Jonathan Downey with a cutaway of UASUSA's Tempest Chris Crisman

This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

Jonathan Downey was born with flying in his bones. His mother had met his flight-instructor father as a student and, as a young child, Downey would accompany his dad on trips. Downey logged his first flight when he was 14 and completed his training while studying engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His grandfather was a pilot; an uncle was shot down in the second world war. He has worked at Boeing, but also captained a commuter air service operating from Las Vegas, which ferried tourists on a 19-passenger twin turbo-prop plane.


So there is a touch of irony when, seated across from WIRED at a conference table, he slides over a small red box of machined aluminium. "You're actually one of the first people to see this," says Downey who, at 31, retains the boyishly fresh-faced, lithe appearance of the cross-country runner he once was. This "flight core", as it is called, represents the culmination of his work in aerospace and engineering. Its ultimate function, however, is to eliminate pilot operation from a flying device in which the pilot has already been removed. This little box represents a new kind of dominion of the skies, not of man's conquest of the physics of flight, but man's ability to turn the air into a data layer -- to put cloud computing literally into the clouds.

Downey is the founder and CEO of Airware, a three-year-old startup that aims to bring a standardised operating system to the nascent but sprawling world of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles. "What you need is a platform," Downey says, "that bridges a large set of applications and a large set of drone manufacturers." Airware tracks more than 600 drone manufacturers which use the devices in a broad range of applications, from automated aerial inspections of power lines, to delivering medicines to remote clinics, to monitoring the health of a winery's grape stock.

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But getting each of those drones to do each of those things requires costly, time-consuming "integration", as it is called – a raft of custom software and hardware solutions. One drone needs to fly at high altitude for hours; another needs to be carried by a utility worker in a backpack; one will carry a motion-stabilised Hollywood camera to film a high-speed chase; another will sport a methane detector for analysing the gaseous plume emanating from a landfill. "That kind of stovepipe way of doing things isn't going to scale," Downey says, from the company's headquarters on the edge of San Francisco's SoMa neighbourhood. Instead, he envisions Airware as a Wintel for drones. Intel, he says, "didn't build all the computer systems, they built a key hardware component that all of the hardware manufacturers needed". It will also, Downey believes, provide a regulation-compliant, data-rich platform to help assuage insurers with qualms about the notion of automated, "beyond-line-of-sight" drones operating in the public domain. "One company told us they're only able to write a policy for one in 50 companies that approaches them," Downey says. "Right now, they're not able to get the flight data that they need."

The idea for Airware was born, he says, when he led an MIT team building a drone for an inter-collegiate competition. Drones had to autonomously complete a number of missions. Downey says the first question to answer was: "What was going to be the brain of the drones?" At the high end, a would-be drone builder could turn to software and electronics that had been developed for military UAVs. "Every one of them was a black box," Downey says. "It did seven things, but if you wanted to do something different, your hands were tied."


At the other end of the spectrum was the world of open-source code. "We found that this was spaghetti code -- not architected to allow extension by other people," Downey says. The team struggled for two years, only to finish second from last. His takeaway: "Building all the underlying pieces was really a distraction from what the drone was supposed to do."

Downey eventually moved on to the Advanced Systems group at Boeing, where he worked on a really big drone: the A160T Hummingbird, a 2,900kg autonomous helicopter designed to fly for 24 hours with a 4,000km range. While working on the project, Downey heard a common refrain from dronemakers who had previously worked with the military. Now they were getting requests for drones that could survey and map, or inspect crops. "They said 'We're trying to repurpose this black box solution and it's not working,' or 'We tried the open source and we crashed all our drones.'"

So Downey, with a group of colleagues from Boeing and investment of $25 million (£16m), founded Airware. Big aerospace it is not -- on the day WIRED visits, a number of fixed-wing drones are collecting GPS signals in a small car park next to the office. Most of the company's staff are software engineers, and much of what they think about is processing data. In the world of drone 2.0, the focus is no longer on how drones fly, but on the information they collect. "It's all about the data," says Lucas van Oostrum, chief technology officer and cofounder of the Dutch drone builder (and Airware customer) Aerialtronics. "Drones are flying servers."

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Airware engineers work on the Allied Drones EF44 UAV Chris Crisman


A few years ago, Joshua Kornoff, president of Allied Drones, got a call from the producers of a National Geographic documentary. They wanted an aerial shot in a US national park and were unable get permission. "It was a really dry season up there, and they were afraid of sparking a forest fire," Kornoff says. Officials were also concerned about the noise generated by a full-sized aircraft. Kornoff's career had been spent in film special effects and pyrotechnics. "I spent 15 years in Hollywood blowing things up for the movies," he says. UAVs were just beginning to hit the commercial market, so Kornoff modded up a drone and got the shot. Soon he started getting calls for other jobs, but had no appetite for being on set. Then he had another idea: "We'll just build for everyone else." Allied Drones was born.

Drones have fast become standard Hollywood tools -- one of the more high-profile drone-filmed sequences was 007 chasing a villain across the rooftops of Istanbul in Skyfall. Given that technical hurdles are now relatively low ("It's just a flying camera," Kornoff says), Allied Drones is working on more specialised applications. This has meant building drones for clients' specific needs, from mining operators to a healthcare provider looking to create an air link between far-flung clinics in developing countries. As Kornoff began to grapple with the difficulty of building bespoke drone after bespoke drone, he began to see patterns in what customers wanted. "After a while I said, 'If I could standardise something that would satisfy 95 per cent of your needs, you guys would deal with it.'" With the addition of Airware's flight controller, he is able, as he puts it, "to integrate a standardised autopilot on a standardised air frame that's still highly adaptable". It can scale. Bringing this kind of automation to drones may not seem as revolutionary as something like Google's self-driving car project, Downey says, because progress is incremental. Some communication drones, for example, require two operators. "One's acting as a pilot and the other is kind of looking at the data coming in from the drone. With automation, the footprint is down from two to one."

But there is another benefit. "If aviation has taught us anything over the past 40 or 50 years, it's that we've been able to decrease the rate of accidents by orders of magnitude through greater software automation," Downey says. That includes standardisation: "Pilots doing the same thing in the same way every time." Automated drones can bring not only more safety to previously risky manned flights, they can lessen the risk for humans doing dangerous jobs. In 2013, for example, 13 workers fell to their deaths in the US alone while carrying out mobile tower inspections. In the Netherlands, Aerialtronic's Lucas van Oostrum notes, T-Mobile inspects towers using his company's drones.

At a typical Dutch football stadium, "they would take a cherry picker and it would take them two to three weeks to do all the inspections [of towers]," says van Oostrum. "With our drone they can manage to do it in a bit over three hours, with huge cost savings and not putting anyone in harm's way." And drone work is not all visual. "We had a client who had this lighting collider, the size of a quarter," says van Oostrum. "To test if it works, you need to touch it."

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Airware UAV systems engineer Stefan Aprodu tests Drone America's DAx8 Chris Crisman

Payloads are also a possibility: van Oostrum has been contacted by an Antwerp diamond dealer to discuss the feasibility of carrying diamonds from the exchange to the airport. "They have to put a lot of security on the ground," he says. "It won't happen today. But in two years?" Typically, drone applications still involve a fair amount of manual operation, he says. "They fly it on GPS – all the little corrections are made manually." But van Oostren's drones will be carrying increased on-board computing power in the form of a processor called Nucleo, running algorithms that can identify mobile towers and parse important information from the irrelevant, "like your neighbour sunbathing on the roof". An increasing amount of the data processing will be happening on the drone itself. "Why are on-board calculations so important? Because you're limited in the bandwidth on your downlink." The Nucleo, he notes, "can do the processing and then give flight commands to Airware".

The idea of having a single solution that can create a sort of jack-of-all drones is what drew a recent investment in Airware by GE Ventures, the strategic investment arm of General Electric (GE). As Alex Tepper, GE Ventures' managing director, describes it, he was part of a team looking to develop "robotic solutions that will be able to work collaboratively with humans in the field." With UAVs, he says, "there are going to be a hell of a lot of solutions... a lot of them are going to be sort of kluged together to solve something." Their relationship is already bearing fruit: in April, Airware announced GE as "enterprise customer" for Aerial Information Platform, its operating system for commercial drones.

Airware, Tepper says, is "product agnostic", allowing a customer to "develop customer-oriented vertically oriented business software into it". Some of that will be vertical -- having quadcopters fly up and down a wind turbine, for instance. Others will be horizontal. "The way oil pipeline inspection is done right now is typically with a Cessna or a helicopter," Tepper says. The sensor? "There is literally a guy looking out," he says, searching for right-of-way encroachments, or checking that a riverbed hasn't eroded away the pipe's support. Lower-cost automated drones could vastly increase the scale and frequency of coverage.

In Airware's lab, John Kolaczynski, the company's director of customer implementation, demonstrates the ease of the process. Airware's PC interface simply requires customers to describe the desired vehicle, payload and mission. The operator uses drop-down menus to choose what he wants to happen in the event of what Kolaczynski calls "off-nominal events". If your drone goes astray, for example, do you want it to return home and land? The company is still learning what can be off-nominal in the real world. Testing an anti-poaching drone over several weeks in Kenya's Ol Pejeta Conservancy, three Airware technicians ran sensor-equipped UAVs across the huge 360km2 park, trying to locate where animals were each day. "You would spot a herd of elephants," Kolaczynski says, "and when they drank water, their trunks would turn a different colour." It is not hard to see the benefit of automated drones doing daily aerial sweeps. There was just one problem. "There wasn't a lot of infrastructure out there, so we had our ground-control system hooked up to a generator." One day, workers were cutting the grass, for the first time that summer. "And they ran over the Ethernet cord." The connection to the drone was lost, but the vehicle found its way home.

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Chris Anderson, founder of 3D Robotics, with a Solo smart drone Chris Crisman

The automated drone is already available to the high-street consumer. One afternoon, standing on the Berkeley rooftop of 3D Robotics (3DR), Chris Anderson, CEO of the world's third-largest producer of drones (and a former editor-in-chief of WIRED US), sets one of his company's sub-$1,000 drones equipped with a GoPro camera. He then takes an Android phone out of his pocket, pulls up an aerial photo of our location and taps the image of the adjacent cement factory ("They're friends of ours," he says). The drone rises from the roof and heads for the building. Once there, it dips on its side to capture the imagery, and circles the building. It rises another five metres and does it again. "It's doing feature recognition between those two circles," Anderson says, "and using the parallax effect to get 3D images." Its imaging completed, the drone swoops over our heads and gently lowers itself to within a few metres of its launch position. Back in the office, Anderson syncs the data to Autodesk, and shortly afterwards has a fairly detailed ground-up rendering of the plant. The drone is no longer just a flying vehicle, but an automated, Android-powered aerial 3D scanner.

Even as drones prepare to go to work, we are still in the experimental stage. This is captured in a video clip Anderson shows WIRED of Richard Branson kitesurfing off his private Caribbean island. The entrepreneur carries a smartphone that acts as a homing beacon for the 3DR drone that follows behind, filming his exploits. "This is simply the democratisation of the tools of Hollywood," Anderson says. We are in a renaissance of personal storytelling. And now, he says, we have access to the one thing only Hollywood used to have: "booms, cranes and helicopters".

There will no doubt be a point where a superabundance of drones hovering over a hipster event becomes the aerial equivalent of the selfie stick, noxious and requiring legal (or social) regulation. But for now, the consumer drone market operates quite unfettered, restricted largely by rules set in place for radio-controlled aeroplanes. This freedom is in contrast with the commercial drone market, which in the UK is regulated by the Civil Aviation Authority -- in October 2014 it revealed that there were 359 operators licensed to use sub-20kg drones for work purposes. As of April 2015, 246 companies were legally entitled to fly drones in the US. In France, as of March 2015, 2,000 operators have been granted permission.

Drone pilots, as Airware's head of regulatory affairs Jesse Kalman notes, need to be trained pilots. "Being able to fly a Cessna is no benefit," he says. "But they want to know you know concepts of airspace." "My children can fly drones," Anderson says, "but trained professionals cannot." He argues that all this open-source innovation is where the action is, even commercially. The rail giant Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, for example, has been granted drone permission from the Federal Aviation Authority after citing 3DR as one of its favoured vehicles. As the commercial drone market has stalled while awaiting regulatory approval, innovation has come from below. "It is always going to be essentially an outgrowth of consumer vehicles -- cheap, small, easy to use, with computer vision and sense-and-avoid technology, but costs $500 and they are here today," Anderson says. At Airware, Downey argues that while on the consumer end, much of the competition is driven by price. "A lot of the end users of drones in our scenario are making $10,000 per day per drone. Our customers aren't focused on the upfront cost of the system. We are optimising for compliance, meeting insurance requirements."

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Allied Drone's Kornoff is more blunt: "It's almost like comparing a pickup truck and an industrial mining dump truck. They both carry stuff, they both have four wheels." But, he says, one cannot do the job as well as the other. He points to the main electronic power wire used on many consumer drones. "They're using a hobby-grade connector that costs a tenth of a penny. If that fails, the whole aircraft is down." To take flying video shots of a wedding is rewarding, he adds, and "was impossible five years ago. But that kind of stuff is not useful to big corporations."

GE's Tepper says that Airware is trying to occupy the middle ground between military UAVs and "their highly, engineered solutions" and consumer drones, "which don't have the deeper engineering that needs to be done for commercial applications, whether it's long endurance or more security". Michael Blades, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan covering the UAV industry, suggests that there will be significant consolidation in what is now a sprawling market -- something that has already occurred in military applications, where contractors have snapped up autopilot solutions. "It's like the internet in the early days – there were a million Amazon-type websites to buy from," Blades says.

Downey agrees that anyone leveraging the Airware platform will have a similar experience in terms of reliability and the features on offer, but adds that "we are actively enabling companies to create their own intellectual property as a software application or as a compatible piece of third-party hardware. We're enabling companies to compete with each other."


This doesn't sound like a pilot talking. Downey's mission has moved beyond flying to creating plug-and-play aerial computers so that, as he says, "someone just out of high school with minimal training [can operate] the drone very quickly in a reliable and safe way."

Within just a few years drones have gone from top-secret military technology to something that you can order on the internet. As uses for the devices begin to proliferate, they're getting down to work, harvesting data, going from the skies to the cloud.

Tom Vanderbilt is a WIRED contributing editor. He wrote about Planet Labs in 05.15