Oct. 12—After helping hundreds of people across the West Coast get certified as commercial drone operators, an Ashland-based aerospace company is looking for new opportunities in its own backyard.
Quantum Dynamics has grown from an Ashland helicopter company's drone offshoot to an unmanned aerial system expert that's helped outfit law enforcement agencies across Oregon, California and Washington, and trained roughly 400 people to get their FAA part 107 certification, according to co-founder Sean Holt.
Quantum Dynamics offers what Holt believes to be the country's only two-day "Zero to Hero" drone flight academy workshop. The students — primarily in the law enforcement and public utility fields — learn from the Ashland company's flight instructors to navigate specially designed obstacle courses while learning a flight curriculum set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
On the second day of the course, which costs $1,000, students take the FAA's knowledge exam and pass with a "near 100% success rate," according to Holt. The two-hour, 40-question exam is no easy feat, he added.
"It's equivalent, I'd say, to about 80% of the material required for a private pilot's license," Holt said. "The FAA expects you to be aware of general aviation requirements because you're sharing the national airspace system with manned aviation."
They've trained the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officers, police departments in Redding and Chico, California, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office and Fire Districts 3 and 5. For their next act, Holt says, the company is looking to expand its presence in Southern Oregon — and to make drone aviation more accessible to local youth.
The company developed a curriculum for an 18-week Drone Aviation high-school elective class for a charter school in Baker City during the pandemic that Holt said he'd love to bring to schools in Southern Oregon. They're also working on a youth STEM summer camp based on their adult drone flight program.
The company started in 2016 as the experimental unmanned aerial vehicle division of Timberland Helicopters.
Mark Gibson bought Timberland Helicopters in 2013 after managing Timberland Logging's helicopter operations since the 1990s. Gibson and other aviators on his staff saw potential in the drone industry about seven years ago, and together, Gibson said, they "pretty much figured it out as we went along."
"We bought a lot of good ideas," Gibson said.
Not all of their ideas have panned out. For instance, they demonstrated a concept drone with ultraviolet sanitizing light that they demonstrated to Asante in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, its real-world results weren't strong enough.
Quantum Dynamics started doing drone work directly for utility companies and first responders, and has developed a fleet of enterprise drones tailor-made for their clients' needs. For instance, their DJI Matrice 210 is used for surveying and inspecting solar farms, wind farms and vineyards such as Belle Fiore in Ashland.
Holt pointed out an Aerialtronics drone often used in utility line inspections because it performs well in environments with strong electromagnetic interference, and an Autel Robotics drone offers law enforcement clients "swapable payloads" such as a thermal camera or a public-address loudspeaker as needed.
More recently, Quantum Dynamic has pivoted to becoming trainers and outfitters because its clients want to do more and more drone work in-house.
Holt said the technology is still in its infancy, but in less than a decade, drone systems already are significantly simpler than some may expect.
"They've made it iPhone-easy now," Holt said.
Some of the next directions Holt sees for the industry include livestream technologies to help law enforcement better communicate during emergencies, and multispectral technologies to help the agricultural industry better inspect field crops.
"There's still a hungry population out there, so precision agriculture is going to be what's required in the future," Holt said.
For more info on Quantum Dynamics, see quantumdynamics.co.
Reach web editor Nick Morgan at 541-776-4471 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MTwebeditor.
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