TCOM Expands All-Domain Capabilities with Equinox Acquisition

TCOM’s Equinox acquisition prepare company for ‘all-domain’ world

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

TCOM Equinox acquisition

Officials with TCOM LP, a producer of lighter-than-air aerostat platforms, said the recent acquisition of Equinox Innovative Systems, a manufacturer of both free-flying and tethered drones, will give the combined company the ability to facilitate communications “from the ground to the stratosphere and beyond.”

The acquisition, which closed in April, combines two companies with complementary assets geared toward the aerospace, defense and commercial industries. Equinox specializes in advanced multi-rotor drone technology, focusing on tethered and heavy-lift drone systems, while TCOM offers advanced sensors, customer-specific communications, and intelligent user interfaces with a broad range of airborne platforms.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from our customer base that there’s just a whole lot of it interest in more autonomous and mobile systems,” said Kurt McIntyre, director of business development and solutions architecture at TCOM. “Bringing Equinox into the fold really offers a highly complementary suite of products capable of addressing all layers and domains within an all-domain construct.”

The all-domain theory, initiated by the U.S. Department of Defense, one of TCOM main customers, which states that “a soldier, an operator, has to be successful now in all domains, meaning space, air, maritime, border patrol, it doesn’t matter,” Gal Borenstein, a TCOM spokesman, said.

Every new form of technology introduced into the ISR [Intelligence, surveillance and Reconnaissance] markets in which TCOM operates is “based on the idea that the soldier can get their communication across all these different domains.”

For more than half a century, TCOM has been a leading producer of tethered aerostat systems, based on airships or hot-air balloons. These airships provide customers with advanced sensors, customer-specific communications, and intelligent-user interfaces at a fraction of the cost of satellite-based systems.

“The aerostats basically were the unsung heroes of the first and second wars in Iraq,” Borenstein said. They were instrumental in helping to facilitate the escape of the Kuwaiti royal family, as well as helping lead to the capture of Saddam Hussein. The airships were also widely used in the war in Afghanistan, where they were used to conduct surveillance operations in the mountainous terrain.

However, in more recent years, the development of drone technology has added a new dimension to ISR operations. McIntyre said that along with its tethered aerostat systems, which operate in what’s known as mid-tier airspace, TCOM also produces “high-altitude balloons, which are stratospheric, covering that upper tier. The acquisition of Equinox really fills that critical gap,” he said.

“There’s just a lot of synergies on what we do with our current products and tether elevated sensors and what they bring to the table,” McIntyre said. “It’s just a nice logical fit.”

John Graziano, TCOM’s director of corporate communications, said with the acquisition of Equinox, the company’s capabilities will extend “from the ground through the stratosphere and into space.” In addition, the acquisition will allow TCOM to optimize its suite of offering to customers.

“If they need something more mobile, more autonomous, obviously the Equinox tethered UAS fits that solution set very nicely, covering that lower tier,” he said. On the other hand, “with the aerostats, we can take up a whole lot of payload, a whole lot of weight for long durations.”

In addition, TCOM’s newly acquired capabilities allow the company to offer a suite of technological options to service customers with reduced manpower capabilities, he said.

In an email statement, TCOM said “the addition of Equinox’s product portfolio provides customers the ability to choose from a full suite of offerings which enables them to balance between flight time, power, and payload capacity for varying mission sets and unique applications across various market sectors.”

TCOM said the acquisition would further its plans to expand the market for tethered drones and aerostat systems through strategic partnership and continued investment into innovative technologies. The statement said that Equinox’s expertise in radio frequency and system engineering, as well as electro-mechanical airframe integration, would “not only complement our existing technology roadmap but also serve to bring this cutting-edge innovation under one operation.”

Read more:

• AI-Powered Obstacle Detection for Tethered Drones: KEF Robotics Revolutionizes Military Surveillance
• KHRONOS: the Tethered Drone System for Challenging Environments
• Red Cat Holdings Introduces New ISR and Precision Strike Drone Systems

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.