ERMA – Cape May County’s efforts to attract unmanned-aerial system (UAS)-related companies to locate at the County Airport will take a giant leap forward Dec. 15. That’s when Luftronix, Inc. will open its testing and demonstration center in Hangar 1 at Naval Air Station Wildwood.
Luftronix, Inc., maker of Fused Flow™ precision navigation technology for unmanned vehicles, is the company.
According to a release, Luftronix is a leader in developing cutting-edge technologies to change the way communities respond to natural disasters, emergencies and security threats and lightning strikes.
Luftronix will use the center at the County Airport to conduct aircraft inspection flights with drones to scan the airplanes and test for damage from corrosion. The company will use a De Havilland DHC-4 Caribou airplane for the testing and demonstration program.
“Having access to aircraft in a stable indoor environment is a major milestone in our efforts to provide enormous efficiency improvements to the aircraft inspection process,” stated Denise Spell, vice president of Business Development and Sales at Luftronix.
“We are looking forward to bringing our customers in the maintenance and repair industry to Cape May County to witness how our precision flight and data collection tools can create vast improvements in their efficiency,” he added.
“We are witnessing an important step in attracting aviation technology startups to the Cape May area,” stated Freeholder Will Morey, adding “Cape May County has all the ingredients to become the preferred location for aviation companies, especially in the field of commercial drone operations.”
The county has held monthly gatherings for UAS-related firms to share information and to underscore the county’s desire to attract those firms, and the jobs they will generate, to the area.
The airport’s location has been cited by Morey and others as important, since it is in the flight path of metropolitan airports, which is a factor the Federal Aviation Administration is monitoring. The FAA wants to ensure the safety of general aviation aircraft as drones enter the skies. Having test data available generated from the local airport about those flights will assist the FAA in future rulemaking.
“Cape May County has shown us they are willing to help small companies like ours succeed,” commented Klaus Sonnenleiter, president and CEO at Luftronix. “Aviation has a natural home here, and we have seen a climate that is accommodative to the needs of startups, we are confident this will create a microcosm of similar-minded innovators in the industry.”
The test center will be located in Hangar 1, home of the Naval Air Station Wildwood (NASW) Aviation Museum. The 92,000-square-foot hangar, commissioned in 1943, served as an active dive-bomber squadron training facility during World War II.
Dr. Joseph Salvatore, executive director of the museum, was able to find space for the testing center and excited to see the hangar continue to serve the aviation industry.
The Luftronix test and demonstration center is opening Dec. 15 and has its first demonstrations scheduled in the weeks following.
Luftronix has created GPS-free navigation technology for autonomous drone flights with very high precision.
Its patent-pending Fused Flow™ technology employs computer vision techniques to interpret the environment a drone navigates in, using similar logic as the human brain to make sense of the surrounding areas.
In conjunction with the Luftronix Orchestrator™, the drones collect data, use machine learning strategies to interpret the visual images, and help create a faster, more efficient process for the aircraft inspection process.
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