HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WV News) — When U.S. Army Capt. Randy Bartlett retired from his duties in the military in 2010, he returned to his home state of West Virginia with a dream of creating large, functional drones that eventually could replace helicopters in a variety of emergency and research situations.
Ten years later, Bartlett founded and incorporated Dominion Aerospace, a Huntington-based company focused on designing and manufacturing Group 3 and Group 4 drones — which he said are larger than what you would buy in a store but smaller than what you would see on the news — with the goal of making various air-based missions more cost-effective and safe.
“I started looking at how you could replace helicopters, and there are only half a dozen companies working on and prototyping Group 3 drones,” Bartlett said. “However, there was no simple, easily maintained, rugged solution out there. Everything was carbon fiber and aluminum and hybrid propulsion. We just looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s just build a flying Toyota Hilux pickup truck.’ That’s what we’re doing.”
Bartlett said that during his time in the military, he worked some with drones, and he’s taken that knowledge into the field to begin the next stage of his career.
He said many air-based tasks, such as wildlife biology, search and rescue, wildfire fighting and more will benefit from using pilot-less aircraft in the near future.
“When you remove pilots from the group, you’re preserving life,” Bartlett said. “Sixty percent of wildlife biologists killed last year were killed in helicopter crashes because they fly so low and slow at the edge of what’s called the ‘death curve,’ and if the slightest thing goes wrong, they auger in.”
Bartlett said that earlier this year he was watching attempts to fight the wildfires out west on the news, and he concluded that mission, too, would benefit from using drones instead of helicopters.
“When you’re flying like that, the human factor is a big part of it, but if you’ve ever been around helicopters, you realize that it’s only a matter of time before something gives up here,” Bartlett said. “When it does, you’re too low and slow for any type of recovery. (With drones), the cost is cheaper, you reduce reputational damage to the company and organization, and you keep people alive.”
Bartlett has designed Dominion Aerospace’s first drones to be able to carry a 500-pound payload, which could include LIDAR (a method for measuring distances), heartbeat detectors, a cargo pod or anything else that could be needed as a part of the drone’s mission.
He even designed a system to provide purified, potable water to people in disaster situations.
“One thing we looked at was designing it to be a water container so that the unused space in the lid would hold water purification chemicals and filters and a spigot,” Bartlett said. “When they unload the supplies from it, because the biggest thing in a disaster is clean water, they can filter local water into (the pod), add the chemicals and turn on the spigot that’s on the back and fill up the bladders that are in there so we’re not wasting space. …
“With a 500-pound payload, you can drop feed for wildlife up north during blizzards. This could be easily adapted to that.”
While Dominion Aerospace has only been incorporated for about a year, Bartlett said his interest in the drone business goes back even further, but after a number of business plans fell through, he decided to take matters into his own hands and build his own drones.
“I was approached almost two years ago by a friend from the UK about bring a drone from Europe to here to certify and market in the Western Hemisphere,” Bartlett said. “We weren’t able to do that for a number of reasons, so at that point in time, we decided to try to license the production of that here, and that fell through. Then, we just decided to prototype and build our own that’s entirely U.S.-made and U.S.-sourced.”
Since then, the Spencer native has teamed with the Robert C. Byrd Institute and the Brad D. Smith Business Incubator to make his dream a reality.
Although the company isn’t yet manufacturing the drones — and Bartlett is currently Dominion Aerospace’s only employee — Bartlett said that a concept and prototype have been completed, and that will lead into the startup company’s next steps.
“We have a prototype, or at least a concept, developed that we’re testing in solid works right now,” Bartlett said. “We don’t know if we’re going to use that particular bird, but we do have a concept and the engineering nearly complete.”
He explained that version one of the drone is “modular and rugged,” and designed with the intent of allowing people to work on it with regular tools out in the field.
While the company is still in its infancy, Bartlett said he has high hopes for Dominion Aerospace’s future over the next several years.
“In one-to-five years, we anticipate being fully capable with investments paid back,” Bartlett said. “We’ll be working on the second version of this drone with upgrades and lessons learned. We have two organizations who have agreed tentatively to buy version one and be the beta testers, and when we started this whole project, we ended up with 14 very interested parties spread out all over the world who were wanting this for research and development, and within five years, we expect we will have probably 20 of these sold and be working on the next generation that will be a little more modern.”
Bartlett added that, as a West Virginia native, he strives to be able to in turn train and employ other West Virginians at his company, allowing them to enter a rewarding career field without having to leave the state.
“I just got fed up with young people having to leave the state or leave the military,” Bartlett said. “I’ve said that our greatest export was never coal, but it was 18-to-24-year-olds. I was tired of it, so I thought this was an opportunity to give back and employee kids in technical fields and skilled labor fields and prevent them from having to migrate. … We’re a smart people, and this is an opportunity to keep people at home instead of exporting those young minds and brains and giving them to somebody else.”
Fairmont News Editor John Mark Shaver can be reached at 304-844-8485 or [email protected].