Tucked away on the second floor of the Syracuse Hancock International Airport lies an office filled with computers and wall-mounted screens showing in real time the comings and goings of nearly every object in the Central New York sky.
A handful of people – some waiting to take off, others for arrivals – sit on benches outside the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows. They’d be forgiven for thinking what they’re seeing inside is some routine aspect of airport operations.
It is not.
What’s happening in that office, one floor above baggage claim, is helping lead the development of a multibillion-dollar national drone industry, which seeks to revolutionize everything from transportation and shipping to safety and security to farming and agriculture to construction and environmental monitoring.
There are screens depicting weather conditions in Syracuse under 400 feet, where drones typically operate. Another shows where drones are flying within five miles of the airport, along with the location of the aircraft’s operator. Another marries that information with real-time commercial flights.
“There’s nobody else doing this,” said Ken Stewart, who oversees the airport-based office of NUAIR, a nonprofit helping to shepherd the future of Central New York’s drone industry. “This is a very unique place.”
The Central New York region, and specifically the work being done at NUAIR, is unmatched compared to other areas in the country when it comes to drone technology and integration, local officials say.
Over the past decade, Syracuse and Central New York have quietly positioned themselves among the national leaders of this emerging field.
“The unique demographics of Upstate New York make it an ideal place to build part of the industrial base for drones,” said Bobby Sakaki, the founder of several Utah-based Unmanned Aerial Systems companies who recently visited the region to learn about its drone economy.
Sakaki posted on social media after his trip, declaring Upstate NY “objectively the furthest along of any UAS-related economic development or accelerator program in the country.”
“You have very high-skilled workers with relevant experience in a comparably low cost-of-living area,” he told Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. “The value is just unreal good.”
You’ll find here such drone-related players as Hidden Level, a company that began six years ago with four people in a basement and recently hit 80 employees; cutting edge MQ-9 drones, or Reapers, flying almost daily out of the Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing; accelerators like GENIUS NY awarding millions to drone-related companies to stay and build in New York; and students training to become the newest batch of pilots, innovators and leaders within the uncrewed industry.
Part of this system comes from government grants and initiatives, public-private partnerships and people like Stewart who see the potential.
But some of it was also luck: This region has a combination of geography, climate, available airspace and existing defense contractors that make it unlike any other place in the country.
“There’s a lot of opportunity here for New York to really start thinking about being an aerospace center for next-gen aviation,” Stewart said.
However, there are headwinds that prevent the drone economy here from fully taking flight. The strongest: How can anyone monitor the more than two million drones now in operation over U.S. airspace while ensuring the safety of commercial planes, infrastructure and every American who would rather not have an airborne lawnmower crash into their skull?
The federal government didn’t expect the explosive growth of drones, and it is still working to set up regulations and integrate the craft within air traffic, Stewart said.
“The FAA can’t scale for this sector,” he said.
In the meantime, Central New York’s industry continues to grow and innovate in ways that are attracting talent, money and interest from across the globe.
The rise of drones
Depending on how you define the term, drones have been around for at least a century, with the earliest remote-controlled craft created by an English scientist for use during World War I.
Much of drone development over the next 80 years happened within the military, and the tech got better and better, with longer ranges, more precision and higher altitudes.
But drones really burst into the public in the 1990s with the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, which the CIA and U.S. Air Force used in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other combat zones that needed surveillance, targeted strikes and air support.
As technology advanced and costs came down in the early 2000s, drones went mainstream. Hobbyists and professionals began using them for aerial photography and videography, or just for fun.
In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration selected a 50-mile corridor between Rome and Syracuse as the first of seven drone test sites now in the U.S.
Taking a shot at a $500 million pot of economic development money, five Central New York counties then came together to capitalize on that momentum. They proposed positioning the region as a “global center for the development of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and their safe integration into commercial airspace.”
They cited companies like Lockheed Martin, SRC, Saab-Sensis and others that were already here because of the region’s history of manufacturing, defense and aerospace.
They won the money.
And that – along with efforts from private and public agencies over the past decade – is what opened the door to the commercial drone industry.
Starting small
Doug Hill’s $9,000 drone whipped high above an inaccessible wetland just south of Syracuse in August, collecting photos and videos that would show the extent of a century-old environmental problem.
Mudboils in the area cause tons of silt and sand from underground to vent daily into Onondaga Creek, turning the water into a coffee-colored muck. The Onondaga Nation can no longer use the stream for fishing, and the polluted tributary leads to Onondaga Lake, the subject of a billion-dollar environmental cleanup.
“There’s a channel of cold water coming out of this round hole,” Hill said, looking at the video feed on his remote control. “That is a mudboil.”
Hill is the director of the Maker Institute at the Keenan Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Creativity, and the founder of Sparrowhawk, a company that gives new drone pilots real-world experience.
Outfitted with 6K resolution video and near-infrared sensors, Hill’s drone captured changes in how and where the water was surfacing, and where new fissures were popping up from ground collapse. It would be used to inform environmental agencies about how widespread the Tully problem had become.
“What do you do when birds attack this thing?” a reporter asked.
“You go straight up,” Hill said. “It’s not the behavior of prey – it’s the behavior of a predator – to go up like that.”
Drones often do dangerous or difficult work that can save money and sometimes lives.
Insurance companies, for example, increasingly rely on the technology to save claim adjusters from scampering onto storm-damaged rooftops with a clipboard after a disaster. Farmers use them to more precisely spray their crops, detect diseases and monitor their livestock. Hospitals are using them to deliver medicine to patients or organs to other hospitals.
One of the problems though, Hill said, is that while licensed drone operators need to prove through a written test that they know as much about the rules of the air as a commercial airline pilot, there is no hands-on component to the exam.
“All these kids in high school pass the test, they go to Walmart, and now they’re a certified drone professional,” he said. “It’s kind of like giving a 16-year-old a Ferrari to learn to drive.”
So, Hill created Sparrowhawk. Some of the company’s pilots have come from the Keenan Center’s new drone training program, which is open to the public and was set up with $600,000 from NUAIR.
“The idea is, we roll them right into jobs,” Hill said.
As the drone economy ramps up locally, Hill said he expects Sparrowhawk to grow, spinning off side companies specific to the industry’s needs, like environmental monitoring or real estate photography.
He calls those future offshoots “baby sparrows.”
“We have an unfair advantage here,” he said. “We have the Keenan Center here, we have NUAIR, and we have GENIUS NY.”
Seeing opportunity
Several things attracted Frank Noppel and his company, blueflite, to Syracuse: the 50-mile flight corridor, NUAIR and New York’s high-tech manufacturing industry.
There was also the opportunity to get his company into GENIUS NY, the world’s largest accelerator for the “uncrewed systems” industry – located in downtown Syracuse.
“We learned about GENIUS NY and applied and got in, and obviously that gave us more and more reason to enhance our presence in the state, and take advantage of the ecosystem there,” Noppel said.
GENIUS NY offers mentorship, networking, business development and training to drone-related companies. It also awarded blueflite $1 million last year after the company won the annual GENIUS NY pitch competition.
Noppel at the time said that in Syracuse his company had “discovered a unique ecosystem perfectly suited” for its operations. He then hired staff, set up a satellite office within the GENIUS NY space at the Tech Garden and began working with past GENIUS cohorts to build his business.
As a result, the next batch of blueflite drones will be partially manufactured in New York, Noppel said
GENIUS NY launched in 2017 from the $500 million state grant. Since then, it has awarded more than $21 million to 37 companies – 14 of them international – which have raised more than $100 million in venture capital, said Kara Jones, director of GENIUS NY.
Portfolio companies have raised nearly $350 million in additional funding apart from the GENIUS NY investment, Jones said.
Five GENIUS participants each year must remain in Central New York for at least 12 months as part of the accelerator, and they’re offered support and incentives to stay longer. The number of applicants for the program continues to grow each year, Jones said.
Half of the participants have stayed in state, she added.
By both funding companies that are already here and by bringing in outside startups, Syracuse has distinguished itself, said Kevin May, a vice president at Hidden Level, a Syracuse-based company that makes sensors for detecting drones and offers access to a network of these portable detection systems.
“When you pair that with a bit of a technology hub here, I think that does make some pretty cool things happen,” May said.
Hidden Level started with four former employees of the defense contractor SRC in a basement and has grown to 80 workers in six years, May said. The company’s tech blankets cities with an array of “passive” sensors that listen to the information coming from drones to geolocate them.
Standard radar systems can track big craft, like airplanes, but aren’t great at spotting objects as small and as low-flying as drones.
That’s important when it comes to securing soft targets, like at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, where Hidden Level lets local police know about drones breaking flight restrictions – and even where the drone operators are standing. That way, police can find and ticket operators, and make them land the craft.
Hidden Level does the same here.
“We did security for the New York State Fair here in Syracuse a couple times with New York State Police,” May said. “We set up our sensors and they recognized, ‘Hey, we have people flying drones over this thing, there’s people everywhere – this presents a risk.’ ”
Hidden Level recently spun up a new manufacturing plant in Syracuse and expects to build a third facility here soon. Much of the company’s success is owed to the talent it can acquire – just think about the number of local defense contractors, May said.
“We’ve been pulling people from SRC and Lockheed that have this background in both radar and electronic warfare to say, ‘How can we take this kind of military, technical background and apply it to more of a commercial space?’ ”
Military might
Syracuse made history when it became the first in the nation to launch unmanned aircraft from a commercial airport in December 2015. The drones were escorted by manned planes to warn operators on the ground about potential collisions.
Four years later, the region set another first when the FAA allowed the drones – MQ-9 Reapers – to fly unescorted in and out of the airport.
“If you look back over 10 years of what’s happened with this aircraft, and if you compare that to any other military aircraft or anything else, we’re changing faster than any of the other ones,” said Col. Seth Anderson, commander of the 174th Maintenance Group at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said.
The 174th Attack Wing trains MQ-9 pilots and has served in nearly every armed conflict from the 1950s through today. Its hangar houses 10 MQ-9s, which are marvels of engineering: 5,000 pounds, 36 feet long and able to fly more than 1,100 miles without stopping.
Reapers can be used for reconnaissance, search and rescue, airstrikes or anything else the Air Force needs. And there’s a reason they fly so often in the Central New York skies.
Pointing to a computer screen inside the 174th base, Anderson traces his finger from Syracuse westward to Buffalo, eastward to Vermont, then northeast toward Canada.
“There is a lack of commercial air travel in that sector,” he said. “Because there’s nowhere to go – they don’t need to go there. It’s a hole. It’s a pocket. By coincidence.”
The lack of air traffic means the 174th doesn’t need to worry (much) about collisions; FAA agreements block off airspace to operate the MQ-9s.
The massive swath of air also allows Anderson and the 174th to operate under different conditions.
There are lakes and forests, which can be used to train pilots in search and rescue operations; cities like Syracuse to plan disaster responses; and different climates, so when it’s too foggy to fly in one spot, pilots can navigate to a clearer landscape.
“That sets our pilots up for anything in the world, and we can train to it all right here,” Anderson said.
These constant flight operations and testing will undoubtedly play a role in helping to develop future regulations governing uncrewed aviation in America, Anderson said.
NUAIR
Stewart, the founder of NUAIR, is an oddity.
He comes from a venture capital and high-tech background, including a stint at General Electric. Yet today, his name is arguably invoked most among Central New York’s drone experts and enthusiasts.
Spectacled and mild-mannered, Stewart gets excited talking about the promise of drones and Central New York. His company with a staff of 19 full-time employees has worked with more than 250 agencies across New York to get their drone programs up, and has trained more than 2,600 pilots in drone proficiency in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security.
NUAIR even helped the Syracuse airport develop its master plan for advanced air mobility.
“We just came off a year-long contract with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Stewart said. And, he added, a delegation from the United Kingdom recently visited Syracuse.
Even the New York State Thruway Authority caught the bug.
A few years back, the agency partnered with NUAIR to use drones to map some of the state’s 570-mile highway system, catalog its infrastructure, and document damage and repairs.
Stewart suggested: Instead of using ladders, scaffolding and lifts, Thruway workers should try drones.
“They don’t want to be hung off the side of a bridge in a bucket truck anymore, because it’s not safe. And so they took to these drones like moths to a flame,” he said.
NUAIR submitted a report with their findings to the U.S. Department of Transportation in September.
“What we found is exactly what we believed,” Stewart said. “The Thruway Authority can benefit from over $33 million in savings every two years by moving to supplemental, drone-based inspections.”
That number is for 800 of the state’s 17,000-plus bridges; extrapolating it over all of them would net the state hundreds of millions of dollars in savings each year, he said.
Over the next hour, Stewart showcased framed photos on the walls showing delegations from government agencies and private industry touring the NUAIR facility; a room next door full of tables and chairs for the company’s expansion; and a large air traffic control simulator powered by whirring computers and cables supplying massive amounts of computing power.
“I want to show you this, this piece over here,” he said, “to show you how we help influence the FAA.”
The interface lets pilots train for landings and takeoffs at different airports, and includes live traffic. The screen shows the Syracuse airport, but with a digitally created new runway and vertiport (both of which don’t now exist).
“We can mix the simulated flights with real traffic and really prove the safety case in advance” of the FAA ever deploying this type of technology, Stewart said.
“There’s a lot going on in this small little room right here,” he said, smiling.
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