Drones have been big news – with big market predictions – since DRONELIFE began in 2014.  Since then, the market has gone through expansion, consolidation, and expansion again.  Investments in the drone industry have gone up, down, and sometimes sideways.

Skyfire Consulting CEO Matt Sloane has a unique perspective on the sector: and from where he sits, the drone industry looks finally ready to live up to its promise.  Here’s why

Every show or movie that’s ever been made about a groundbreaking new industry, its rapid growth, and sometimes rapid collapse always starts in a garage or a dorm room.

Take Halt and Catch Fire, the story about the rapid growth of the personal computing industry, The Social Network, about Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard nerd turned billionaire rise to success (at the expense of the Winklevii) or Silicon Valley, where fictional startup Pied Piper went from garage to gargantuan and back to garage.

Watching these shows is both cathartic for me as a nearly ten-year veteran of the drone industry – a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of pivoting and “middle-out” type revelations; and equally as anxiety-inducing.

The commercial drone industry, which has been around for about ten years now, has gone through many of these cycles.

First, they were toys, and other than taking “dronies” (drone selfies), nobody saw the promise. Then an explosion in use cases from public safety to critical infrastructure and engineering to the promises that one day, burrito orders would be dropped at our doorsteps by flying robots.

The next phase has been some mix of “hurry up and wait” – for the FAA to allow “beyond visual line of sight” – to “it’s all collapsing” – Amazon Air laying off 18,000 people.

The truth is, some early titans are gone, some newer ones have come AND gone, and some are just beginning to come to life.

But if you’re an investor, trying to figure when the right time to get into the market would be, it’s undeniable that your chances are better TODAY than they have ever been in the past.

Why the Drone Industry

If you haven’t been paying attention, the drone industry is poised to be a $57B industry within the next 6 years, and only a fraction of that is recreational drones.

The promise of the commercial drone industry will bring us package delivery, yes, but more importantly medical device delivery, critical infrastructure inspection, real-time wildfire management tools, real-time asset tracking and logistics, homeland security tools, better traffic management algorithms, better and more accurate land surveys and real-time information on how climate is affecting our environment.

Why Now?

As we saw this week with the Instacart IPO, if you believe in the tech, get in early and strongly, you win big. Those who did, in Instacart’s case, turned a few hundred thousand dollars into a billion dollars; and those who got in late, lost.

Early is good, but too early isn’t.

The good news is, we’ve passed from “too early” to “early,” and don’t worry, there are still plenty of good bets in the drone space.

So why do I believe we’re at the inflection point?

As you read this article, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2023 is making its way through Congress, and although it won’t hit the deadline of September 30th, it will happen sometime over the next few months.

Baked into that bill is the roadmap for truly allowing “beyond visual line of sight” or BVLOS flights – the holy grail of the commercial drone industry. This means that operators will be able to fly their drones outside of the line of sight of the pilot; opening up things like package delivery, remote inspections, medical deliveries and more.

Even if, for some crazy reason, those provisions don’t pass (they’ve already passed the House), the FAA just last week issued four BVLOS waivers that will serve as precedent for those of us who want to do it now.

In fact, many of the agencies we work with in the public sector have already received BVLOS waivers up to 2 miles, and are operating today.

If regulatory hold-ups being cleared isn’t enough of a signal to you, take the announcement Wednesday about Skydio’s new X10 aircraft. Love them or hate them, this drone is smaller than many, has better cameras than most, and an autonomous deployment box to go with it.

The technology is getting smarter, smaller, cheaper and more available than ever before. It’s certainly a long way from the home-built and toy-level stuff we were flying just a decade ago.

The Team

In my ten years in the drone industry, I have become somewhat of an expert at what makes one company likely to succeed, and another likely to fail. And so far, I’m batting 1000 on my predictions.

Good tech is cool, to be sure, but it’s always – and I mean ALWAYS – the best team that crosses the finish line. You can improve tech, but you can’t always improve the team, especially when negative attitudes come from the top.

Customer service and after-sales support; eagerness to listen to customers’ feedback and incorporate it into the product or service, flexibility and frankly, just being nice people is critical.

The companies that think they know better than their customers, the ones that over-engineer, over-price or minimize the concerns of the end-users always fail.

The last thing to look for in a drone company investment is true knowledge.

A lot of companies make sky-high predictions and promises about what they can deliver, and of course they do — that’s what pitch decks are for!

But do they actually have the knowledge and experience to make it happen?

Consider that companies who have a “legacy” in the drone industry, but haven’t yet “made it” may not have gotten there yet because they were busy surviving while they waited for regulations to change; not because they couldn’t accomplish what they said they could.

Much like with fine wine and good advice-givers, age and historical knowledge in this industry comes with experience and truly unmatched perspective.

Matt Sloane is the founder and CEO of Skyfire – a drone solutions provider seeking to create the “Uber of public safety and critical infrastructure drones. He is a ten year veteran of the industry, serves on several industry advisory panels, and lectures regularly on the drone industry.

Miriam McNabb

Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry.  Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.