🔒Newington pilot has grand aspirations for Hartford drone startup

A growing push by the U.S. government to stem the market dominance of Chinese-made drones over espionage concerns is creating a business opportunity in downtown Hartford.

Barry Alexander, a longtime pilot and flight instructor who has worked for cargo airlines based in Florida and New York, has big plans for Aquiline Drones, which he hopes will become a major drone manufacturer and provider of related services and technology, mainly for commercial and government buyers.

He formed the company last year and is now readying product launches and expansion in 2020.

The 51-year-old Newington resident is CEO and majority shareholder of the privately held company, which he said has raised more than $1 million in equity investments from 30 investors, including fellow pilots. The funding will get the company through at least one year of operations, Alexander said.

Aquiline recently inked a downtown Hartford lease, which starts Feb. 1, for the 16th and 17th floors of the Stark Building at 750 Main St., where the company has been renting a smaller third-floor space since last year.

Its 15-employee team — which includes Chief Strategic Advisor Brooks Bash, a retired three-star Air Force lieutenant general who was recently president of a Florida-based cargo airline — is expected to more than double this year, as the company readies to launch its first product, a cloud-computing network dedicated specifically to drones.

The network, dubbed the “Aquiline Drone Cloud,” will allow drone users to store photos and video, but also offer other specialized features like “geofencing,” which warns drone operators when their unmanned aerial vehicles approach a restricted boundary (like an airport), Alexander said. It will also support software applications, including from third parties, that analyze or map bridges, construction sites, wind turbines and various other infrastructure.

“When we start building apps on our cloud, you will end up with some higher level of autonomy where you can operate the drone without basically any [human] input,” said Alexander, who has hired network architects and others to help build the cloud offering, which he estimated will be priced at around $199 per year for a standard package.

This year, Alexander also intends to manufacture customized drones for various commercial uses, which might include firefighting, heavy-asset inspection, oil aerial ranching, law enforcement and border surveillance.

Those drones will be created by Aquiline with specialized 3D printers, first in its expanded Stark Building space, and later, potentially, in a larger Bridgeport factory Alexander says he’s eyeing for lease. Aquiline plans to use high-end 3D printers built by California-based Carbon, which has worked with Adidas and Ford to print product parts. Aquiline has one Carbon printer in the Stark Building, with plans to add two more this year.

Carbon is trying to shift 3D printing from a prototyping to a mass-production technology.

Alexander also plans to launch a “drone-on-demand” rental service, he said.

Bash, the retired general who started working for Aquiline last year, said there’s a gap for companies that want to use drones but don’t want to deal with the complex federal regulations governing how they can be flown.

That’s why an on-demand service could be popular.

“Once you get past hobbyists, there’s a little bit of a barrier to entry, because now you have regulatory requirements, you have to have trained operators, you’ve got to buy the drones, you need cloud services,” Bash said. “So for small businesses that don’t want to bother with all that, they just don’t use drones yet.”

Aquiline will be seeking Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permissions, required for many types of commercial-drone operations, that would allow it to do things hobbyists can’t — like fly drones out of an operator’s line of sight, at night, or above crowded areas.

Alexander doesn’t seem worried about biting off more than a startup can chew, even as Bloomberg last summer reported that the commercial drone bubble had burst, with multiple venture-backed drone companies going bust or halting production.

There are currently more than 428,000 commercial drones registered with the FAA, according to its website, but the agency has forecast that the number could climb as high as 1.3 million by 2023, driven by advances that are expected to make the aircraft more efficient and safe.

“I don’t anticipate any pitfalls,” Alexander said, noting his company will need to eventually raise more funding.

American-made push fuels optimism

Driving Alexander’s business venture and optimism are a series of moves the U.S. military and federal government have made in recent years to restrict the purchase of Chinese-made drones over espionage concerns and focus more on American-made technology.

In 2017, for example, the U.S. Army stopped using drones made by China’s Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) and a year later the U.S. Department of Defense suspended the procurement and use of commercially available drones from China. Last year, the Department of the Interior grounded its fleet of nearly 1,000 Chinese-made drones, citing spy concerns, while a bill before Congress would ban the entire federal government from buying any more drones from the Eastern Asia nation.

“The timing is opportune for a domestic supply chain,” Alexander said. “There is no large-scale drone manufacturer in the U.S., and by large-scale I mean like 500-plus units a year.”