#100 Chris Hewlett, Project ULTRA: Why DoD will lead UAS integration

In this 100th episode of The Vertical Space, Chris Hewlett — former Navy Commander, helicopter pilot, and Director of Project ULTRA at Grand Sky in Grand Forks, North Dakota — returns for a candid conversation about the realities of UAS integration. Chris challenges the industry's rush toward community-based traffic management and questions whether UTM, as commonly envisioned, can ever deliver safe and scalable integration. He argues instead that the Department of Defense, through rigorous test, evaluation, and rapid operational deployment, will set the standard for comprehensive UAS integration — a framework that will ultimately spill over into commercial use.

The conversation covers the lessons from Project ULTRA on verification, validation, and operational test and evaluation of unmanned systems, FAA's Part 108, and why shortcuts and theory aren't enough for safe airspace integration. Chris makes the case that starting with the hard problem — integrated airspace management across all users, cooperative and non-cooperative — is the only approach that actually scales.

Key Topics

• Why community-based traffic management is a fundamentally flawed idea — and what 50 helicopters operating with zero ATC during Hurricane Katrina taught Chris about the limits of cooperative deconfliction
• The difference between what the industry thinks UTM will look like in 10 years and what Chris believes it must look like — and why the gap matters
• Why you can't have a community-based traffic management system that effectively manages counter-UAS — and what San Antonio's airspace says about the real complexity of integration
• What the industry got wrong in its near-term eVTOL predictions — and why the physics of hybrid electric aircraft still don't support passenger operations at scale
• Energy density as the structural bottleneck: why the full press into electrification stalled and why class twos and threes are backing into hybrid electric solutions
• Why Project ULTRA's results are more applicable to commercial delivery than military logistics — and what a Tuesday at Grand Forks looks like with B-1s, MQ-9s, Global Hawks, Skydio drones, and crop dusters all in the same airspace
• Part 108: why using power line inspection data to justify rural package delivery rulemaking is not a like-for-like comparison, and what data set would actually support it
• How a four-year RDT&E cycle gets compressed into four days at Grand Sky — and what CENTCOM operators forward-deployed from Qatar are doing in North Dakota
• The military utilization assessment: seven hybrid-electric Group 3 aircraft through the program, tail-sitter engineering failures, and why translational lift is still unsolved
• What success for Project ULTRA looks like in five years — and why it will be largely unknown to the public who benefits from it

+ Read Full Transcript

Chris Hewlett: But the moment that you start adding other operators with other techniques, tactics, procedures, whatever it is, into the airspace, you create complication and by extension, risk that cannot be mitigated if you're talking about community-based traffic management. There needs to be one codified rule of how to do things, and that's usually how an air wing is successful because that's multiple squadrons living together and operating together under one air wing commander. And that has been something that the United States Navy, and I know the United States Air Force does this too, but we've been doing this for a hundred years. So why we're trying to make up some new methodology for aviation operation with complexity of interwoven components and saying that this is gonna be the thing that works baffles me. We have a hundred years of data to support doing it the traditional way. I have no data to support that the way that people are suggesting will work. And I'm not saying it's not worth the study, but I think from a safety and speed of integration perspective, it's very difficult to enter into a conversation where somebody says "I quickly want this to happen. I quickly wanna get my return on investment, but I want to do it in a new way." Well, if you quickly want it to happen, wouldn't it be easier to conform to the safety standards that we already have in place so that you can get that application to work because new and fast are two things that are counterintuitive to one another.

Jim: Hey, welcome back to The Vertical Space in an active discussion with Chris Hewlett, former Navy Commander and helicopter Pilot and Director of Project Ultra, which stands for UAS Logistics, Traffic Response and Autonomy, working for the development and implementation of new operational capacities for Advanced Air Mobility, UAS, Counter UAS, and UTM for the office of Under Secretary of Defense, acquisitions and sustainment. Chris is always a delight to speak with. In a world where people talk about rapid change in possibilities, Chris understands the bedrock safety culture of aviation, and as he welcomes change both in commercial and the military markets, he understands that future technology integration will have to respect traditions and experience of aviation excellence. Hey Chris, thanks for joining us and to our guests, enjoy our conversation with Chris Hewlett as you profitably innovate in The Vertical Space. Commander Chris Hewlett has 30 years of experience in aviation operations, safety modernization system optimization for next generation aviation systems and assessment of developing and deployed aviation command and control systems. As I mentioned, he's the Director of Project Ultra. Chris is currently the President and CEO of C. Scott Solutions, which contracts to Grand Sky and the Grand Forks County team. He has extensive experience supporting the US Navy in modernizing rotary wing, manned and unmanned aviation through integration, implementation, and test evaluation of new systems. Before consulting, Chris spent 21 years on active duty in the US Navy, flying helicopters, drones, and leading large teams of sailors to integrate and test new aviation system designs through operational test and evaluation for the purposes of engineering, design validation, enhancing safety, and smoothing the acquisition management lifecycle. In the areas of UAS, he has managed organizational change and efficiency and developed individual and team talent.

Luka: Chris, welcome back to The Vertical Space. We're so excited to have you back.

Chris Hewlett: Yes. Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for taking the time with me today. I know you guys are tremendously busy and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to share thoughts with you.

Luka: Our pleasure. You know that usually we ask if there's anything that few in the industry agree with you on. Is there something that you would like to comment on that question or maybe comment on the answer that you gave two and a half years ago?

Chris Hewlett: Yeah. No. I think that everybody thinks that the solution to integration of unmanned systems is community-based traffic management, right? Which is seeing a void and talking to each other. And I think that is a fundamentally flawed idea. There is a tipping point that I have been working on, as part of my doctoral thesis, with regards to how much the airspace can actually handle before we become more likely to have a mishap, which would set the industry back in decades. So, I think there's the right mix of air traffic management and, to that end, I don't think that the terminology UAS transportation management is at all applicable because in my mind it means everything and nothing. It's just traffic management, but traffic management for the next generation, which would be ubiquitous to the user or the operator or the methodology in which it's being flown in the airspace, that is the solution set. And it's a more difficult solution set to be sure, but that's the reason why I think people from an industry perspective disagree with me because it's not easily attained. So I'm pushing forward with the more difficult side of the house. Because I think if we solve for the difficult, we automatically can incorporate the easy instead of trying to solve for the easy and then figure out the difficult, which trying to figure out difficult and aviation doesn't usually end well.

Jim: So first of all, just for clarity's sake, what is it that most people disagree with you with? Is it that start with easy and get to the hard, or, and what you're saying is start with the hard and get to the easy?

Chris Hewlett: No, actually, I think what they disagree is that community-based traffic management would work and that UAS transportation management is actually the solution. You can't create a solution with something that's completely meaningless. Because what is UAS Transportation management. It's just transportation management for unmanned aerial systems. But how does that integrate into the current traffic management scheme? So how does UTM and ATM merge and what does that mean?

Jim: Now, I am gonna clarify terms here just for a second. You're using the word transportation. Do you mean to say traffic, UAS, traffic management? Okay, so give us a scenario of how people, those who may disagree with you, see a world five or 10 years from now. And then what is your world five or 10 years from now, and how are they different?

Chris Hewlett: Right, right, right. So I think five or 10 years from now, ideally when you talk to members of the industry who perceive an elegant network of data exchange in the low altitude airspace where vehicles that are moving packages or people are exchanging their information freely with the network, to tell people where they are. Or there are remote pilots who are telling each other where they are. Very similar to what LAANC is, very similar to the rules of the road that we now have where you put information out there for people to understand. I mean, I'm here in North Dakota and this is the Vantis network, right? It's awareness. So, that interchange of information and then the reliance on somebody to take it and then broadcast it to somebody else and for them to understand that's what they need, the area that they need to stay out of or they need to be cognizant of. I think the more elegant solution and certainly the more difficult one to solve for is a ubiquitous system that does not care what the operator is, doesn't care how the operator's operating, but what it's managing is the safe separation of aircraft. And that would necessitate a data exchange architecture that is probably a little bit too advanced right now for us to handle with a human either in the loop or a human on the loop to validate the things that would be important. And the way I see it is very similar to what an Air Force base has to deal with on a regular basis, which is I need to be worried about all the traffic that's coming in and I need to be worried about the traffic that I don't want to come in. Right? And so that's where the merged realities are starting to hit, in my opinion, because how can you have a community-based traffic management system that effectively manages counter UAS and says, stay out. That's where I start losing the connectivity here, where if you're non-cooperative and I can't rely on you to just stay away, then how do I have control of that situation? And if you are non-cooperative or if you're unaware, how much more danger are you creating in the airspace? And then I extrapolate that out to a thousand of the 10,000 drones that we have operating in the airspace — a thousand of them are non-cooperative. How do I even remotely deal with that situation in a community-based traffic management environment in which everybody's required to be cooperative? So the easiest thing to do is go to the lowest common denominator. Same thing that we do right now in aviation, which is: you will all follow the rules, you will all let me know where you are. And if you don't, then you just don't get to operate my airspace. So that is the difference between what is projected to be the airspace of the future and what I see the airspace of the future is. Because to me, the most difficult thing is when you talk about utilization of unmanned systems and the return on investment that you would like to have, the scaled order of magnitude of drones operating in the airspace is insurmountable for any community management system. It is something that would have to be automated. And in order for that to be automated, you'd have to have a common operating picture. And as I start teasing all of that out, the natural progression for people is to go, okay, well there's no way a room full of air traffic controllers could handle 40,000 air vehicles. I mean, that's just not even feasible. Right? So what's the level of automation and integration that actually would make sense?

Jim: It's funny, people have said about UTM versus ATM: it becomes ATM really quickly when something goes wrong. And what you are saying is, let's plan for a future where we have more sophisticated systems than a community-based system or what many would consider traditional UTM perhaps.

Chris Hewlett: Right. Right. That layer of automation just adds simplicity and adds safety and oversight. And it also creates standards, right? Community-based to me doesn't sound like standards. And I've said this before — I learned these lessons the hard way flying for the military, especially rotary wing. And where I disagree about the community-based traffic management is that it sounds like the response that we had for Hurricane Katrina, which is literally just 50 or 60 helicopters operating simultaneously in a search and rescue environment with absolutely zero air traffic control. Because everything is lights out. There is no power. We're not talking to anybody. So in my world, operating that way for two weeks in the continental United States of America, in the city of New Orleans that was underwater — it was a miracle that we didn't hit each other. And that was only 50 helicopters. When I extrapolate that out by an order of magnitude, even 500 drones sounds to me almost impossible from a community-based traffic management perspective. 500 drones is not a lot of drones either.

Luka: Chris, let's reconcile this view with the ongoing operations that we're seeing with drone delivery companies around the world, where they either are using a third party UTM provider or they have their internal UTM systems. But they are providing information based on certain standards that have been adopted out there in terms of interoperability and the message sets and the data exchange protocols and all of these things. And they are showing that even at the low scale that they're operating right now, they can do this safely. And they can not only deconflict their own fleets and their own operations, but between operators and also between operators and law enforcement that's flying in the low level. So the system is working — what is it that they are doing wrong in your mind and what should their operations look like today with your idea of UTM?

Chris Hewlett: No, that's a great question. And they're not doing anything wrong, by the way. I wouldn't suggest that they're doing anything wrong if the architecture that they set up is capable of merging realities with everybody else's architecture. So I'm gonna give you an example. Company A, Company B, Company C, Company D — all package companies. And they're large package companies. These are big box companies. If they wanna move into an area and establish drone delivery and create some kind of return on investment, and they say in their model that a thousand drones is what's gonna get them return on investment. And they do everything that you just described, Luka, which is manage the system. Who develops and who determines who has priority to deliver when? So they're running their own independent system. Do they have to grid off a city? And one company is only allowed to deliver in the north, one company's only allowed to deliver in the south? It doesn't make sense. How do you integrate all four companies into one localized system for delivery and prioritize? Does one company only fly between seven o'clock in the morning and nine o'clock in the morning? Because where's the deconfliction strategy? Because you're managing your own fleet, but you have no idea about everybody else's fleet.

Peter: Okay, so take us into that with respect to what is being demonstrated in the Dallas suburb with the key site. Because at a headline level, we know that there is some degree of data exchange and coordination amongst operators doing this. But take us this layer deeper to what you're talking about and what have they demonstrated there, and what remains to be done.

Chris Hewlett: Yeah, so the remaining to be done is what we're working on with the DOD, which is the full skill integration, right? So if we take the microcosm of an Air Force base, like I said, what we have to do is coordinate all things aviation. That means here in North Dakota, we're about ready to slide into the month of November, which they call no fly in November up here. And it's not because it's so cold, it's because of migratory birds. Okay? So what I'm suggesting to everybody is there are partitions and pieces of the airspace that in the solution that is currently being articulated do not incorporate all of the airspace. That is, if you have a solution that just deals with you and your operators in fleet management and fleet scheduling and where they are and how they're deconflicted with each other, that is one piece of it. Certainly, however, that needs to be bolted into the other pieces, which are somebody else's company that is doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same airspace, the counter UAS component, the first responders component, and then the other things that exist in the airspace like birds. And then how do I deconflict all of that from the unintended consequence of a 16-year-old with a drone that he can buy at Walmart and go flying anytime he wants, which is the non-cooperatives or the people who are ill-intentioned to do things. When you take a look at that bigger problem, the Key Site is very important. It's getting data and that's gonna help us integrate. The idea of community-based traffic management is not a bad idea. It's just I don't think it's a complete solution. I don't think it's the end state, right? It's a portion of what we need to collect data on and then put into an end state.

Jim: But you're even proposing though, it's not even a first state. In other words, you're proposing you should start with what's difficult rather than what's easy.

Chris Hewlett: I think that's the best way to do it. And fortunately for me, the Department of Defense is starting to agree with me. And so what we're having is the conversation about how we build the Air Force's version of what the airspace looks like for the future. And then that will become the DOD because they're the executive agent for airspace management. But if you think about it, right, a base commander has got normal operations. Here at Grand Forks Air Force Base, that includes manned and unmanned traffic. I've got pretty large aircraft flying around. I've got Predators and Reapers flying around. There's Global Hawks here. All small UAS operations are here. And then there's right next door at Grand Forks proper is UND's Flight School. So this is some of the busiest airspace in the country, just from a volume perspective. And what we're doing is recording all of that data and talking about how we see it. And by the way, it's not just that — I've also got farmers' fields with aerial applicators and pop-ups happening all over the place with crop dusters. So we're dealing with all of that and understanding what information exchange needs to happen to be able to do all of this from a regulatory perspective and feeding that back into the DOD. And at the UAS EXCOM level, having the conversation with FAA saying, hey man, these are just data sets for us to provide with you. But when you talk about an integrated airspace system that incorporates both manned and unmanned traffic and a communication system that interchanges information, that's a Tuesday at Grand Forks. Okay. So the Dallas Key Site to me is important because it deals with very small UAS, but we don't deal with just very small UAS. I've got a Skydio drone flying on top of a class three drone with a B-1 in the pattern and an MQ-9 on downwind. And like I said, that's a Tuesday at Grand Forks.

Luka: Chris, is there a line that you draw where community-based traffic management and the current concept of UTM and U-Space does make sense and where it is a more favorable route to go and start with something that's more operationally constrained and controllable? Where do you draw the line in terms of either complexity of operations or the size of the aircraft or the airspace that's flown into where this model breaks?

Chris Hewlett: Part of it deals with the market, right? And the industry and what people are doing, and I think that's very smart and it's very savvy and they're getting lots of information. The other part of it is traditional aviation methodology, and that is this way, right? Luka, you have a squadron, you operate your squadron, and you have your SOPs and you do things the way you do. I have a squadron and I operate my SOPs and I do things the way I do. When two squadrons meet together to start cooperating, are they automatically operating the same exact way or does there have to be an information exchange and an understanding, and then the training to merge the realities between those two squadrons? And the reality is, yes, there is no way that two squadrons come together and operate exactly the same way. And there is because there are personalities and there are desires, and there are wants from every single aviator. They do things just a little bit differently. Those subtle nuances can lead to successful, safe integration of two squadrons or very unsuccessful. I've seen in the past integration of two squadrons. If we dissect that and distill it down to integration of unmanned systems, if you have one operator that has one set of rules and one geographic location, what you're talking about works. But the moment that you start adding other operators with other techniques, tactics, procedures, whatever it is into the airspace, you create complication and by extension risk that cannot be mitigated if you're talking about community-based traffic management. There needs to be one codified rule of how to do things, and that's usually how an air wing is successful because that's multiple squadrons living together and operating together under one air wing Commander. And that has been something that the United States Navy, and I know the United States Air Force does this too, but we've been doing this for a hundred years. So why we're trying to make up some new methodology for aviation operation with complexity of interwoven components and saying that this is gonna be the thing that works baffles me. We have a hundred years of data to support doing it the traditional way. I have no data to support that the way that people are suggesting will work. And I'm not saying it's not worth the study, but I think from a safety and speed of integration perspective, it's very difficult to enter into a conversation where somebody says, I quickly want this to happen. I quickly wanna get my return on investment, but I want to do it in a new way. Well, if you quickly want it to happen, wouldn't it be easier to conform to the safety standards that we already have in place so that you can get that application to work? Because new and fast are two things that are counterintuitive to one another.

What the Industry Got Wrong

Luka: Okay, let's put a pin on this and come back when we talk about Part 108. Let's talk about how the market has evolved over the last couple years. What did the industry get wrong in its predictions versus what actually played out?

Chris Hewlett: I mean, it's fair to say, right, because — and I'm not saying that people should not have invested or should not have bought into this — but we're not flying anybody around in the LA Basin. I'm not seeing anybody flying around anywhere in the back of an electric vertical takeoff and landing air vehicle. And a lot of people bought into that because the statements were made. And I don't think we're ready for that. I think we've got a lot more constraints and restraints that we need to argue. This isn't even about airspace control. This is just about the physics of flight. Right. And I'm watching these hybrid electric vehicles that are out here. They're not even just all electric, these are just hybrid vehicles, just struggling to perform at the lowest level when there's not even a passenger involved in it. This is just logistics and military utilization assessments. So the statements that were made about what the near-term future was gonna be with regards to electrical vertical takeoff and landing and passenger movements, I think were grossly inaccurate.

Luka: What about on the lower end of the market?

Chris Hewlett: Lower end of the market, I think we're doing great. And we'll get into the conversation about 108. I think there were some assumptions that were made that are gonna be beneficial in the test and evaluation perspective, but I don't see the scalability and the return on investment on the lower end market based on the notice of public rulemaking coming out on 108. But we can get into that later because I don't think it's scalable.

Jim: How do you feel about the statements being made by the electric or hybrid eVTOL companies today? If four years ago or three years ago you said, I don't think it's gonna come about the way they're articulating it. How do you feel about the statements of today for the next three or four years?

Chris Hewlett: I think it's difficult. I think it's difficult to understand that the industry as a whole has scatter gun solutions, right? And none of them are bad. They're all good. I actually love that energy. The thing that I'm having a hard time wrestling with is the definitive statement about this is the solution over here. I think it's a viable conversation, but when somebody makes that statement to me as an aerospace engineer person, I wanna see data associated with the statement. So I don't buy into it because it's no different than the market analysis that takes a look at statements that — just because the Secretary of War, I have to say it the right way, the Secretary of War says we will do this, doesn't mean that we will actually achieve it. I mean, we won the space race by throwing tons of people, human capital and money at the space race. So if we're as a country making a decision that we're gonna win this particular race by doing the same thing, then I say we're gonna be massively successful. I truly believe that. But if the statements are being made but we're actually not doing the thing that we need to do, which is throw the money at it, then I'm struggling with how it's gonna happen.

Jim: The commercial eVTOL hybrid VTOL companies — in order for them to be able to get the returns on the capital, they're going to need to be fully integrated into the airspace. In order to scale, they need to be fully integrated. And this is the warning you're giving about where most people don't agree with you — in order to get the returns they need to be fully integrated. In order to be fully integrated, they need to be at the point where you are saying people should start.

Chris Hewlett: Yeah. And so, there's even more complex than that, Jim. A few years ago when I first was meeting Luka and Peter and having all of these conversations, I was asked by some auto manufacturing companies to do a make-buy analysis on specific development of vertical takeoff and landing air vehicles because of my background with rotary wing and my business analysis. So I brought a team to bear on this doing make-buy analysis. One of the critical moments that I completely understood how crazy things can be from people's perspective of figuring out business is when they were getting down to the make-buy analysis. And I asked them from a scaling perspective what the annual manufacturing for vehicle numbers was gonna be. And they actually, with a straight face, looked at me and said they wanna make 4,000 air vehicles a year. 4,000 air vehicles is an order of magnitude higher than any other production company manufactures annually of air vehicles. And these are companies that have been in business for 50 to a hundred years. So I naturally asked the question: you have an expectation to manufacture more than has ever been manufactured in aviation before. Can I ask you how they're gonna do that? And they started saying things like resin transfer molding, all things that are not approved for flight-critical surfaces. And then I said, I'm also curious about how you're planning on doing work in process, because there's only 365 days a year. So how do you build, functionally check flight, disassemble, transport, reassemble, functionally check flight again — 4,000 air vehicles that need to be disseminated into the market? That's not even possible. I just don't even know how you do that and maintain what would be considered FAA standards for safety for transporting people in the air. So again, there's a misperception because these are auto manufacturers and they're used to making thousands of cars a year. But they had aspirations to become an aerospace company, and there are certain truths that you have to adhere to, which is: just because you are an auto manufacturer and you have glass, you say, well, I achieve efficiencies by using the same glass that I would use in cars for my aircraft. And you have to point out to them: well, aviation glass is called Mylar, and it's very specific. And there are 15 companies out there that make Mylar. So you are gonna have to buy it from them in order to put it in your aircraft. Those are the kinds of things that the early days of trying to figure this out — companies are not thinking about. They're just making a statement: in order for me to be successful, I'm gonna make 4,000 aircraft. All the aircraft manufacturers are just giggling. They're like, that's not even possible.

Peter: Well, you mentioned World War II and the auto manufacturers did in World War II produce aircraft. They were the backbone of aircraft production in the — what has changed about the nature of aircraft production and about the nature of safety certification since those days, which were very high volume, to the paradigm that we exist in now?

Chris Hewlett: So I will use the Hellcat as an example. And everybody knows the story, but that was called the incinerator, and it wasn't called the incinerator for a good reason. It was literally more ENSs in training died than the Japanese shot down, point blank. So I would say between then and now, our safety standards are a slight bit different compared to — the expectation is not we're gonna crash. The expectation is we're gonna make it from point A to point B and everybody's gonna be alive and landings equal takeoffs. In World War II, in order to win a war, the expectation was that we're gonna throw a wave of humans — D-Day, the fight with the kamikazes, the fight with the Luftwaffe. It's just we need to get more mass downrange. There is no desire to win an engagement in which an exchange of life is the ultimate end state. So we're not fighting a war against an actual enemy. We're fighting a war against time and desire. And the time and desire does not drive the Federal Aviation Administration or the federal government into a position where it's gonna accept the risk that was accepted in World War II. So I think our desire to change our financial situations such that we can take advantage of these unmanned systems has pushed us in this direction. But we are getting to a point where unmanned systems, based on the war that we're seeing in the Ukraine and some of the evolution of these things, is starting to drive us into a methodology that's very similar to what we were dealing with when the first counterinsurgency stuff was being talked about at the Pentagon. So to me, this is airborne counterinsurgency that we're now starting to deal with when you start taking a look at Ukraine, because that's the real driving impetus behind all of this. It's not commerce — it's the speed of an edge of the battle space that is really starting to propel us down this road. If it was just businesses making money, I doubt that we'd be moving with any more alacrity or speed than we are right now.

Structural Bottlenecks

Luka: What market bottlenecks that people assumed would be short term have proved to be more structural?

Chris Hewlett: From my seat, there is still not a great understanding of how to convert and or adopt the electric distributed propulsion side of the house. And I'm not sure that I'm completely bought into lithium ion or the energy density that's associated with heavy lift and what can really be done with electric distributed propulsion. And I think we missed the boat on adopting hydrogen in some of our early tests. So the energy management situation is a lot further behind than I thought we would be at right now. Energy density is everything. It just has to do with endurance, range, payload capacity. All of those things come down to energy density. And so the full press into electrification was great at the beginning. And now more of class twos and class threes are starting to throttle back to hybrid electric, like one of them we're dealing with up here. It's a really elegant design system, but it's a two-stroke engine that actually has nothing to do with propulsion. All it does is push an alternator and feed the batteries. So once the fuel is exhausted, the drone itself still has 45 minutes to an hour worth of flight time since all the propulsion systems are based on batteries. Which is an elegant design. And they're actually going to improve efficiencies and reduce weight by going away from the two-stroke to a four-stroke diesel engine, which weighs less and has better endurance. So I think everybody's trying to solve for the same thing — how do I fly longer, take more, all those kinds of things. But then in the early days it was all about electricity. We're gonna do this with electricity, right? And swap out battery packs and recharge and everything else like that. People are now starting to understand that creates a lot of different complexity, especially when you start scaling at a large distribution facility. How do you recharge all of these drones or swap batteries and recharge the batteries that have been swapped out and get things on and off a platform when your battery charge times are not instantaneous? It's certainly not like pumping 55 PSI gas into a jet, which you can do in a matter of minutes. You cannot scale to energy density in a matter of minutes with lithium ion. It just doesn't work.

Luka: Where have you seen the most adoption, both on the defense and commercial side of the market?

Chris Hewlett: It's all logistics, right? And ISR. When you talk about the merged reality between defense and commercial or even just private sector — defense and private sector, because some of it's not commercial applications — first responders. Examples are lost personnel wandering around. The police use these things a lot. The fire department uses them a lot. The Forest Service uses them for firefighting and that's all intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, which bleeds over into the DOD side of the world. So elegant designs that meet a good tipping point where you have commonality between DOD and private sector. I think logistics is absolutely huge, especially medical supplies. When you take a look at the things that are being done by all the great companies doing amazing work in the private sector with medical supply delivery and blood delivery, the DOD is doing exactly the same thing. So where are the commonalities? Because that's what I'm trying to enhance. Because if the DOD spends a little bit on that, it eases the strain on industry for the ROI and what they expect back. And the industry can evolve on the backs of the DOD pretty well because those are easily integratable. But again, that goes back to the common architecture, which is my defensible moment — if industry goes off by themselves and creates anything that the DOD says, well I don't agree with that or it doesn't work for me, we now run the risk of having a city that has a common operating picture for the city and the base that's associated with that city has a different architecture. So how does that work if the drones from the base are supposed to integrate with the drones of the city?

Luka: But that's a relatively niche use case, right? Where you have this exchange between a military and a non-military environment. There's plenty of market outside of that scenario.

Chris Hewlett: That is true. However, the hardest thing to solve for is — let's just do San Antonio, Texas. Great example. Probably one of, arguably, one of the most difficult places simply from an aerospace management perspective. Three bases that surround San Antonio and an international border that you have to manage. And so within that airspace you'll see everything from Air Force to package delivery, to cartels flying drones to move drugs around. So that airspace is completely the wild, wild west. It's where Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, DOD are starting to do the aggregation, integration and study around just awareness — just knowing what's there. But if you can start extrapolating that out to various different areas, I think it makes it better because that complicated airspace will get you to a solution set faster than going someplace and working one avenue of what I just talked about. If you solved for one data set in Los Angeles or Chicago and then took it to another city that is got what I just mentioned, which is all of those agencies associated with it, how does that solution set help the other city? So the one-offs are absolutely something that we can manage. I think most people would argue that their airspace is fairly more complicated than a single vendor.

Luka: I would agree. The one thing that I would slightly push back on is the pace of the industry has been far too unacceptable in terms of agreeing on how to do certain things and standards. And if you look back to remote ID, if you look back to many of the issues that we've had over the last 10, 15 years, if we wanted to start from this high-end, fully encompassing, comprehensive solution, we would have to wait potentially 10, 15, 20 years. Or maybe we just say we can't do this. So it's either waiting another 10 years hoping that we collectively somehow get to the solution, and then all of a sudden we're like, all right, we've got the answer — by that time, it's totally obsolete because the industry and technology moved on. Or we say, okay, let's remain safe, absolutely, but let's start with something so that we can get some mileage under our feet.

Chris Hewlett: Okay. And I love the fact that you pushed back because that's exactly a perfect segue into talking about what we're doing here. Okay. So I've got the Air Force Battle Lab here. I've got Test Force 99 here. I've got CENTCOM here. I've got DARPA here. I've got the Federal Aviation Administration. I've got more federal partners than you can possibly imagine here. And what we're doing is moving at the speed of the battle space. Some of the people who are here are actually forward deployed in Qatar and are here right now to help us because we're creating interoperability and common operating pictures with not only the link, the control, the C2, and the mission in the tasking and the air vehicle, such that what we're trying to do is develop a process where somebody in the CENTCOM AOR can log into a system and operate a drone here for training environments. Pull in tactics, techniques, and procedures that they want to validate for the battle space that they're dealing with. Validate them in a test environment. Go through the V&V, write the new tasks, and then accept them in the battle space and employ them tomorrow. That's a four-year RDT&E mission truncated into four days. If we can do that for a theater component commander, I think we can integrate stuff faster than the process that you're saying is currently in the mix. And the way to do it is to break down the barriers that you've articulated are in place, and that is being done because the DOD is assimilating information and then taking it to the highest level. I'll give you an example. We are providing feedback at the UAS EXCOM for the interagency on process and procedure and policy that is inefficient and doesn't need to be in place anymore. And there is a significant difference between the early days of the integration of unmanned systems — when in my mind the methodology that was applied by the federal government was to allow normalized institutional inertia to slow the process down a little bit — and now. There are some things, as you've rightly pointed out, that need to just be changed and maybe improved from an efficiency perspective to speed the process up to an adequate level where we can actually start doing these things. As an example, just to get a transmit license for the FCC to be able to use a transponder in a geographic location is an onerous process. Even though that particular transponder might be government furnished equipment that is used on a daily basis. But because of the way the process is set up for the DOD, even to apply for a geographic shift for a transponder from Pax River at Wolf Field to here took us two weeks initially when we started it. That process has now been changed because of our feedback through the DOD to the UAS EXCOM to FAA. So I think it's on us to take a look at the current process and provide — instead of the statement to the federal government which is the typical industry statement of you just need to change your process and speed things up — to say, hey, I've done your process this way and I now have some comments for you of how you can improve your process or speed it up based on having done it the way you wanted me to. Now I'm asking you, can we efficiently, effectively, and safely speed this process up? If we can do that as an industry, we can start breaking down some more barriers, getting more data, freeing up more processes and speeding the advance up. So I appreciate your pushback, but I think we can achieve way faster than 10 to 15 years for integration if we follow the right methodology.

Part 108

Jim: Are the results of the work at Grand Sky and Ultra more applicable to the military application or to the commercial?

Chris Hewlett: More applicable, actually, ironically, to the commercial application because all I'm doing up here is taking packages from point A to point B. Our first series of flights back in April were just to prove out the concept of operations that we validated in simulated world — taking a 10-pound package, 60 nautical miles north, but not doing it in class golf airspace. We did it in echo airspace, departing class delta with a squawk code talking to air traffic control, landing at an offsite facility, unloading cargo, and returning back, all in coordination and collaboration with the air traffic management system. So that's not even a DOD operation, even though it was done under a DOD umbrella. That's just package delivery. That's all that is.

Jim: But couldn't one argue that because of your introduction of the DOD component, aren't you introducing a level of complexity you wouldn't necessarily see even in New York City? In other words, aren't you solving for something that is not necessarily the greatest example on the commercial side by introducing DOD?

Chris Hewlett: I mean, you could make that argument. I would disagree with you because in the complexity of what is required, flying into an active Air Force base is way more complex than flying someplace in New York. I mean, the Air Force is very strict. You have to deal with not just the FAA — fly someplace anywhere in the country, you have to deal with the FAA except for below 400 feet, right? Because they don't deal with that. We're different. Even below 400 feet here, we're dealing with somebody. So I don't see the level of complexity out in the middle of golf airspace where you can fly around and do whatever you want as a complex operation. Even if I want to do that here, I still have to coordinate with the United States Air Force because this is their airspace. It's class delta airspace. This is not golf. The complexity of doing something like that requires more interoperability. And we've developed our Airspace Integration Service. We use federal USSs. We have a ground-based sense and avoid system. We are responsible for the safe integration of small to large UAS in this airspace system in collaboration with FAA and the United States Air Force.

Jim: Chris, fascinating. What we are interested to know — if you are going to make changes to what's been proposed for Part 108, what would you change about it based on your very confident stance of how you think things should be in the future?

Chris Hewlett: So my confidence stance is simply my lens for aviation safety. It's very narrowly focused. And as a guy who integrated unmanned systems for the DOD when I was active duty, it's very narrowly focused. And that's just my experience. But 108 to me — not saying it's a bad rule, I'm not saying it was done the wrong way. I'm not suggesting any of that. What I'm saying is that if you are creating a rule for rural package delivery, which is what I understand the expansion of that is to, and you're basing it on data sets that you validated which were done specifically for inspection of infrastructure in an easement that was owned by the company that was doing it — how is that a like-for-like comparison to delivering packages over somebody else's property? I am not understanding how those two things connect. Not saying the rule's bad. I'm just from a purely data analytics perspective: how is that a like-for-like comparison? Now, if 108 was designed to open up the aperture for rural and remote inspection of infrastructure, I would've said, well that absolutely makes sense because that's what it's based on. But what I'm doing here at Grand Forks has more application to 108 than the data set that was used for it, because I'm actually delivering something in a rural and remote area. But I'm not understanding how inspecting a power line is synonymous with rural and remote delivery. That's, I guess what I was trying to say about 108.

Luka: What are some of the proposed parts of Part 108 where you see this biggest disconnect between inspecting infrastructure in the rural area and some of the other use cases that will be enabled by 108?

Chris Hewlett: So good question. Are there altitude restrictions for inspecting infrastructure? If you own the infrastructure, I think the answer is no. Right? You can just fly wherever you want over your infrastructure. Will there be altitude restrictions with rural and remote delivery? Yeah. Refuges, tribal locations — you can't just, the most effective way for package delivery is point A to point B. So how do you mitigate that? A straight line linear inspection is at a single altitude and there's no concern for if you crash on it because it's your property and it's your drone. But what are even the insurance implications of what we're talking about from a rural and remote package delivery perspective?

Luka: Who owns the airspace? It's the FAA, right? Just because they don't want to control the airspace below 400 feet doesn't mean that they are still not legally responsible for it.

Chris Hewlett: Well, I mean, is that the question? If you don't wanna manage it, does that mean you're not legally responsible for it? Because right now I would submit to you that if somebody does something goofy with a drone in classical airspace, the FAA just kind of goes, okay, did you hurt anybody? There's a requirement for NTSB to come in if there's a certain amount of damage above a categorical variable like loss of life or a certain threshold. But how many situations of people going out in the middle of nowhere and crashing a drone that's $14,000, which actually hits the threshold, are unreported and therefore unknown to NTSB and FAA? That changes when you create a business model around a rule that allows people to operate. Because now isn't that a 135 operation? Technically, package delivery. And do you have to have a license to do that or do you not? Because it's just 108.

Chris Hewlett: I think the problem statement is that, point blank, package delivery is 360 degrees. Linear inspection is not. And so from a utilization perspective, we have opened the aperture up to package delivery 360 degrees in rural remote areas and based that on an altitude-restricted, geographically restricted, straight-line inspection process. And that's not mathematically sound in my mind.

Chris Hewlett: I wouldn't say it's inadequate. What I'd say is it's incomplete to me. The study just requires a little bit more data, probably some more proof points. And everybody in the conference, I'm just trying not to mention names. But everybody knows where the data came from. And it wasn't intended at the time — in my opinion, in my estimation — it wasn't intended to be a research study. It was just data. Right? Which is valuable. I'm not saying it's not valuable, but I think we're fundamentally missing the boat here. Did we set out with the operation that we're talking about — that the data that was being captured off of it is an aerospace study that was going to inform a rulemaking process? No, it was not. It was a novel approach to power line inspection. So what you're telling me as an aerospace engineer and an aviator is you're using a novel approach to linear asset inspection as a justification for a rulemaking process for rural and remote package delivery. And when you say it out loud like that, that should be cause for concern. That's what I'm saying. Because to me that means it's insufficient to be able to do. If you had done it in reverse, by the way — if you had done rural and remote package delivery as a validation for linear asset inspection, I would say yeah, I could actually see that, because you've done a lot more than what the application is that you're trying to move towards. But the data set is incomplete. And that's just me being candid. If you wanna say you can do it and say you're gonna accept the risk, I can say fine. But when you ask me my opinion about whether or not you're accepting risk that you should accept, I'm saying your data set's probably not where you think it is. That's all I'm suggesting is that when something goes wrong and everybody goes back and says, wow, how could this happen? — did you have a data set that allowed you to accept the risk?

Peter: Now we know that Part 108 as it is written in the published proposed rules is a bit stale. So that text was probably written 18 plus months ago, just due to the realities of getting that proposed rule through all of the review and getting it out. My question is: in the time since then, so much has been done with new approaches to waivers. So much more flying has been done. I think part of this discussion, we have to anticipate what the revised rule is going to look like after the comment period and after all of the new learnings and insights that we've all had are incorporated into a final rule.

Chris Hewlett: I agree with you, Peter. That's probably the best way to characterize it. And I look, here's the funny thing: I'm doing this whole thing — how many people have reached out to me about what I could do with all of this data to input into it? It's not my responsibility to shove it down their throat, but I can tell you this: zero people have called me. I'm not being asked. The DOD is not being asked. Nobody's being asked. So to me it just looks like it's plotting forward with acceptable. Right now I'm not seeing anybody ask any questions. They're just saying, this is the data set, we got it, we're going. And I'm like, wow. The rule's gonna come out. It's gonna be stale and it's gonna be much ado about nothing. It's not gonna have any validity. But if they can incorporate everything that we've been doing, there's a possibility that there could be some validity to the rule.

Luka: Do you plan on submitting any comments, Chris?

Chris Hewlett: I haven't been asked to. And I work with the Northern Plains UAS Test Site and the executive director was on the ARC, so he knows full well what my comments are. I provided my stuff. The FAA knows what I think, and what the Ultra program thinks, and what our program sponsor at the Pentagon thinks. But again, our job is not to force industry or force other government agencies into believing what we say. Our job is to provide the data and the delta between where we think it should be and what it is now. Help with the process. So I'm not being argumentative in the sense of this is the wrong way to do it. I'm saying I don't know that we have a complete picture to really formulate an opinion right now. The reality is I think we need a lot more data and a lot more inclusion and a lot more conversation in order to make something successful that's gonna be scalable for the future of our country.

Project ULTRA: Concept and Development

Luka: Chris, so we've talked indirectly about Ultra a couple times now. Why don't you describe what really Project Ultra is, how it came to be?

Chris Hewlett: So Ultra came into existence conceptually probably about 10 years ago. And that is the Department of Defense, from the undersecretary side of the house — or Department of War, if you're politically correct — decided to start taking a look at aerospace integration. That's the core piece, and the UAS service suppliers that needed to be part of the system. So this is at its concept. Conops was written by NASA, FAA, Mitre, DOD, coming up with a framework and architecture. Air Force Research Lab developed their own federal USS — that's CLUE, the Collaborative Low Altitude UAS Exchange. And NASA started getting involved in the conversation and built their UTM management network called Freddy. So at the beginning, this is a lot of simulation and testing evaluation and building out the conops of how traffic management next gen was gonna look. Somewhere along the lines about two or three years ago, and when we were moving into our ground-based sense and avoid, building out the Vantis network up here in North Dakota, the Department of Defense showed up — OSD — to take a look at our fully integrated airspace and start having a conversation with them about what it would look like to bring that in a testing evaluation perspective up here, and open the door to that in partnership with the Northern Plains Test Site, University of North Dakota, and the Air Force. Because this facility at Grand Sky where Ultra is housed is a joint use agreement with the United States Air Force. We're able to use the digital surveillance radar feed and create ground-based sense and avoid. It's the way companies up here operate beyond visual line of sight without any chase aircraft. So this little microcosm kind of became interesting to the DOD and a couple years ago we penned and inked the deal between Washington Headquarters Services, OSD, and the County of Grand Forks to run a five-year IDIQ known as Ultra — UAS Logistics, Traffic Response, and Autonomy. And like I said, at its core it was all about airspace integration and figuring out what the future of traffic management looks like. But it very quickly started to take on the underpinnings of logistics missions because the DOD is very interested in logistics. Everybody will tell you there ain't no mission without a logistician. So that's beans, blood, bullets — all that stuff that needs to be supplied downrange to the combat war fighter. So we were asked very early to start doing simulation work, incorporate the federal USS, take a look at the conops, do verification and validation simulated of what the conops looks like in the airspace, and then start putting together a process for logistics deliveries between one conops space station and another conops space station. And as a result of that, we've gotten a tremendous amount of partnership with the Department of Defense to the point that I've mentioned now that a COCOM — CENTCOM — is here, with Task Force 99, with a ton of people, and DARPA. And we're having this amazing intersection between commercial application and logistics and all the other things that are out there, commercial off the shelf. The DOD is now facing the fact that we could spend billions of dollars on a system that works over there and then change it to try to make it work here, or we can start spending collaboratively with our industry partners — not less money, but just the right money — to make something that you could use here that still has an application in theater.

Luka: So what you're describing is in a way a verification and validation or operational test and evaluation framework for the DOD.

Chris Hewlett: Yes.

Luka: Why does the Air Force or Army not do that internally with their existing units?

Chris Hewlett: Because right now in the force reduction state that we live in, this is rapid prototyping and keeping with what the undersecretary has said and keeping with what everybody's starting to do in the DOD memos that have come out — to say that we're gonna rapidly get to our process and we're going to start shaving down the normal acquisition lifecycle process. Because some of these unmanned systems, the verification and validation that is typically in a RDT&E lifecycle for acquisitions involves the fact that there's gonna be a human being in it. And so, if you're doing normal aircraft manufacturing for a pilot, that's one thing. But the acquisition program is starting to change over saying, look, these are low threshold, low cost solutions, and the term is attributable — they're consumables. If you're talking a $40 million aircraft that's piloted, that's a different acquisition program than a $100,000 drone that if it hits the water, you're like, meh, get another one. So that's where things have shifted. And the speed of advance is starting to pick up because these are commercial off the shelf technologies. Like I said earlier, a four-year RDT&E cycle down to a four-day T&E cycle. Wow. I mean, can you imagine if you were in the battle space and you woke up in Ukraine, they're using this, it's bad, we gotta figure it out. I can get onto an app and I can get some information over to an engineer who can look at it and evaluate it and say, let me come up with some stuff. You test it, you evaluate it, you come up with some new TTPs, and you implement it on the spot. That's the future vision that we're talking about.

Lessons Learned from UAS Tests

Luka: Can you share some stats with the audience in terms of how many aircraft you've taken through the program and what were some of the surprises or insights or stories that you can share?

Chris Hewlett: Right now we're at seven aircraft that have gone through the program. These are all class threes or group threes, right? So between 300 and 1,320 pounds. Every single one of them is hybrid electric. What I've been surprised at is the number of them that are tail-sitters, which I did not expect to see from an engineering perspective. Because the application for these — these are tail-sitters that at the end of their test and evaluation period are gonna be required to land on a US Navy ship. And I'm being a guy who flew around US Navy ships for as long as I did — I'm not seeing how it's gonna be successful. But again, what we want is we want everybody to be successful because all of these technologies have unique idiosyncrasies about them that I think need to be pulled forward into probably the future of what aviation is gonna be. So to me it's a beautiful and elegant program because we're getting more information, we're bringing more commercial off the shelf technology through, we're working with the services, we're working with the downrange requirements people from the theater, and we're working with the acquisition community to speed the process up, reduce the barrier to entry, reduce the onerous institutional inertia in the paperwork, and get results. And then get those results to a scalable position where we can actually achieve low rate production and then start putting these things into operational environments in theater.

Luka: Can you give us a walkthrough of the scenario that you take these aircraft through? What does that test card look like?

Chris Hewlett: So the test in and of itself is two phases. First of all, the airworthiness phase — not talking about the COTS CTP or any of that, it's literally in a test environment. Early stage TRL/ML kind of stuff, which is bring it out, strap it to the deck, spin it up and watch the engines and the performance and everything else like that, to the earliest phases of hover and being able to demonstrate controllability and the ability to move off a spot and back onto a spot, to literally a higher altitude hover, to following that, a higher altitude hover to transition to forward flight, and then intentionally de-transition back into a hover and land. That maturation, stair-stepping level of aviation, especially when it comes to vertical lift, to ensure that you are capable of controlling the aircraft in all those environments. Once we get past a certain point, the maturation level of that aircraft then shifts over to what's called a military utilization assessment, where we start putting operational constraints on it — not only do you take off, but then you go out and you conduct an ISR mission or a synthetic aperture radar or deliver a package. Those kinds of things are the stair-stepped approach that we're working in concert with all the testing evaluation community to build awareness. And I can tell you this — number one on the card after you can hover is logistics, flat out. It's not ISR. It's literally they wanna see something move from point A to point B. So that's where I start getting an interest in what the industry needs to lean into. I'm sitting here looking at these industry guys showing up going, oh, we designed this elegant package that can carry this turret ball and do all of these things and we wanna go out and do that. And the DOD looks and goes, great — can you just take something from point A to point B for me real quick before you do all that.

Luka: Have any of the airframes gone through the entire program and what's the carrot — what's the certificate, what does the OEM get by graduating from the program?

Chris Hewlett: Well, first of all, there's a payday at every stage for them, but I can't divulge that. So there's an incentivizing moment for each of them along the process. But the carrot at the end is LRIP — low rate production, LRIP and acquisition. So at its core, the program wants to assimilate a certain number of their vehicles, then put them in theater and start operating them. And the only way to get to that is to go through the whole process of figuring out what the technical application is and the limits, and more specifically the tactics, techniques, and procedures for each one of these air vehicles that we can adhere to. And can we train the people up to do it right? You can design something very elegant, but then it becomes very complicated to train.

Luka: Is it fair to say that there's a ton of emerging players who are knocking on the doors at CENTCOM and various units and saying, here's my aircraft, use it to solve all of your problems. And then the DOD or those units are somewhat paralyzed in their ability to assess the validity of those claims, and they send it over to you. You run it through the program and at the end you say, yeah, these guys are good to go, and they go and acquire it.

Chris Hewlett: Yeah, and so I'm gonna nuance it slightly because most of what you said is exactly spot on. I would add the one statement, which is continue to work with these companies as long as they wanna stay in the program to achieve the metric that needs to be achieved in order for it to be a useful end state for the DOD. The DOD is being very careful about everything. It's not just everybody who bum-rushes and says, this is my solution. They're looking at it going, that one — we'll put you into this program and see what we can get it. Maybe you can get there. That'd be great. But there is a barrier to entry. And that's when I go all the way back to the beginning of our conversation — I'm not understanding in the industry that we have any barriers to entry. It seems to me that the industry is literally everybody gets to win. And that has never been the case in the United States of America ever. And if it is, you can take your Blackberry out and type me that message, please.

Advice to Innovators

Luka: What are some of the other failure modes that you've observed on the range, and what kind of advice would you give to the innovators in the audience?

Chris Hewlett: It's that subtle nuance between a remote pilot in command and the automation that's associated with the transfer of control between the flight management system that's gonna create the autonomous portion of it going someplace, even though the PIC can take over. There have been some moments of aerodynamic inefficiency that's associated with that. The second thing is that, as a rotary wing guy, I will tell you that many people from Igor Sikorsky to now have been trying to figure out how to dampen and smooth out translational lift — that moment between being rotary wing lift to forward flight lift — and it's still difficult for everybody. I watch drones take off vertically and then try to transition over the wing and go up to as much as a thousand feet and lose 700 feet in altitude trying to get up to speed to get onto the wing. That's not gonna work. So figuring out translational lift has been complicated for a long time. It's not something that's a foregone conclusion and it's certainly not something that could be solved by just saying, I'm gonna accept the fact that I'm gonna lose a ton of altitude in order to get on the wing. So I would ask, if I was talking to people who are potential candidates, if you have no good clue of how to get on the wing, then your design might need a revamp.

Peter: In terms of the surprises or the technologies that might come to work, and in thinking about the turbulent environment around ships and what you're observing with transitions and the difficulty that some of these designs are having, are you seeing any success with blown wing designs or other novel designs that are looking at this from a different angle?

Chris Hewlett: Yeah, no, there's a tremendous amount of innovation and success with that innovation in the early stages of research and development. And I work very closely with NavAir, the Air Warfare Center, UX24. So we have teams of test pilots and engineers and everybody who wants to do this. And the beauty that I think we're seeing is the speed of advance is actually going in the right direction. So everybody's got an idea and they want to try it. And then we sit back and we go, this is novel. It's a novel approach, traditionally in acquisitions and sustainment that novel approach is really stalled. What we're doing is saying, hey, that's great. Bring it out here. Let's go. Because we wanna fail fast. That's a different methodology, different mindset, especially for the DOD. But we're accepting risk. That risk is — like I told you, there was an aircraft that had a near mishap. My statement would've been: when it hit the deck, I would've looked at everybody and said, hey man, there was nobody in that and it didn't hit anything. It hit the earth. The earth's not upset about it. I'm not upset about it. The company that designed it might be upset about it, but they're the ones that did it. They flew it into the ground. That to me is a — it's callous, but chuck it in the block. Right? I move on to the next thing. So if somebody wants to come to me with a design and say, I've figured this out, I'm gonna go, great, let's validate it. After we verify it and validate it, it's down over onto operational test. What can you do with that? Now some of the stuff that we're now operationally validating — I literally walked into this process for this particular program with DARPA and CENTCOM six weeks ago. I didn't even have the stats on the drone until we were a month out from test and evaluation. And then I started taking a look at it like from my traditional methodology and aviation. I was shaking my head going, some of this stuff's not gonna work. Some of the stuff that I thought wasn't gonna work works great. And I'm sitting here going, wow, I need to change my whole mindset. I was wrong. It's okay. I get to be wrong a lot. And I hope I am wrong a lot. But the reality of the circumstance is we still are going through the same process. There is no acceptance of it's gonna work. We have to prove it. And after we prove it, then we have to employ it. And then we have to develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures so that we can make it completely usable and scalable. Now that we're doing all this stuff, I can see an end state where the commercial applications for some of these drones is immediately there and they will perform and they will perform safely.

What Success Looks Like

Jim: Let's say Project Ultra is swimmingly successful. What's the difference on the DOD side and the commercial side a couple years from now?

Chris Hewlett: A couple years from now, I think we see some things that people are like, wow, where did this come from? I'll know where it came from because I'll be the one who actually recommended it and everything else like that. But people are gonna say, hey, where did this come from? And it will be largely unknown. No different than any other technology that we currently work with, that most Americans are walking around with on a daily basis, that was built on the backbones of military innovation that is just now commonplace in the industry for everybody. Because there's an unclassified and or commercial variant of it. I think we're gonna see that kind of thing happen quickly now that memos are changing, money is changing, things are all changing, trying to open this up. What success means to me is in five years, something that we worked on in Ultra has a commercial application that actually is providing a return on investment. That means to me that we did what we were supposed to do to integrate that into the international airspace. That would be what I would call successful.

Jim: Your DOD sponsor — what would he or she say is the greatest return that will come from it?

Chris Hewlett: First of all, ironically they would tell you that we elevated it to that but immediately realized that we did not make it high enough. They would say it still needs to go up. And then they would secondarily say the statement is: if we can get stuff to the war fighter faster, that's what we're gonna do. And that's the whole point around Ultra. We've gotta integrate into the national airspace and get stuff to the war fighter faster. And that's not a bifurcated strategy anymore. It used to be.

Jim: And for the war fighter, it's largely going to be a more efficient, effective, quieter, logistical train.

Chris Hewlett: That's specifically what it is. And a relevant — let's just say more efficient, more effective, but relevant. I have, and I'm sure Luka has too, been downrange and we've looked at gear that we've gotten and said, this is completely irrelevant. Doesn't do anything. I'm gonna put it on a shelf and when I get done with my deployment, I'm gonna give it back to somebody because I don't even know what it is.

Luka: Thank you Chris for coming back and sharing your insights. It was great and we look forward to having you back again, without waiting for another two years. We wish you all the success with Ultra.

Chris Hewlett: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.