Discovering What’s Next in Aviation

If you’re leaving the Syracuse Hancock International Airport through Terminal A, and you look to your left after crossing through the glass doors, you’ll see a room with large screens on the walls. The screens are displaying air traffic control data, a microweather service and low-altitude flight detection and more. 

It's a room you may not have noticed if you weren’t looking for it, but it’s home to a keystone of the Central New York uncrewed aerial systems, or UAS, ecosystem, an ecosystem with a global reputation of innovation and success. This is the NUAIR Center of Excellence, headquarters for the NUAIR Alliance.

As the Central New York region grows as a hub of UAS technology, NUAIR works with its partners to enable the next generation of aviation in our region and across the country.

On this episode of Talk CNY presented by NBT Bank, NUAIR’s Executive Director Ken Stewart joins host Katie Zilcosky to discuss the organization’s success and how the industry is impacting Central New York. 

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This is Talk CNY, semi-monthly podcast by CenterState CEO. We're an independent nonprofit committed to creating inclusive, equitable, and sustainable economic growth in Central New York. Join us as we meet the people and explore the projects driving the regional economy forward. This is Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Zilcosky, director of communications at CenterState CEO and your host for Talk CNY. If you're leaving the Syracuse Hancock International Airport out of terminal A and you go through the glass doors and then look to your left, you'll see a room that has large screens on the walls. Those screens are displaying air traffic control data, a micro weather service, low-altitude flight detection, and much more. It's a room you might not notice if you aren't looking for it, but it's the home of a cornerstone of the Central New York uncrewed aerial system or UAS ecosystem. An ecosystem that has a global reputation of progress and success. This is the NUAIR Center of Excellence, home of the NUAIR Alliance. On this episode of Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm joined by NUAIR'S President and CEO Ken Stewart, who will talk to us about the UAS ecosystem in Central New York, how it's grown and its impacts on our region. Ken, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you for having me. Late in 2024, Commercial UAV News publishes an article and it calls Central New York, the Center of the Drone Universe in the article. It's an impressive title and it's one that's been built up over less than a decade, pretty much. So how does that happen? How have we reached this label from a notable news source in the UAS industry and what sets Central New York apart? So I think we got here because we've had, if you look back 10, 12 years ago, we had the test site land here, which was kind of early thinking about what this industry could become. And then as that evolved, and it's been a lot of challenges in evolving the test sites just for various rules and regulation reasons and things like that. We started developing GENIUS New York, we had the Tech Garden and all these things kind of played into building a broader industry. So you have an incubator, you have an accelerator, and you have a place where they can go once they've accelerated their components to go to a test site, to start testing all these components and really starting the commercialization process. And there really isn't another place like that across the United States. Test sites mostly are run by universities or associated universities, so they're very focused on white papers and things like that, where this was a very different test site when it first became a test site. Now how have the perceptions of uncrewed aerial systems drones changed over this time? Because I think there's definitely still different views of drones, how they're used, what they're used for, but it's becoming more and more commonplace, I would think. Sure. I think depending on what type of drones you look at. I can recall the first time I came here to Syracuse before I was working at NUAIR, and I was sitting at the airport and I saw the MQ-9 taxi out and I had to pick up my phone because I said, what is going on? Why is there an MQ-9 in an airport? I didn't know they flew off here. So when you see those, you have a different thought than when you see a smaller drone. So that really influences what people generally think. But I think it's starting where people are starting to understand a little bit more about what the benefit of the drones can do. I mean, one of the things that NUAIR really focuses on is really drones, how to incorporate drones for the benefit of the constituents of the state of New York. H-ow do we start doing bridge inspections so you don't have to close lanes of traffic and backup cars sitting behind waiting for something to happen, right? So how do we look at electrical infrastructure, big utility lines that they cost a lot of money, very dangerous. People literally sit on the skids of helicopters and fly above the high voltage wires. How can we start doing what we generally call the dangerous, dirty and despicable that you don't want humans doing, that you can automate with these types of UAS? And I think it's starting to move that way a little bit. I think some of the things that happened in New Jersey and New York got people a little spooked, and I think unfortunately it was a great opportunity for the Federal Department of Transportation to actually really push up the benefit of drones. We've been working with the Thruway Authority on a SMART grant, and they were just about to announce the phase two or stage two award. When that happened, they said, oh, we're just going to shut down all the press. And we're like, wow, this is really a great opportunity to come out and say, look, you might see something and think something, but here's what you really think when you see these drones out there. Yeah, I think that even in Central New York where the UAS industry is very robust, a lot of our neighbors don't really know the scale or what it means or what drones do. So when you're talking to someone who's not knee deep in the industry, what kind of stories do you tell? What sort of real world applications do you tell them about to illustrate how drones can be used and what they're being used for? Yeah, so there's so many use cases and really it depends on what the person's background is, but when I was at GE, we actually helped deliver an organ to a waiting patient with a drone. That was in 2018, 2019. But generally what I talk to people about is every year, and you just saw recently the city of New York was talking about congestion pricing. So the state of New York when I first came here four years ago had, I think the congestion for the state was somewhere around $24,$25 billion or something across the entire state. Now that's up to like $30 billion just in four years. And that problem isn't New York City, it's actually the broader part of New York where I-90 covers because every time I-90 shuts down, you're impacting commerce. And so think about the commerce that goes across this road. And so if you look at Syracuse, it's like $3 or $4 billion. If you look at Albany, it's another $3 billion. So it really adds up along that piece. Well, if you can then start using drones like the Thruway or DOT to start doing things, they don't have to shut down traffic, even accident recreation or those types of components. There's a huge advantage to all of us as constituents of the state to get benefit from police using and DOT using these new technologies. A great example is accident recreation. So generally it's like 13% of accidents depending on what the accident was about. You have to do an accident recreation, and so they have these transit stations that generally take about two and a half hours to recreate the accident document digitally or document everything. Whereas a drone can do that in less than 25 minutes. Oh my gosh. So if you think about closing a lane of traffic, and let's just say that particular road is I-90, which I don't know if this is the right number, but say it's $411 a minute of economic impact, every minute that highway is closed, you can close for 25 minutes or three hours. So all those things you start saying, well, that's really beneficial to be able to use these things. And the flip side of this not only is it beneficial when you think about congestion and carbon emissions and all these other things, but lane closures are hazardous to the cars as well as to the people working doing the bridge inspections. They don't want to be hung off the side of a bridge in a bucket truck. So many benefits on both sides of the coin for everybody. I was going to say it's not only cost beneficial, but it's safety. Safety too. It sounds like, like you said, some of these jobs that drones can kind of take over for are definitely jobs that pose dangers to people's lives. So it's really great to have. I think so. I think a lot of benefits. You can't be used for everything, but there's certainly a lot of benefit for them. Absolutely. I mean, you mentioned GE prior to your role at NUAIR, you were working in Boston for a GE subsidiary AirXOS. What made you want to come to Central New York in NUAIR? Why did you think this was a good fit for you? So AirXOS was a startup under GE Aviation. So I worked for GE Ventures on the aviation side. So we were very focused on next generation kind of technologies and aviation. And we were actually doing a lot of testing out here. So we were looking at how do we apply drones to inspect wind turbines, the big industrial components that GE has. And so we did a lot of testing here, and then when COVID happened, GE said, Hey, this little business is not part of the bigger engines. We're going to shut this down. And so as I looked around and said, what's really going to be my next move? And predominantly my career, I've been in private equity, so restructuring of new growth entities, but what I saw here in New York was all the assets were here. It was just how can we use this to really start moving this industry forward? And that was really exciting to me. So I'd never worked at a nonprofit before, and so many people questioned me, but I absolutely love it. I love the technology. I love that you have all the infrastructure here and really focused on moving this industry forward. So you worked in aviation, obviously with GE, but prior to that, and now in NUAIR, it's a huge industry that is, I mean even for people who are familiar with it, often confusing. What has that been like for you entering this field now being really influential? So you bring up something that's kind of funny. I was not in aviation before I went to GE. I actually did a lot of different types of technology, startups outside of aviation. But some of the things we did, I don't want to get into the details of all the Spectrum-related stuff, but some of the stuff we did with Spectrum was what was the reason behind GE saying, Hey, you should come here and help us in this particular space. So for me, I spent 27 years in really telecommunications and Spectrum. This to me was a whole new venture again, and we just saw the capability of this and I was like, I want to be in this space. And so I'm excited now as I was the day I got into this space, maybe even more so. Yeah, I mean, it's constantly changing and there's always something new. The rules and regulations don't change so quickly, but the technology seems to change really quickly. You got to have something a little stable, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Central New York as a region, were you familiar with it at all before you joined NUAIR? No, I only knew from coming here and working with NUAIR out at the test site, didn't know anything about it. In fact, when we moved here, we drove, it was all during COVID, looked at a couple of houses that the second time we drove, we were like, we're buying a house regardless. We're not doing all this trip again because you had no place to stay. There was like 16-hour days. So bought a house in Caz and we absolutely love living in Cazenovia. It's just a wonderful place. Love this region. It's probably very different from Boston or DC or New York where you... It's so quiet. Fifteen years in DC, a couple years downtown Boston, and the first thing we realize here is like, oh my God, it's so quiet. I bet your commute is a little bit, it's so funny when I talk to people here in the region and they're like, wow, you drive all the way in from Cazenovia, and I'm like, my seven-mile commute DC was an hour to an hour and a half each way. This 35 minutes, is this really a big deal. So it's all about perspective. But no, the commute here is great. The community is fantastic, very much embracing the technology. We've not really found many people who are opposed to seeing this technology really emerge in this area. And I think the other big difference about what the collective is doing here is it's not about, it's great that we have Micron and companies like that coming here, but this is about building an industry. And when you build industry, companies can come and go over time and just not impact the industry once you have an industry stabilized in a region. So that's the thing I think that we really focus on is how do we build out a holistic industry here? Not just what NUAIR is doing, but the holistic look on the industry itself. I was going to ask you, what is it that keeps you moving forward day in and day out about NUAIR? And it sounds like that holistic industry is something that really drives you forward, but I'm sure there's a lot of stuff. I do have some beliefs about how this industry will evolve over time. And I think that one of the reasons it's made us successful here is what we've done with that vision. I literally just came back from Saudi Arabia. We did a trade mission representing the companies here in Central New York to what's called GACA, which it's their FAA essentially. And so we went and presented to them. We actually did their strategy. We spent a year contract doing their strategy for technology and regulation for advanced air mobility. And so now we had the opportunity to go back and present them all the capabilities that we've had here. We went back and did the trade mission. Now at the end of this month, we'll actually provide a proposal back to them. There's other countries around the world that are looking at what we're doing here in Central New York. We've got Montreal working with, we have other states that have contracted NUAIR to kind of figure out how they're going to start moving forward in this space. So I think once people start understanding how far this technology has come, I think they start saying, well, I don't want to go recreate the wheel and get 12 years of work ahead of me. How do I go much faster? I was going to say, is it common for other states, countries to be reaching out to NUAIR to be like,"We need you to help guide us forward.". I don't know that it was in the past, but it's certainly become a thing now. So we've got a group from Australia coming here in June. Wow. They want to come over. We've got, I think in March we've got a group coming from Montreal. So we're really starting to get this kind of global look. We've had a, I can't really talk about the state. We've had a state saying, you just need to make sure and confirm with us that you can do business with the state because we have some RFPs coming out. We'd very much like for you all to respond to those. I think once people kind of understand where the technology is headed and how quickly it's going. And I also think with this administration, I think that UAS is one of the new administration is one of their top objectives. So I think we're going to see a lot of activity in this space and a lot of momentum happen very soon. Well, we are going to take a quick break here, but we'll be back with Ken in just a moment. First a word from our presenting sponsor, NBT Bank. I would recommend NBT Bank to any business. My name is Chris Polimino and I'm the president of Atlas Fence. Chris had decided to purchase Atlas Fence from the previous owner. He had previous connections at NBT Bank. NBT Bank provided me equipment financing, doubling our entire production workforce. It's important to me as a business owner that the decisions of our banking relationship are made locally. Welcome back. This is Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank. I'm Katie Zilcosky, director of communications at Center State CEO, and your host for Talk CNY. I'm joined today by Ken Stewart, NUAIR's President and CEO. We are talking about the UAS industry in Central New York. Ken, thanks for being here. Thank you. So there's a lot keeping NUAIR busy these days, it's all very exciting. You guys are making a lot of announcements even within the organization. Just recently, you increased your beyond visual line of sight testing area from 250 square miles to 450 square miles. You got a waiver. So before we get into what that takes to get that waiver, what does it allow you to do? What is beyond visual line of sight testing? Sure. So I mean, it's exactly what it says. Like you flying drones beyond your visual line of sight. So when people generally ask me what does that mean? I'm like, well, put a bag on your head and go fly a drone because that's essentially, you can't see where it's going. So that takes technology and infrastructure. And so what we've done is we've partnered here with many of the companies that have gone through either the GENIUS New York cohort, the UAS jobs fund or have been at the Tech Garden. So we have companies like SRC, ResilienX, Hidden Level, Aloft, True Weather, all kind of integrated technology so that we can provide this kind of infrastructure as a service. So it's a way to think about it. It's a highway in the sky because we can see more than, quite frankly, the FAA can see. They have these big radar systems that look for big aircraft, but they don't look for small ones. So we can see small general aviation, small drones. Because we can see all this, we now have the ability, the authorization from the FA to be able to go fly a drone, 450 square miles sitting at home or sitting at the op center because we can see everything around it and ensure that we're not interfering with manned aviation. The last thing you want to do is have a drone interfere with man aviation. And that's what the FAA has entrusted us to do, essentially. So we've given you this, awarded you this waiver because your operations have shown us the safety level that allows you to go perform these operations. Now, how far is 450 square miles from Syracuse? It'd be traveling from here to? Alright, so it's a little bit west of Syracuse to a little bit right around say Utica, Rome area and then south of I-90 and then north of the lake. It's a big kind of square area like that, but it's going to get bigger. We're actually deploying more systems a little bit further out and that area is going to grow again very soon. Oh my gosh, that's exciting. Yeah, it's very exciting. So how hard is it to get one of these waivers? It's very hard. Yeah. It's really hard. I mean, ironically, the last one we submitted, it was kind of like we already had the things in place, and we were just saying we just want to a broader area. It took a week. The previous one, I think when I got here, the first one they have was about a four by eight mile. It took them a year and a half. And then we ended up getting the 50 mile one between Griffiss and the airport in 18 months. And then we got the 250 mile one, a square mile one and just like four months. So everything's getting faster because the FAA is getting used to us. We have credibility with them. And I mean we've actually flown like 6,000 flights in controlled airspace. That means 6,000 flights in and around the airport. Wow. The closest thing to that, one of the test sites, and we are not a test site, but the North Dakota test site has flown like six to 700 flights. Oh my gosh. And so it just shows you the volume of traffic and the capabilities we have here just exceed most other places in the United States. Now, you mentioned some of the GENIUS NY teams that you are working with and GENIUS has a really great relationship with NUAIR, a lot of collaboration happens there. I mean, how unique is that kind of mutually beneficial relationship between the startups and an organization like the NUAIR Alliance? I think it's really unique. I think challenges of startup companies is going to someplace where they can incubate and learn from others and network and then actually have a place to go test their wares. And the thing about dealing with aviation is you can't put anything in the air unless it's been certified or approved by the FAA. So you can build a drone all day long, but you're really not flying it until they say, "Hey, this thing's okay to go fly in this particular area." It presents a lot of challenges in this space, but what you're starting to see now is a big transition from the DIU. So Defense Innovation Unit is now looking toward the civil environment. So the commercial world for defense products because than traditional aviation manufacturers are. In general, as an example, if you were building an aircraft like a regular GA aircraft, it might take you six to 10 years to get a type certification for that aircraft. We're already seeing, Beta isn't type certified yet, but they're an electric aircraft that is already probably 50 to 60% of the way through their type certification process and they've not been a company for that long. So you can see the rapid progression that's happening here and that's where having those capabilities, having companies around you surround you can network learn from, but then have a place where you can go and verify and validate what your components can do. There's not many places like this. Yeah. Can you share some of the stories of collaboration between GENIUS teams and NUAIR and what they've produced? Sure. So example, if you were to come to our operation center or the Center of Excellence, you would see all of those components integrated into what we would call an unmanned traffic management system. So it's a system that we use. It has both an enterprise side, so we can, as we're flying, we're tracking our vehicles, it's giving us telemetry back, but we can also see a common operating picture, whatever's happening in this whole area. The other thing it allows us to do with our partners like ResilienX, it allows us to see that all of our network components, our counter systems are all functioning properly. So if we can expect an outage or a problem, we can proactively get out there and fix it before we have an outage. And that's really important for us because our next big step is essentially being to offer this infrastructure as a service. And that's the process we're in with the FAA right now. And if that comes to fruition, we'll be one of the first companies ever in the United States to be able to provide infrastructure like this almost on behalf of the FAA It's not under their operations. All FAA equipment is private networked on their premise, and this will be something that's adjacent to the FAA. So it's a really unique time for us. Yeah, I was going to say, what does that mean to operate as a service versus... It's like building a road. It's like if you don't have a road, you can't drive your car somewhere. So when you get on the throughway, that's a turnpike as a service, you're paying to go on that. Well now you need that for the airspace. And so that's essentially what we're now enabling across this region. And so as that area gets bigger and you say, why is 250 to 450 maybe going to broader than 600 miles, really important is once we're able to offer this infrastructure as a service, then drone delivery companies can come here. And what's going to be important is the population density that's underneath that area. So you want to cover the major population centers here in the region. So when you think about, I don't even know what the population density here, but I'm guessing there's like 270,000 households and that population may be five times that when you think about Amazon deliveries, how many deliveries would they have a week, and how many of that can now be done by drones? So when you start thinking about those numbers, there's a lot of opportunity for companies to come here and actually use this infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another new project for NUAIR that it's recently announced is a new division within the NUAIR Alliance, NUAIR Defense. So can you tell me a little bit about NUAIR Defense and what problems it's working to solve? Sure. So about two years ago, we participated in, the government at the time passed what's called the American Leadership and Coordination Act and Advanced Air Mobility. A very long winded act. Yes, very easy to say. Yeah, I have to always think about it when I say it. But the goal of that was to really accelerate the United States to make sure that they were in the leadership and had the leadership in advanced air mobility. And so we reached out to them, I think it passed in 2022, and they were like, why should we come to Syracuse? You should come here and see what we have. And so they said, well, we'll make it stop number four of four. When they came here, they said, this should have been our first stop. They were like, we had for their Department of Energy at the federal level, we had the New York Power Authority, they had the Department of Commerce, we had the Thruway, we had the port authorities, we had all kind of the counter agencies who had worked with us to do things to really help them accelerate this whole piece. The DOD was also part of that. What we realized that the DOD was also looking for solutions like we were developing in the civilian side. They needed to test drones. And by the way, it's very hard to get on a military base to test a drone get flight time because they're busy. And so what we have, the ability here is to not only help them with airspace integration and airspace management, but also provide a facility for what we call verification validation. So for the Army or the Navy or DOD to go and acquire a procure a product, they have to know that it works well. If you can't go test at these locations, how do you know that it works? And so we now give them that capability here. And so how agile a company we are was illustrated last year. It was the last week of November, right around Thanksgiving, the Defense Innovation Unit reached out and said, Hey, we've got nine aircraft. We've got a test. And we're like, wow, okay. This is kind of short notice. Well, nine days later, they were here and tested all of them within a week. Oh my gosh. And it's because of the people that we have at NUAIR. It's really a unique group of resources, but we're able to do both sides of that. And so most of what we operate on today anyway is dual use technology. So we're trying to say, how do we bring these two things together here and marry that? And just leveraging kind of all the capabilities that we have for that market. Now, working with the U.S. military is not a small task. It takes a lot to work with them. They have very high standards. So I mean, what does that say about NUAIR as an organization, about the trust and reliability of NUAIR to be able to work with the U.S. military and be a resource for them? I think it says a lot. I mean, to get the waivers that we've been able to be awarded from the FAA shows that the FAA has a lot of trust in what we do. A lot of our staff is former 174th, so they come from the military. It really gives us a high level of capability within the team. We've got safety management systems, people from the 174th, our head of our flight operations is a former F-16 pilot at the 174th. So almost all of our pilots are manned as well as unmanned certified pilots. And all of them, they don't just have a part 107, we train them all the way up to what they call the NIST proficiency level all the way up to Level Five. And so they're very proficient at what they do. They're very good at what they do. We have people that have telecom backgrounds. We have people with sensor like ground-based radar that they're subject matter experts. And so the FAA can certify an aircraft and they can certify pilots. But in this next generation aviation, all these associated elements, the radars, the sensors, the counter drone technologies, the telemetries, the software in a cloud environment is not something that they're really trained in. They're learning. They're having to really accelerate their learning of this space. And it's something we're really good at. And I think that's what it speaks volumes is that we can serve our military clients, we can serve our civilian and our civilian clients as well as our emerging tech companies that are coming through here. Now, NUAIR'S tagline is what's next? So I've got to ask you, what's next for NUAIR? So I think there'll be some commercialization of some things, is what we're hoping. That's where we're really putting a lot of our focus on right now is how do we start enabling commercial companies to come here and start using this infrastructure? And that means not just companies to come here, but how do we enable state operations, different agencies? We've trained, I think 3000 state personnel in becoming a part 107, but also NIST certified for piloting. We've done like 300 different waivers and COAs for agencies across the state. So our goal is to really continue to enable the whole state. We are not only adopting these technologies, but it keeps the state at the forefront of the economic benefit of this industry. By doing that, it's going to help us continue to grow this industry right here in Central New York. Well, Ken, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you stopping by. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. CenterState CEO's podcast Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank, is available on all major podcast platforms or centerstateceo.com. Additional content and clips can be seen across CenterState CEO's social media channels for new episode reminders. Be sure to subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app, and don't forget to leave a quick review or five-star rating. Thanks for listening to Talk CNY, presented by NBT Bank.