Your little issue being that Airships is critically broken until you research Spidertron? Thanks very much for reporting that; one of the downfalls of doing everything in a test world is that I miss subtle progression issues like this.
I did know about the remotes since I had to deliberately remove the old recipes from the mod, and I even changed the name of the remote shortcut to "Advanced vehicle remote" when Airships is active. But somehow, it slipped my mind that you actually need to unlock them.
Unfortunately, instead of being defined as unlocked by the technology prototype, it's actually a part of the shortcut button prototype. The unlock status of a single technology determines whether or not you can use the shortcut.
In version 1.0.3, I've made the unlocking technology be "Hydrogen airship", and researching "Spidertron" now requires having "Hydrogen airship" beforehand. Hopefully nobody will mind this tiny balancing change.
EDIT: If anyone else wants to quickly patch the issue without having to update like the OP did below, paste the following code into data.lua:
data.raw.shortcut["give-spidertron-remote"].technology_to_unlock = nil
data.raw.shortcut["give-spidertron-remote"].unavailable_until_unlocked = nil
Interestingly, this is quite similar to what Deadlock did with the Cut/Copy/Paste, Give blueprint, Toggle personal roboport etc. shortcuts, he just gives them to you right at the beginning instead of trying to tie them to the Clockwork robots technology.
