Stay lean and outsource your research and development, test, and evaluation. Developing innovation and proving new components in-house are very expensive, especially for companies new to proving their concepts in the air. Physics can be a cruel and remorseless foe, and ensuing mishaps are expensive, if not ruinous.
Drone Dominance and other performance-based contests make this service more valuable or complementary to your business than ever. Going all in on a single flight is risky at best and, as we witnessed for many at the DARPA challenge, high-stakes gambling! Even the winners are barely breaking even on the overhead to participate. There is undeniably a DOW overhead disconnect. VC money for hardware is still hard to come by, and joint ventures or partnerships are risky and usually one-sided.
Your credibility and future SBIR/STTR mega-millions could all be riding on an unproven airframe or subsystem. Who wants to watch the future of their company ragdolling down the runway because of someone else’s overlooked or undiscovered single point of failure? It all sounded good in the office on the whiteboard, but now you’re staring down the barrel of the dreaded Selected not Fun-ded notice!
What do you do? I’m glad you asked. You contract out the proving of your components and/or subsystems to fly on the venerable Super Bat UAS airframe. Developed by MLB’s Steve Morris, it uses some of the same engineering behind the World-famous V-Bat. With pilot Gene Robinson, who has years of experience flying UAS, including flying the Super Bat for NIST on the Wildland Urban fire study contract circa 2014.
The other half of the dynamic duo, Patrick Egan, has years of demo experience, including for the FAA, other OEMs, and as the High-Altitude Test Bed Flight Director for the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Battle Lab. There is a recipe to boost your chances of success with flight demos. Be it for the domain of Land, Sea, Air, and/or Space, RPRDT&E is validation as a service.
Our service is confidential and comes loaded with years of experience that can be put to work for you.