# The Frontal Lobe Is Not a Load-Bearing Structure
Table of Contents
“The Frontal Lobe Is Not a Load-Bearing Structure”: An Exclusive Interview with Rob “The Boss” Sivilli on the PTERODACTYL Incident
Posted to the Cost Plus Technologies Unoffical Blog | Cleared for Public Release: After Significant Legal Review | Distribution: Unlimited (Except to the JAG Office, Pending)
Six months after our first interview, Cost Plus Technologies finds itself at the center of a controversy that has made the rounds in defense acquisition circles, three naval aviator group chats, and at least one Reddit thread that has since been removed for reasons the company declines to specify. Dr. James Nicholas Ashworth, D.Sc., returned to speak with Rob “The Boss” Sivilli about the deployment of the PTERODACTYL Counter-Unmanned Aerial System to CVN-87, the subsequent incident now being referred to in certain circles as “The Bite of ‘87,” and what the company’s path forward looks like. Mr. Sivilli requested that we note, for the record, that he is “completely calm” about all of this.
Dr. James Nicholas Ashworth, D.Sc.: Rob. CVN-87. Walk me through it.
Rob “The Boss” Sivilli: I want to start by saying that Petty Officer Fischbach is doing extremely well. He is responsive, he is communicative, and according to the ship’s medical officer, he is living proof that the frontal lobe is, in the words of the official medical report, “not a strictly load-bearing neurological structure.” Those are the doctor’s words. I’m just repeating them.
Dr. Ashworth: The sailor who was bitten.
Sivilli: Who was grazed. The after-action report uses the word “grazed.” We fought very hard for that word.
Dr. Ashworth: The official NCIS report uses “bite.”
Sivilli: The official NCIS report uses a lot of words. It also uses “unauthorized engagement envelope exceedance,” which I think more accurately captures what happened from a systems perspective. The PTERODACTYL unit was operating within its defined behavioral parameters — we think — and Petty Officer Fischbach made a movement near the flight deck that the unit’s threat-discrimination algorithm interpreted as, and I’m going to use the technical term here, a drone.
Dr. Ashworth: He was carrying a coffee mug.
Sivilli: A very fast coffee mug. We are reviewing the sensor calibration.
Dr. Ashworth: Let’s back up. For readers who aren’t familiar, describe the PTERODACTYL system.
Sivilli: Absolutely. The PTERODACTYL Precision Threat Elimination and Rapid Organic Denial of Aerial Craft Technology with Ychromosomal Logic — the acronym took three weeks and I stand behind it — is Cost Plus Technologies’ answer to the low-altitude UAS threat. It is a pterosaur-derived, avian-genomics-based counter-drone platform with a wingspan of approximately four meters, a top airspeed that we are contractually prohibited from disclosing, and a threat-interdiction methodology that I would describe as “extremely thorough.”
It uses bird DNA. I cannot stress this enough. We are not InGen. We did not cut corners with amphibian genomics. Every PTERODACTYL unit was sequenced from a certified avian baseline, which means it is, taxonomically speaking, a very large, very fast, very motivated seabird with a beak the length of a regulation softball bat.
Dr. Ashworth: And it was deployed to CVN-87 specifically.
Sivilli: CVN-87, yes. The USS Gerald R. Ford-class vessel currently under the command of Captain Jeremy Fitzgerald, who I want to say is an outstanding naval officer who has handled this entire situation with extraordinary professionalism, especially given his, let’s call it, personal history with bite-related incidents. The man is a survivor in every sense of the word. We have enormous respect for him.
Dr. Ashworth: I’m not going to ask about that.
Sivilli: Appreciate it.
Dr. Ashworth: The ship’s designation — CVN-87. You didn’t flag that as potentially inauspicious before deployment?
Sivilli: (long pause)
Our Program Manager flagged it. In writing. There is a memo. I chose not to act on the memo, which in hindsight I acknowledge was a program management decision that did not age well. It is now a standing agenda item in our weekly risk review. We have a new policy: any contract involving the number 87 in the hull designation, contract vehicle number, or CLIN structure triggers an automatic safety review. We are calling it the Fitzgerald Protocol.
Dr. Ashworth: How is Captain Fitzgerald responding to having a safety protocol named after him?
Sivilli: He has not responded to our emails. His XO sent us a very terse one-sentence reply that I am advised not to quote in a public forum.
Dr. Ashworth: Let’s talk about Petty Officer Fischbach. How is he actually doing?
Sivilli: Mark is doing great. Genuinely. He was remarkably composed during the incident — by all accounts he stood there for approximately twenty seconds with a completely blank expression, just processing what had happened, and then looked directly at the ship’s camera system and said, and I am told this is an exact quote: “Was that the Bite of ‘87?”
Which, honestly, is a level of presence of mind under pressure that I find impressive. That man has a future in crisis communications if he ever leaves the Navy.
We have also, at the company’s expense, sent him a very nice fruit basket and a Kevlar flight deck helmet with enhanced cranial protection. The helmet is rated for pterosaur beak impact up to approximately forty miles per hour. The PTERODACTYL unit in question was traveling at approximately forty-three miles per hour at the moment of contact. We are working on the next revision.
Dr. Ashworth: I feel obligated to ask: is the frontal lobe comment from the medical officer a real assessment, or is that some kind of legal positioning?
Sivilli: It’s real, it’s in the report, and it is also — and I say this with tremendous gratitude — almost verbatim language from a DoD medical document that was used in a completely unrelated incident in 1987. I have cited it in our incident response. Our legal team called it “an inspired use of precedent.”
Dr. Ashworth: InGen must be having a field day.
Sivilli: (visibly tightening)
InGen. Yes. We have been made aware that a representative of InGen’s successor entity — I will not name them, they know who they are — sent a statement to two defense trade publications suggesting that this incident, quote, “validates concerns about the use of unproven biological platforms in active fleet environments.”
This from a company whose flagship product ate a lawyer on its opening day. On a toilet. Their entire liability record is one long argument against their own credibility, and they have the audacity to issue statements about our quality assurance process. Their assets used frog DNA. Their assets could spontaneously reorganize their own reproductive biology. Our asset had a sensor calibration issue. These are not equivalent problems.
Dr. Ashworth: To be scrupulously fair: their assets did not bite a sailor on a carrier.
Sivilli: Their assets ate guests. Paying guests. On a commercial property open to the public. We had one, single, documented beak-to-cranium contact event on a hardened military vessel in a controlled operational environment, and the sailor survived with full cognitive function. I’ll take that trade every time over whatever liability exposure comes with having a Velociraptor loose in a visitor center.
Also — and I want this in the record — the PTERODACTYL successfully intercepted fourteen Group 2 UAS threats in the three days prior to the Fischbach incident. Fourteen. It has a 100% interdiction rate against actual targets. The Fischbach event represents a 6.7% friendly-contact rate against non-drone targets on the flight deck. In acquisition terms, that is well within acceptable system immaturity thresholds for a Milestone B program.
Dr. Ashworth: I’m confident no one has ever used those words in that order before in a Senate hearing.
Sivilli: We have a hearing in six weeks. I have already used them in that order, in a draft opening statement, twice.
Dr. Ashworth: Any modifications to the program going forward?
Sivilli: Several. First, the threat-discrimination logic is being updated to deprioritize slow-moving, low-thermal-signature objects below a certain altitude threshold — we’re calling this the “coffee mug exclusion zone.” Second, all flight deck personnel will be issued the aforementioned cranial protection. Third, we are looking at a behavioral conditioning update to better distinguish between a DJI Phantom 4 and a human being holding a beverage.
We are also — and this is not officially announced — exploring a daytime restriction protocol for the PTERODACTYL units while the ship is at general quarters. We will limit their free-roaming mode to nighttime operations only, to prevent any further engagement envelope ambiguity. Our Chief Behavioral Systems Architect calls this the “servo lockup prevention protocol.” We call it “not letting the pterosaur walk around the carrier in the daytime.” It amounts to the same thing.
Dr. Ashworth: That is essentially the exact lesson that Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza learned in 1987.
Sivilli: (long silence)
Yes. It is. And I want to be clear: we arrived at this independently, through rigorous after-action analysis, and not because a DoD IG investigator left a printout of a Wikipedia article on my desk with the relevant paragraph highlighted in yellow. That did not happen.
Dr. Ashworth: Final question. What do you want the defense acquisition community to take away from this?
Sivilli: That biological platforms in operationally contested environments require iterative refinement, and that iterative refinement sometimes involves a sailor named Mark and a very enthusiastic pterosaur. That is not a failure. That is the developmental process. Every transformative defense capability in history has had a Fischbach moment. We have learned from ours. We have documented our lessons learned, updated our TTP’s, and submitted a contract modification request for the enhanced helmet program that I am confident will be approved, funded, and delivered before CVN-87 completes its current deployment.
We are the professionals. We use bird DNA. We file our paperwork. And when our system bites a sailor, we send fruit.
Dr. Ashworth: Rob, thank you. And please pass along our best wishes to Petty Officer Fischbach.
Sivilli: He knows. He’s been following the blog.
Cost Plus Technologies is a registered defense contractor. The PTERODACTYL CUAS platform is currently in a modified Limited User Testing phase pending sensor recalibration. Petty Officer Mark Fischbach has been medically cleared for full duty and has reportedly requested a transfer to a non-pterosaur-equipped vessel, which is under review. Captain Jeremy Fitzgerald declined to comment. The CVN-87 Fitzgerald Protocol has been submitted for formal inclusion in the Cost Plus Technologies Quality Management System. InGen’s successor entity did not respond to a request for comment, which is statistically consistent with their pattern of behavior. Dr. Ashworth’s views are his own. This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and ongoing NCIS coordination.
