05 July 2024

By Joel Manfred

I started out in Spokane, WA, attending our local community college's Airframe and Powerplant course with the goal of becoming an aircraft mechanic while flying RC planes on the side as a hobby. The passion for flying ran in my family, and I always had the bug to become a pilot. After 9/11, I decided to join the U.S. Army through their Warrant Officer Flight Training program, launching my pilot career flying the incredible UH-60 Blackhawk. I served for 11 years as a UH-60 Blackhawk certified Flight Instructor, spending most of my time overseas from Europe to Central America and multiple deployments to the Middle East for the global war on terrorism.

In 2012, I married my beautiful wife and we decided to start a family. Quickly realizing the military wasn't the best place to raise our children and with the arrival of our first child, it was time to transition to a more family-friendly environment, so I moved on to a civilian helicopter air ambulance service. This job provided structure and more time off, making it an excellent transition to civilian life and offering the time with my family. However, after six years, I was experiencing burnout and began searching for a new career path. We had always wanted to venture into entrepreneurship and business ownership but never really knew what we wanted to do.

My interest in drones grew while working at an EMS base on a drone testing range for military and civilian organizations. I talked with drone pilots and crew, which led to a job offer from a big drone operator. Although corporate work wasn't appealing, it sparked an interest I hadn’t considered. Along with a fellow Instructor pilot, we took the FAA online training course to get certified in drone operations and signed each other off on our FAA Part 107 Certifications.

I found a company that offered a complete drone business setup, including a website, drone, training, and would become a drone job aggregator for a percent of the business they sent. Despite the company's eventual closure, I received most of what I paid for, including a Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual drone, an in-person training course that spawned my love of mapping and the domain www.DroneSolutionsLLC.com. This turn of events forced me to quickly learn the ins and outs of the drone business and take responsibility for its future.

This led me to dig into business ownership and I began taking entrepreneurship classes and small business training through my local college. They offered free business coaching and were a great source of information for business management and sales.

Our First Jobs

Once the backbone of Drone Solutions LLC. was built, we moved to North Idaho to pursue the business full-time. I was particularly interested in drone mapping, having always enjoyed map and compass navigation and was very interested in where it was going digitally. As most small drone companies do, I started with real estate work and secured a contract providing monthly construction update videos for a large construction company in town. Although my initial focus was mapping, the need for presentable videos pushed me to learn video production and editing, taking classes in Adobe Premiere and video production.

While producing those videos and thinking that might be what I end up doing a local surveyor contacted me through another FPV drone service provider, seeking orthomosaic and topography maps for his project clients. This collaboration taught me a lot about surveying and GIS work. The first project went well. However, I realized quickly the need for better equipment and skills, I invested in a Phantom 4 Pro V2.0, Emlid GPS units, ground control points, a generator, and an upgraded PC. I took a Pix4D workshop and practiced mapping constantly, eventually achieving a quality and repeatable deliverable.

With a solid product, we designed a sales plan and began building relationships with survey and engineering firms in my area, expanding our clientele and services throughout the Northwest U.S.

Currently

Since our inception, we've continually improved our systems and deliverables through better equipment, education, and processing techniques. I now fly the Mavic 3 Enterprise RTK and Multispectral, with an off-grid battery charging station and a modified truck for on-the-go charging, storage, and 5G upload capabilities.

Our projects primarily involve mapping and 3D modeling for survey topography and orthomosaic. Alot of our work has been way out in the mountains of North Idaho, Washington and Montana. As the farther you get out the handier drones get in gathering the data to save the surveyors’ knees, time and improving their margins in the rural areas. We also have been conducting cell phone tower inspections, golf course mapping, construction site mapping, and occasionally video and photo shoots.

Recently we have partnered with www.Thread.one, offering a solution for managing and organizing the vast amounts of data drones can gather. This partnership addresses the bottleneck of data management, processing, and work order distribution in the drone industry as they can gather more information than most shops can handle for the inspection and vegetation management of distribution lines, transmission lines, wind and solar farms.

Into the Future

This is always a difficult subject as drones are so versatile and capable in so many sectors however as we grow and look to add employees, we have been focused on maintaining and building long-term relationships in infrastructure inspection, forestry/fire management, and renewable energy sectors. We're also considering adding LiDAR and fixed-wing drones to our fleet to cover larger areas in Topo, and for inspection of infrastructure projects. I would love to start teaching more as that is a gift I have been given and love teaching aeronautics, aerodynamics, airspace, weather and drone technology.

In Our Off Time

Most of my off time is spent with my incredible family. My wife Tammy helps manage Drone Solutions LLC and homeschools our three children, aged 3, 6, and 9. When I have the time, I enjoy woodworking and building timber frame structures. Our off-grid drone charging system has also become a fun electrical engineering project that I enjoy working on with my children.

We live in one of the best outdoor areas in the world, with large, deep lakes for summer activities and plenty of skiing opportunities nearby for the winter months. We're developing a 5-acre property near our current home into a family farm, complete with an orchard, woods, a great shooting range, and a sledding hill that rips. Our family loves hiking, swimming in mountain lakes, picking huckleberries, and, when possible, going on multi-day mountain hikes and a bit of hunting.

I teach aeronautics whenever I get the chance at homeschool co-ops and still love chatting with local pilots and visiting with crew at the local airport. My son enjoys looking at aircraft and getting comfortable with aviation, which has been an incredible part of my life and has made me the man I am. I aspire to bring more aviation culture into the drone world, as much of it seems to get lost outside the airport environment.

We love attending church whenever we can and supporting Jesus’ mission as a family.