Half a career in aerospace engineering in Wichita gave Roger Powers the foundation to make the
entrepreneurial leap. He started Flint Hills Solutions in late 2005 as consultancy, drawing on his experiences with the Boeing Co. and Cessna Aircraft Co.
Less than 18 months later, and 128 miles dead west of his fledgling company in Augusta, an F5 tornado erased the town of Greensburg. Years of service in the Kansas National Guard combined with his understanding of flight to uniquely position Powers’ company for a new focus.
“Several tornadoes spun out from the storm that night over a four-county area,” Powers recalls. “There was damage outside of where the emergency teams were responding, but they didn’t have situational awareness and ability to prioritize in remote areas where there were gas leaks and homes destroyed.”
A high-ranking National Guard official told Powers, “If I had a fixed-wing UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that could give us a video feed, it would tell us where to send teams out, and we would have been more effective.”
Soon, Flint Hills Solutions was rolling its own line of unmanned helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.
The Teal Group, which specializes in aviation marketplace analysis, has projected that this fastest-
growing segment of the aerospace sector will balloon to $80 billion in sales over the next decade. “A lot of countries other than the U.S. are using the technology more aggressively than we are,” Powers says. But in the next two or three years, “anything under 55 pounds gross weight, the lid’s going to come off this application.”
These UAVs provide extended surveillance capability (an unmanned helicopter can stay in place for up to six hours), or long-distance flight at remarkably low costs. “We have one in our possession that flew over the Atlantic on less than a gallon of gas,” Powers said, referring to a 33-pound fixed-wing plane certified to fly at altitudes of up to 18,000 feet.
That cost factor is driving demand from local law enforcement in the U.S, where officials have a hard time making the math work on the prices of manned vehicles for surveillance and emergency-
response needs. Flint Hills’ turnkey systems—including the vehicle, control module, antennae and training—range from $75,000 to $250,000, prices that easily compete with costs for manned vehicles and the continuing manpower to operate them.
FHS produces both gas-powered and battery-powered aircraft, the latter being so quiet they can’t be heard just 100 feet off the ground. But beyond law-enforcement uses, applications cover crop surveillance, insurance assessment, various regulated inspections such as hard-to-reach oil and gas pipelines, or right-of-way uses, Powers said.
His staff of 12 comprises “really smart people who have helped us commercialize this technology, which didn’t exist few years ago—the software, the helicopters and fixed-wing, the harnesses, all of it miniaturized in some small-form factor.”
That includes cameras and recorders, he said, and getting that right wasn’t easy. “These aircraft have more technology and are more advanced than the big ones,” Powers said. “You can always scale up; scaling up is easy—the hard part is doing it small.”
Working at two sites covering 4,000 square feet, with additional acreage for expansion, Powers can draw on Wichita’s aviation supply chain, where materials and expertise in lightweight composites and scalable components come in handy. Flint Hills fabricates about half the content of each vehicle—it can turn out one UAV in a week, if needed—but also relies on supply chains that extend overseas.
“It’s all about the supply chain,” Power said. “That’s the limiting factor for us. We’re working to develop the critical path, working on that supply chain to get rid of that risk so that, in two years, if we need to build 1,000 UAVs a year, that’s our goal. We know exactly what the process is, who the suppliers are, and we have the harnesses documented and engineering ready.
“We’re just going to need a big facility.” 