Pre-release Notes and Priorities for 2019
In the last year, Kittyhawk grew in many important ways. We helped the largest drone program in the world get bigger. We helped Fortune 100 companies launch their program the right way. We helped power hundreds of thousands of flights, many in controlled airspace thanks to our native LAANC product. To put our growth in perspective, we powered more flights in the last 30 days than we did in the first 30 months of Kittyhawk.
We continued our efforts, including our participation in the Unmanned Aircraft Safety Team, to help move the industry forward in a safe and clear direction. We collaborated with the InterUSS to demonstrate that Remote ID is possible today. We became an FAA-Approved UAS Service Supplier for LAANC. We also brought on some new investors, including the largest aerospace company in the world from Boeing.
Along the way, we’ve learned a ton about what companies need to get started, the bumps they’ll run into as they scale, and the tools they’ll need as their teams grow from 10 to 100, and 100 to 1,000. The guiding light for our team is to translate this insight and expertise into our platform for our customers, and we’ve set some lofty goals for our team and our applications for 2019.
To sum up our objectives and roadmap, we want our customers to have their cake and eat it too.
- A fully compliant drone program that generates a ton of ROI.
- An enterprise-grade operator and mobile experience, with even more powerful tools for managers and data analysts.
- Executable workflows and authorizations, even though your pilots just want to go fly.
- Integrations for mission planning, with robust APIs to get all the data you want in or out of the Kittyhawk platform.
- In-app prompts when flights are not compliant, with real-time alerts for airspace, Part 107, or even company defined procedures.
We’re fortunate to have such passionate users of Kittyhawk (often — lovingly — referred to as zealots) and an amazing, professional community of drone operators, and a number of stakeholders and partners across manufacturers and regulators. Yet, the person we think about the most these days is the person behind the desk that doesn’t get nearly enough fun time on the sticks, for she is managing hundreds of people, thousands of assets, millions of data points, and untold levels of risk. We want to make her job just as cool as the person in the field flying drones (instead of climbing on roofs or scaffolding). She deserves a more comprehensive tool set to understand all the data that is flying off these drones, with the ability to affect decision making in real-time.
This dedication will include small but meaningful improvements, like bringing our encrypted live streaming product to the Kittyhawk web dashboard and API integrations. This focus will also mean much bigger changes for both our web and manager tools, as well as the experience that operators have on mobile — not to mention our growing library of APIs and webhooks. Most importantly, this will result in your data, your fleet, your workflows, and your airspace getting much more personal and dynamic — completely in tune with your data.
We’re excited for the year of the unsung fleet manager and delivering a true Kittyhawk experience to this critical piece of our platform. For those that live on our apps, we have plenty of good stuff in store for you too 🙂
Stay tuned and let’s fly,
Jon
Jon Hegranes - Aloft CEO
Jon is the Founder & CEO of Aloft, the market leader in drone airspace systems & UTM technologies. Aloft’s patented technology is used in today’s leading recreational, enterprise, and government drone applications.
Jon is a certified commercial drone pilot as part of FAA Part 107, the founder of the Drone Advisory Council, and is an active member of other industry groups, including GUTMA, NBAA Emerging Tech, the FAA’s Advanced Aviation Advisory Committee (AAAC) and working groups, and is a founding member and data working group chair of the FAA Drone Safety Team. He’s a self-taught iOS developer, writes about drone topics for technology news outlets including VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Forbes, and regularly speaks at industry events such as Commercial UAV Expo, 2B Ahead Future Congress, and DJI AirWorks. Jon graduated from TCU with a major in finance and received his MBA from Thunderbird Global School of Management (ASU). Jon has served on multiple FAA Advisory and Rulemaking Committees (ARCs), including drone detection, counter UAS, and Beyond Visual Line of Site (BVLOS).
