Northwest Aerospace News August | September Issue No. 10 | Page 57

ASSOCIATION FOR UNMANNED VEHICLE SYSTEMS SPOTLIGHT
T
he technologies that so impressed Prange
and the other founders of TacAero had been
used overseas on board drones, but the
domestic regulatory environment made the use
of drones inside the U.S. almost impossible.
“That led us to put those same payloads on
manned airplanes — there is no shame in that,”
said Prange. “We started with the idea of using
these sensors for agriculture, because we saw
precision ag coming down the pipeline. We did
that for a couple of years, and it’s still in our
residual DNA.”
Faster Horses
It turned out that the ability to mount a payload
developed for a drone onto a crewed aircraft
created an opportunity that Prange and the
other founders of TacAero had not foreseen
— which ultimately led to the creation of
Hood Tech Aero: a partnership between Hood
Tech and TacAero. “I was on the board of the
AUVSI Cascade Chapter at that time, and
through that organization, I was able to build
up these phenomenal contacts with the folks
doing drone work in the Columbia River
Gorge,” he said.
At the time, Hood Tech was struggling with
the problem of how to rapidly iterate their new
payload systems. “Hood Tech is known for
being agile, anticipating market demands and
innovating on their own budget to meet them,”
said Prange. “They don’t necessarily wait
around for the customer to ask for something.
It reminds me of that quote from Henry Ford
that Steve Jobs liked to use, ‘If I had asked
people what they wanted, they would have said
faster horses.’”
For Hood Tech, the problem was that arranging
to fly new payloads on a drone at the test range
in Boardman could take weeks or months.
“If they got out there and found a problem,
even a small one, they would have to cancel
the flight, go back and fix the issue, then start
all over again trying to line up another flight
on a ScanEagle, which could take a couple of
months,” Prange explained.
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