PODCAST: Kraettli Epperson of Vigilant Aerospace on why droneports make sense before widespread UAS operations

Our latest podcast episode is live! This week, we were delighted to be joined by Kraettli Epperson, CEO of Vigilant Aerospace.

In this episode, Kraettli tells us more about Vigilant Aerospace and the work it does, before going into more detail about the creation of droneports; who is behind them and why they make sense first, before widespread UAS operations across urban and rural areas.

Kraettli talks about the technical, regulatory and operational considerations, before sharing more about Vigilant’s recent projects with the Skyway36 droneport in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the US Air Force Research Laboratory. And finally, he gives us a broad overview of the current state of uncrewed aircraft technology.

Listen to the Podcast here

eVTOL Insights podcast transcript

Kraettli Epperson, CEO, Vigilant Aerospace – September 12, 2024

Hi, I’m Jason Pritchard and welcome to the eVTOL Insights podcast, a brilliant show featuring guests from companies in the EV to aircraft and urban air mobility markets. Throughout each episode, we’ll be finding out about the exciting projects which will help revolutionize the way we travel in future and get their insights into the current state of the industry.

In this episode, I’m joined by Kraettli Epperson, CEO of Vigilant Aerospace. Kraettli is CEO of the company, which is a developer of multi-sensor detect and avoid and airspace management software for uncrewed aircraft systems. He oversees the company’s contracts with NASA, the FAA and the US Air Force, and has participated in more than 45 uncrewed aircraft flight tests.

Kraettli is a frequent speaker on uncrewed aircraft technology, including detect and avoid and autonomous systems, and is a member of the FAA’s BVLOS Aviation Rulemaking Committee and the ASTMF 38 Committee on Technical Standards. He has co-authored multiple AI papers with NASA and Oklahoma State University on autonomy and collision avoidance systems and is the co-inventor of four technology patents.

So Kraettli, thank you so much for joining me on the EOL Insights podcast.

KE: Thank you, Jason. Really happy to be here and thank you for the invitation.

JP: My pleasure, Kraettli. We’ve got some really cool topics to discuss and digest, so very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts more about this too. But if you don’t mind, to start off with, could you tell our audience a little bit more about your career today? What led you to join Vigilant Aerospace?

KE: Certainly. So, I have a background as a technology and software entrepreneur. I’ve been passionate about building technology companies for a long time and have had the opportunity to build several. I was the co-founder of the world’s largest academic digital library early in my career. It’s a library that is now owned by Cengage and is used by millions of students to do research and to get that last minute quote into their final term paper the night before it’s due. And so that was a lot of fun. After that I built a GIS company that was focused on serving railway systems, solar farms, wind farms, pipelines and others, and so I got a lot of experience with mapping systems, which has been very relevant of course to what we do at Vigilance since we’re dealing with moving maps, airspace management systems and related technologies.

You asked how I got involved with Vigilant, I was involved in running a fund that had some investors that were looking at getting into the UAS and drone industry and they ended up backing this company and I got involved because I really enjoy working at the forefront of the technology and certainly working with worldwide leaders at NASA, the FAA and the Air Force was just too good an opportunity to pass up and so went out and worked with NASA to license this technology, launch the company and that’s how I got involved.

JP: Excellent. Thanks ever so much for the introduction greatly as well, and I had to chuckle at the digital library for those students. I was one of them all those many years ago that wanted to get a little bit of research into the paper that was handed in the next day as well. So, thank you very much for that introduction as well. Are you able then to tell us a little bit more then about Vigilant? You mentioned it a bit in your previous answer, and I also did in the introduction as well. Could you tell us a little bit more then about the company and the work it does and again, love then to go into the detail about the creation of the droneports and why these make sense as well.

KE: Absolutely. So Vigilant Aerospace is a boutique software development company. We do software development, systems integration. We do software to hardware integration in order to solve the problem of providing detect and avoid and particularly automatic detect and avoid, which is the ability for all kinds of uncrewed aircraft from the very small ones up to the larger advanced air mobility type aircraft to be aware of other aircraft in the airspace as they approach the UAS and to be able to have an appropriate deconfliction maneuver. So, to know what to do automatically to maintain a safe distance from those other aircraft.

So that’s fundamentally the detect and avoid problem that we solve. We have two primary products we use to solve that, based on two NASA patents that we’ve licensed. And so, NASA has been dealing with these problems and of course as a worldwide research leader in aviation and avionics. Ricardo Ortega at NASA Armstrong out in California invented these patents and the ideas and concepts behind this DAA system and we’ve built that into our two products.

So, our products are Flight Horizon Pilot, which is an onboard detect and avoid system for aircraft that are large enough to have onboard sensors. Usually a portable radar, a transponder receiver, integration to the autopilot integrate to a command-and-control radio. And that’s really intended for larger drones, advanced air mobility aircraft, eVTOL aircraft, anyone who really can carry their own sensors is going to be a candidate for that Flight Horizon Pilot product. And then we have a ground-based product that’s called Flight Horizon Tempo, and it is networked detect and avoid. So this is when you’re using ground-based sensors like radars and it can provide integration to UTM, so uncrewed traffic management, which is a way to create airspace reservations and plan your routes ahead of time so it can integrate to UTM, but fundamentally it provides that detect and avoid function, which is the key safety function to get regulatory authorization to fly your drone.

That’s a product that, for example, would be used by droneports used by fleet operators, flight corridors, and really anyone who has the ability to use ground-based sensors would be using the Flight Horizon Tempo product. So that’s really what the company focuses on.

A couple of highlights, we were awarded the first FAA broad agency and research contract for detect and avoid back in 2020 and that was an exciting project in which we got to fly for miles beyond visual line of sight along the trans-Alaska pipeline up near Fairbanks, Alaska. And then subsequently we have been awarded additional contracts and some of the things that you mentioned that I’m sure we’ll go into including a couple of Air Force projects.

JP: Really cool stuff. Thanks ever so much for sharing that Kraettli and interesting with all the work that it’s doing and how relevant it is for the advanced mobility market as we’re covering that as well. You mentioned droneports in that answer as well. So, are you able to go into a bit more detail about the creation of these? Who is behind them? Are you able to share more details with our audience please?

KE: Yeah, absolutely. So, what we’re seeing with droneports is that they are of course analogous to airports and the development of airports. The development of droneports is an important economic development activity for the communities in which they are located. They’re a very important part of the future transportation infrastructure. Worldwide countries are making investments in droneports, and then local communities and regions are thinking about droneports supporting the development of those droneports. And just like an airport, they’re an important location for things like shared facilities, shared capabilities, things that need to be located at a central point so that they can provide services to multiple operators. Up to now in the United States, it’s been very much a bring-your-own-infrastructure kind of environment in which if you want to apply for special waivers, which are typically required to fly a drone or a larger aircraft beyond visual line of sight, you really have to have, to own and operate your own infrastructure, usually including a radar and ADS-B, transponder, receivers, all of your own integration.

And increasingly of course droneports offer the opportunity for companies to share those resources, share that infrastructure, begin to share that cost, which creates a much more compelling economic picture for the use of advanced air mobility aircraft, eVTOL aircraft and drones for things like delivery inspection, agricultural spraying, all those types of vital economic activities that eVTOL and drones can contribute to droneports are just really interesting and really excited about them because they are already becoming central points and a nexus for all of this economic activity to emerge and grow for the industry right now.

JP: Excellent. Thank you ever so much for the explanation as well, Kraettli. And I guess the next question, again, if you’re able to expand on your previous answer, why do these then make sense first before widespread UAS operations across general urban and rural areas as well? I know you touched upon it a little bit in your previous answer, but again, we’d love to hear your thoughts on why these make sense.

KE: I think what we’re seeing happen is that particular industries are becoming interested and investing in the use of autonomous aircraft and so it makes sense that they have a facility at which they can locate the aircraft, the expertise, the sensors, the common operating picture and airspace management systems that they need like our product to operate. And so, droneports makes a lot of sense for them to have a place to do that. We’re primarily seeing this around, for example, transportation hubs, logistics hubs, agricultural centers, energy hubs, which may be rural in many cases. Some of the places that we work, this is very much an industrial or agricultural activity. And so, they’re beginning to model, build out, test, demonstrate the technologies that are necessary, the safety case that is necessary to get the waivers and permissions to operate their aircraft beyond visual line of sight.

They’re beginning to develop the economic model of who will use what aircraft, where and when and what the cost saving is, which is often driving these projects. They can go and look at things, inspect things, they can use fewer fertilizers and less water because they can do precision agriculture just drove by a field, a large cornfield yesterday where they were doing drone inspections here in the central United States with a good sized drone out doing precision agriculture across many thousands of acres of corn in that case. So, they’re really proving out the way that you can do this. You do it obviously safely, but also proving out economic viability and we think this shared infrastructure model for droneports makes the most sense and is going to make it so much easier. It means that an operator or a fleet operator doesn’t have to have all that expertise in house. They don’t have to have all the capital infrastructure in-house to go ahead and begin doing these advanced operations and then go ahead and get the permissions that they need or eventually operate under a standard rule from the FAA here in the US for example, to fly these drones long distances and perform these really important missions.

JP: Excellent. Thank you ever so much again for that explanation greatly as well, and I completely agree with you is there’s so many use cases that are now coming up that are going to be so beneficial to the community in the various use cases as well. On the other side of that as well, and again, love to hear your thoughts on this with all that you’ve said and in mind too, what then are the technical regulatory and operational considerations for this?

KE: Yeah, sure. So, I’ll mostly speak about this from our specialty in our area, which is safety. So, there are a variety of technical and regulatory requirements. The first and foremost, the one that we focus on solving is the safety need to detect track and then avoid both cooperative aircraft and non-cooperative aircraft. So cooperative aircraft are those that are carrying a transponder and they’re actively have a radio signal, kind of like a radio license plate that tells you who they are and where they are so that you can be aware of them. Most larger aircraft, of course, crude aircraft carry these transponders, but in the United States they’re places where they’re not required to carry these transponders because they’re not flying in and out of controlled airspace, they’re not flying into traditional airports. And in that case, that is a non-cooperative aircraft. If it doesn’t have one of those transponders and those are the cases in which to detect and track those aircraft, you must have something like a radar.

And so, we focus on solving that problem of how you can operate your autonomous aircraft safely in the presence of other aircraft and integrate into the national system and the national airspace. So that’s an important technical requirement. If you look at the various waivers, waivers we’ve operated under and others for longer distance beyond visual line of sight flights and then when you get up into larger M-type aircraft, that safety requirement is really job number one and that’s the reason that we really focus on that and utilize these NASA patents to fill that important technical gap. Obviously beyond that, there is a need for shared airspace management systems, a need for aircraft certification. And right now the FAA has a history of and is beginning to indicate that the regulations are going to have a variety of levels of certification for aircraft, have a lot to do with the durability and reliability of the aircraft that you’re going to put in the air and fly over long distances all the way from very small aircraft that you might be able to self-certify up to much larger M-type aircraft that would go through more of a traditional aircraft certification process.

So that’s an important regulatory consideration is how the aircraft gets certified. And then you have things like personnel certification, how are the people trained? The FAA has indicated for example at the most recent FA Symposium that they’re expecting to move more towards organizational certifications instead of individual pilot certifications to facilitate the future of this industry. That’s very exciting. It allows companies to build up entire processes to support autonomous aircraft. And then finally the FAA has indicated started to put effort towards certification of third-party services that provides some of the critical services to a fleet operator. So, one of these is the near-term approval process in tap for certifying third party safety and data services like ours for example, where a third party, a fleet operator could use a third party to fulfill some of their requirements for safety and for command and control. So, all those things are happening right now. They’re in development and leaders are emerging in all these areas as we consider the next steps for advanced air mobility.

JP: Excellent. Thanks ever so much for sharing that again, greatly. Really interesting too. Now, if we could then move towards the work that Vigilant Aerospace is working on as well as I understand that it recently announced some interesting projects with the Skyway 36 Droneport in Tulsa and droneports across the US and with the US Air Force Research Laboratory for wide-scale airspace management solutions. Are you able to share a little bit more details about these, please? They sound really interesting. I’d love to hear more.

KE: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be happy to tell you a little bit about those. So, Skyway 36 is a droneport in Tulsa. It’s one of the premier droneports in the United States. It’s owned by Osage, LLC., so that’s a tribal nation that owns that facility and it is focused on enabling advanced flights in and around Tulsa. It sits on kind of the northwest edge of Tulsa, so it has access to both Tulsa urban areas, but it also has access to areas outside of Tulsa and that allows it to be in a great location to support a variety of operators. So, they already have a company called Wind Shape that is building out a drone testing facility there. It’s an advanced indoor drone certification and testing facility and they have signed on and are using our FlightHorizon Tempo system to do airspace management so they can monitor the air traffic there and begin to support operators who are seeking special waivers and special operating permissions.

They have a runway that’s suitable for fixed wing drones. They have facilities for multi rotor drones and they’re adding more sensors all the time, which we’re very involved with and supporting them in that process and integrating those with the FlightHorizon Tempo system. So, they are a leader, they’re really out on the frontier making this happen and it’s an important economic development activity both for their facility and for Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma. The droneport Network is another organization that is involved in helping communities to identify opportunities to fund and build droneports and all the things that go into that, all of the federal, state, local programs that support that and how they can get community buy-in even find investors and others who have an interest, maybe industrial partners that are going to want to be involved in a particular droneport at a particular location.

So that’s a great partnership for us and they bring a lot of expertise to the table. So, the company was awarded an SBIR phase two contract, which is a Small Business Administration research program that allows the SBA and the military to bring commercial civilian dual use technologies into the military. So dual use meaning that it is a technology that’s useful for both the military and for civilian users. And so that’s where our FlightHorizon Pilot product, which is our onboard detect and avoid system comes into the picture. So, we won that contract and are working on integrating our Flight Horizon pilot system into military aircraft, which is a great opportunity for us to do it not only for the US military but also for larger, advanced air mobility aircraft. So, it’s the same product, it’s dual use and it is really suitable for any larger aircraft that can carry its own sensors.

So that’s a very exciting project for us. And we are currently working with some advanced air mobility manufacturers, so those companies that are investing in developing and building and testing larger air taxi-type and cargo delivery-type drones and larger aircraft. And we’re seeking more of those companies. So, companies that are interested in having a path forward with an onboard detect and avoid system. We’re very much interested in talking to those companies. And so that’s some of the work that we’re doing right now on the FlightHorizon Pilot product in addition to the work we’re doing with our FlightHorizon Tempo system for ground-based facilities.

JP: Excellent. Seems like you and the team at Vigilant greatly are very busy at the moment, so thank you ever so much for those insights as to those projects as well. And we will, for our audience listening, we’ll be asking greatly for more details on how to keep in touch with Vigilant, should there be anyone interested in keeping in touch as well now can’t quite believe we’re already heart or more than halfway through 2024. So, with those other projects that you’ve just talked about just now, are there any other projects of note that Vigilant is currently working on that might be worth sharing with our audience?

KE: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll share a couple of other things that we are doing. So, we’re rolling out a version of our product called FlightHorizon Defender that is designed for airspace safety. We’re rolling it out, for example, at smaller airports that want to be able to track drone runway incursions. They’re worried that there are drones, and they have evidence that there are drones that potentially are a safety problem at those airports. And so, we are working on rolling out that FlightHorizon Defender product, which is a ground-based system to track drones and to provide warnings to the airport operators and to pilots who might be either taking off or landing. So that’s another way that we’re using this same technology for a different sort of safety case. And then we’re also rolling out our FlightHorizon Tempo, which is the ground-based online system and industrial parks and both rural and tribal facilities and other places anywhere that there are manufacturers, warehouses, logistics hubs that could really want to get ahead of the advanced air mobility adoption. That’s where we’re rolling out FlightHorizon Tempo. And so, we’re in discussions with variety of organizations and beginning to roll those pilot projects out, which we’ll be announcing throughout the end of the year and into next year as we launch those various projects.

JP: Excellent. Thanks ever so much for sharing that. Again, Kraettli, as I said, a lot of things going on at Vigilance, which is really great to see. So, wishing you and the team all the very best of luck with that going forward too. If you don’t mind me saying, we mentioned it at the start of our podcast, in addition to leading Vigilant Aerospace, we mentioned that you oversee contracts with NASA, the FAA and the US Air Force and also participated in more than 45 uncrewed air flight aircraft flight tests. But with all that in mind and with all your industry knowledge as well, greatly, are you able to give our audience a broad overview then on uncrewed air technology at the moment? There’s a lot of stuff happening, so I wondered if you were able to give us a little bit of an idea of what you’re seeing in the market and an overview for those who might not be familiar with the technology.

EP: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a couple of things I’ll highlight. As you mentioned earlier, I served on the FAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee or ARC for Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules for drones. This is kind of an extension of Part 107. It’s colloquially called Part 108, and it is expected to be a draft published much later this year or early next year. And that is going to be very interesting. I expect it to have a similar impact on the industry here in the US to what part 107 had, which was really the launch of the commercial industry in the US. It is expected to include rules that will allow the flight of small drones beyond visual line of sight under the rule. So, you won’t have to get a special waiver or a special exemption. You’ll simply need to follow the rules, have the systems and meet the requirements of those rules, and you’ll be able to fly essentially automatically without needing a special waiver.

It’s extremely exciting. It’s a great opportunity for the industry to really evolve and mature. We expect that that will cover mostly the smallest aircraft, the lowest risk, the lowest population density. So, you’re not going to be flying over densely populated areas under that rule probably, but it will be a way to fly without needing to do a lot of jumps through a lot of special hoops to fly beyond visual line of sight. So, we’re really excited about that. That’s of course, based on the recommendations and the report that we wrote in the ARC. The other thing of course, is that the technology that supports the detect and avoid process is improving all the time. And so, we track very closely and have multiple partnerships with some of the hardware manufacturers and vendors, including especially some of the radar vendors. And that technology continues to advance, continues to become smaller, require less power, provide greater precision and greater accuracy in terms of what it’s able to track with a smaller unit and a less power- consuming and less heavy unit. And so that’s incredibly exciting and it just enables the industry, and it enables everything that we’re trying to allow these drones to do, and it will be crucial for advanced Air mobility to be able to carry these advanced systems on board. So that’s incredibly important, very exciting for the industry, and as we go forward, we’ll be integrating with the most advanced of those sensors as soon as they’re available and viable on the market.

JP: Excellent. Kraettli thanks ever so much for sharing those views as well. I feel like we’ve covered so much in the short time that we’ve been talking, but I wondered whether you might be able to share any final thoughts that we might not have already covered or even anything you wanted to share reinforce what we’ve already spoken as well. So, before we finish and share with our audience the best ways to get in touch and stay in touch, sorry with Vigilant, what would be your final thoughts to our audience for this podcast?

KE: The thing that we have become increasingly aware of, I would say over the last 18 months is that the momentum around this industry is increasing. There have been periods of high investment and interest and then there have been lulls, and we’re definitely in a period in which because there is movement on regulation, because the ARC did its work and the FAA is adopting that work and because the technology is advancing so quickly and is really out ahead of really even what the regulations allow so far that the momentum and pressure to mature this industry is growing day by day. That’s very exciting. It is inevitable that more autonomous aircraft will emerge. It’s inevitable that they will be used and will gradually represent most of the takeoffs and landings in the United States, for example, and probably worldwide. And that’s really become an inevitability. So that is the thing that we think about and keep in mind all the time, there are still a lot of obstacles and hurdles.

Some of those are regulatory, a few of those are technical, but the actual likelihood that we’re going to be seeing this in the relatively short term as a viable part of the economy and as a viable part of logistics and infrastructure is very, very high. The other thing is, of course, the question is at this point, which countries, regions, and companies are going to end up leading the way, which ones are going to end up winning as we race towards the launch of all these systems? Some countries are making a really serious effort making very serious investments, and the technology is already so far ahead of the regulations in some places that I think we’re going to see those investments in various regions and countries pay off quickly. And so, we’re just watching for that. And obviously as a company, we try and participate, we try and support efforts, but I think what we’re going to see is as the regulations begin to open up the industry, that those investments and those places and people that have decided to invest in this are going to see payoff as the industry rapidly matures over the next 12 months or less.

So that’s really what we’re watching and what we’re thinking about right now.

JP: Excellent. Really appreciate those final thoughts from your good self Kraettli as well. And then finally, how can our audience stay in touch with yourself and the team at Vigilant keep updated on all your progress?

KE: Well, first off, our website is a great place to start. It’s vigilantaerospace.com, so www.vigilantaerospace.com. We also have a monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for when you go to the website, and then we publish frequently on LinkedIn. So those are the three primary ways to reach us, website, monthly newsletter, and then follow us on LinkedIn and you’ll see all our news that way.

JP: Excellent Kraettli. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you ever so much for sharing all your insights from an industry perspective, but also the work that’s being done at Vigilant Aerospace as well. Keep up the great work. Very keen to stay in touch and hear more developments from the team of Vigilant in the near future. But until then, thank you very much.

EP: Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it.

JP: Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to be featured in one of our podcasts or there’s something you feel we should be talking about, then please send me an email at [email protected]. We’ll be back soon with another episode. So, look out for it on whichever podcast platform you use. Goodbye.