Drones have previously been confined due to limitations such as short battery lives and restricted load capacities. This is beginning to change. With SiFly recently breaking the world record with an electric drone completing a flight lasting more than three hours, we are seeing drones advance into a new phase of aviation that will be used as a crucial part of critical infrastructure. Why does going from minutes to hours completely change what drones can do in the real world? And how is SiFly building toward an America First manufactured drone that is fundamentally a more sophisticated technology than what already exists?

Here are highlights from my conversation with Brian Hinman, the founder and CEO of SiFly and an adviser at Metrika. I was also joined by John Donovan, the CEO of Qudit Investments and former CEO of AT&T Communications. With my guests’ extensive experience across aviation, cybersecurity, and technology, this discussion goes deep into understanding how this next phase in drones enhances deploying new tools for first responders and how it could change conversations around the future of aviation.

Below is a lightly edited and abridged transcript of our discussion. You can listen to this and other episodes of Explain to Shane on AEI.org and subscribe via your preferred listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in.

Shane Tews: Let’s start with how you two met and started working together, because you have an interesting story.

Brian Hinman: We go back 20 years, actually. John was my customer when he was at AT&T—he was on my board. We met when I was building DSL equipment and reconnected about two years ago. It’s been fantastic to get back together again.

John Donovan: It’s fortuitous, Shane, that my daughter had an interest in agriculture—regenerative agriculture. I was at the University of California, Davis, and we were out in the field. They were telling us about all this advanced work they were doing with sensing, and the problem was that these darn drones cost so much money and only hang in the air for 20 minutes. I was literally up at UC Davis and I get a call from Brian, so I drove back to Brian’s office to visit him. You talk about serendipity. I already knew the use case in agriculture walking in his front door, and he said, ‘I have this high-endurance platform.’ I said, ‘Perfect.’ I just witnessed how not having high endurance makes it really hard to innovate with devices that only stay in the air for 20 minutes.

I just have to point out, in my 40-year career, I’ve never met a better engineer than Brian. When you get down to the physics of things, he won’t tell you this story but we were in a board meeting once and I had looked and he had opened his notebook and was writing some calculations down. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘This idea popped in my head on something and I had to write it down.’ I looked at his engineering notebook and it dawned on me: there are people who know technology—they know how to talk about it and how it works. Then there are people who live inside the information box. That’s Brian. That’s Brian in the physical sense, and he has an obsession with perfection at every component in every element every time in anything he’s ever done. And that’s what I love best about him.

Let’s talk about SiFly—what have you created here?

Brian Hinman: Well, just at the beginning of the company, what got me started was thinking about—you want to make something that can fly a long time, that’s electrically powered because you get all the reliability that comes with that. But it kind of requires rethinking how drones are made because as Part 107, it’s all visual line of sight flying under FAA rules. And I’d see the future as flying way beyond visual line of sight—cellular connected, cloud connected.

And what does that look like? It means that the aircraft themselves need to be redesigned from the scratch. And if you look at all the drones that are out there today, they all look like flying bricks and they don’t need to be particularly aerodynamic because they’re typically hovering and are not in forward flight. In essence, what I set out to do four years ago was to create the quadcopter optimized for forward flight. And as it just as an aircraft category. And I think what I’ve ended up with is something that not only works well at the scale that we’re at, but it scales up to much larger sizes.

You have two models that you have been working on. Tell us first about the Q12.

Brian Hinman: Right, it’s actually 12 is for 12 kilograms, that’s how much the thing weighs so the Q12 is really a sensing platform that’s meant to be a drone as first responder. You send it out to the scene, it’s got a high-quality camera on board; other sensors payloads can be added in—thermal cameras, we do multi-spectral mapping for things like agriculture. And again, we flown that thing for over three hours.

We think we—actually at this point—could do over four hours, and very soon we’re going to be able to demonstrate that we can break the world record as far as for electrically powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—set the distance record as well. I think for a lot of those missions that require overlying a site, surveillance, you name it, that’s what the Q12 platform is for. The other one is the larger one, the Q250, and that is designed to be carrying payload, serious payload. The initial application we were looking at in agriculture is for spraying and agricultural spraying is something that everybody needs to do and we think we have a platform there that’s going to be the most cost-effective way of doing it and, again, way safer than, for example, using helicopters to do it.

What are the next steps for you all before you can go to market with these amazing things?

Brian Hinman: We’re in the back-end phase of the engineering now. The timing of the change in rules was actually good for us because we’re at the stage of choosing some of our contract manufacturers. And with the emphasis of Made in America, we’re looking at contract manufacturers in Arizona and Texas that would do this subsystem assembly. We’re to do the final assembly in California, testing and ship out of here. So, all that timing worked out well. We’re down the path already with the waiver.

Interestingly enough, the way that whole thing got set up, virtually every single company is going to have to go through that process—which isn’t a bad thing. It’s essentially an audit every year to make sure that drones are being shipped to the United States are going to be safe, that there’s not going to be a national security risk. We’re hopeful we can get through that pretty quickly. In the second quarter of this year, we’re going to be doing what we call beta site installations with several customers, and across the board we have three different segments we address: we address the public safety market, we address agriculture, and then the third one is what I would call traditional commercial applications, like linear inspection and mapping. And there’s a huge amount of that out there that’s going on today.