Airport to be used for unmanned aircraft training

A service agreement signed Tuesday afternoon between a San Diego-based company with an office in Corbin and the Williamsburg-Whitley County Airport Board will allow the airport to be used to train governmental agencies in unmanned aerial systems and for testing of such systems there.

Keith Brashear, Chairman of the Airport Board, and John Surmont, Chairman and CEO of Sofcoast Inc., signed a 10-year service agreement Tuesday afternoon during a ceremony at the Hutton Business Building on the campus of the University of the Cumberlands that was attended by several local dignitaries.

Williamsburg-Whitley County Airport Board Chairman Keith Brashear, left, and Sofcoast CEO John Surmont, right, sign an agreement Tuesday that would allow the company to use the airport for unmanned aircraft testing.

“This agreement allows Sofcoast to provide services as well as marketing services to bring new opportunities, i.e., folks, who would want to establish a base of operations or utilize the airport’s facilities and instructors. Primarily, these folks might be defense technology companies, who might be looking to establish an area for them to test and to evaluate and leverage the benefits and infrastructure of this region,” said Surmont, a Corbin native and a former Navy Seal.

“The fact that there is no military airspace or restricted air space in this area is valuable to some folks. The fact that there is relatively minimal air traffic in this area is also of benefit to some of these defense contractors, who need to find areas to test their technologies.”

Surmont said this might include potential testing of unmanned systems like the Predator unmanned aircraft currently in use on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It might also include testing of a product that Sofcoast plans to unveil in Whitley County over the next few weeks.

Surmont said Sofcoast isn’t a manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, but is developing affordable mobile data management solutions.

“Our lead product is something called ASAP, which stands for Affordable Stationary Aerial Platform, and we will be back to the Whitley County Airport to unveil this product,” Surmont said. “We are in test flights now and to date we have had very satisfactory results. We are doing low rate manufacturing in San Diego, California, and will be shipping it to Kentucky in late February or early march for an unveiling.”

The ASAP is essentially a portable antenna and communications systems that allows cameras and repeater technology to be suspended and elevated up to 500 feet on a tethered line on something similar to a balloon.

A practical use for the system is deployment in an area where a tornado or hurricane has gone through and wiped out communications towers, such as Hurricane Katrina that had 30,000 first responders trying to get in who had a difficult time coordinating actions because of communications problems.

“We also intend that as we continue to grow our customers and expand our sales for this product, we do intend to locate some of the final assembly and integration here in Southeastern Kentucky,” Surmont said. “The market for this product we think is about 4,000 particular agencies, particularly in disaster prone areas, such as hurricane, earthquake and flood zones. We also intend to expand a small services and support team here as well.”

Surmont said an example of how the local airport could be used is that a customer might need a place to test one of Sofcoast’s new products to evaluate them.

“With this partnership with the Williamsburg Airport Authority, we have that opportunity to deliver that to them, and say absolutely in addition to selling the product to you, we can provide you an area where you can perform the testing you need to perform,” Surmont said.

He said there is still a lot of work to do, and the company is still in the process of working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to get airspace authorizations to operate, such systems in this area.

“A huge first step for us really is this agreement with the Whitley County Airport Board that sends the signal and the message that they are seriously committed to a growth industry like the unmanned systems industry to pave the way for developing education programs out of the University of the Cumberlands with partnerships in partner colleges across the mid-south region,” Surmont said.

“I also think it is important that this message is transmitted to the defense industry folks, who see that there is a commitment here and that there is interest in taking the long term view as this industry matures and as the FAA begins to resolve how small unmanned systems are operated in national airspace.”
He said the University of the Cumberlands has played a big role so far in providing space to meet and plan.

“They are very instrumental in incubating us to some extent,” Surmont said. “I think going forward the University of the Cumberlands provides us as, well as the region, with an opportunity to institutionalize the knowledge that we are producing and bringing to the region.”

This could include at some point offering fields of study and new programs related to the developing market of unmanned aerial systems, he said.

“I think it is very important to think about how to you get into a very, very young and new industry right now,” Surmont said. “The way you get into the industry right now is you have to be in the military or you have to be a contractor and have certain credentials. I think from our perspective here in this region, we bring this corporate knowledge here and have a college – like the University of the Cumberlands with partners across the United States and across the state of Kentucky – start and develop a uniformed, institutionalized, accredited degree program so that children here can break into an industry whether they qualify for military service or not.”

Williamsburg Mayor Roddy Harrison said the agreement shows that this is an exciting time to be in Williamsburg and this region.

“The airport board has done a tremendous job to work well with Sofcoast. To bring this all to fruition is just a wonderful thing. It is just going to make us better. We had a lot of people that said the airport would never do anything. This surely can put an end to that. I want to thank the airport board again for all that they do and to welcome Sofcoast to the area,” Harrison said.

Brashear said the agreement has several potential upsides for the airport, including increased utilization of the facility, and rental of hanger space and fuel sales among others.

“We are hoping that the airport will be used as a training facility for these unmanned aerial vehicles,” Brashear said. “There will be a fee structure so we will be getting a little income from the use of the facility if indeed this does come into being. Right now, they are talking about renting some hanger space for two or three different surveillance platforms they will be testing out there. As it progresses, they will probably be building a facility somewhere in the area.”

Brashear added the airport plans to have an open house for the opening of the new terminal that is tentatively scheduled for early April.