From Drone to Helicopter: SiFly Redefines UAV Design for Endurance and Value

SiFly to build drones designed like to perform like mini-helicopters

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Many businesses have been slow to embrace unmanned aviation because what they really want is a vehicle with the flight endurance of a helicopter at the price of a drone, Logan Jones, chief business officer of drone start-up company SiFly said in an interview.

SiFly recently emerged from “stealth mode” to announce the launch of its flagship products, the all-electric Q12 drone platform and the Q250, SiFly’s heavy-lift drone. The design of the two aircraft marks a significant design departure from that of traditional quadcopters, to give the company’s UAVs additional flight-time capacity and endurance, Jones said.

“What customers really want is much better value from their system, meaning they want to fly longer, they want to fly farther and they want a price point that’s competitive with Chinese or non-Western alternatives,” he said.

“You have to be able to meet a minimum threshold for endurance to get the use case and usability that customers actually want,” Jones said. “They really want a helicopter. They don’t want a little hobby drone.”

The private company, which has both individual and institutional investors, is planning to launch an effort to raise additional institutional funds in the coming months. While the company’s drones have the capabilities to be used across a wide variety of business segments, Jones said SiFly will initially focus on marketing its products in two broad areas, public safety and long-distance inspection missions.

 Vehicles such as the Q12 drone, which can hover for two continuous hours and fly forward for up to three hours, are designed for what Jones refers to as the Drones as First Responders (DFR) 3.0 model. In the first iteration of DFR programs, a police officer would put a drone in the trunk of his cruiser, and launch it whenever he arrived on the scene of an accident or crime.

In what he refers to as DFR 2.0, the model is based on the idea that fixed infrastructure and drone docks are the answer to the question of how best to deploy UAVs to respond to emergencies. The emerging DFR 3.0 era will center around “long-range persistent operations, much like you would expect from a manned helicopter, where you have an asset in the air with a dramatically lower operating cost that’s flying in multiple hour shifts,” Jones said.

In this scenario, emergency agencies would fly fleets of vehicles, continually rotating them out in order to get “a dramatically larger coverage area” than that of the fixed-infrastructure operating model.

The second area in which Jones thinks his company’s vehicles could have a big impact is in the field of linear inspections, in which a drone flies along the route of an electrical transmission line or oil or gas pipeline.

“Every additional minute that you’re in the air translates to more productivity or more revenue for customers,” he said. “When we provide four times the endurance of the average platform on the market today, it’s a dramatically better [return on investment] for customers.”

Company entering its beta stage

Jones said SiFly is moving into its beta program, having logged more than 3,000 flights over the past several years at its testing facilities in rural Salinas, California. The Santa Clara, California-based company has a great deal of flexibility in where it sources its drone-building components from and where it will ultimately locate its manufacturing facilities, he said.

Its initial plan calls for SiFly to initiate small-rate production, assembling its UAVs somewhere in the United States from components that the company purchases from countries whose products are approved under the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, but then transitioning that to scale manufacturing at another location, Jones said. “We ultimately haven’t picked that location yet, but we’re trying to stay flexible with how the market evolves over the coming year.”

Jones said the fact that its drone platforms will be NDAA-compliant is that will make it attractive to U.S.-based customers.

“One of the things that we offer that’s integral to our platform is cloud connectivity. So, data processing happens on the platform, data moves offboard the platform into our cloud environment. As the [original equipment manufacturer], and as the platform provider, we can provide a high degree of certainty and trust,” he said.

In regard to pricing its products SiFly is looking to fill a market niche “somewhere between where DJI is and where other Western vendors are,” Jones said. “There’s a middle ground that seems to be unaddressed, but from a capability standpoint along with the price point, we think will be far more competitive than anything out there today.”

Drones’ design unlike typical multi-copters

Because of the unique design of SiFly’s drones, the company can choose where it builds and manufactures its sub-components. This gives it a great deal of latitude as it decides where it builds its products, based on the shifting tariff situation, Jones said.

“If you look at the other, especially Western, makers in the market, they all look the same. They largely leverage the same set of sub-components,” he said. They don’t control or direct a lot of the supply base. That’s somewhere that we have as an advantage, and it stems from the fact that we’ve had to redesign and redevelop the multi-rotor from the ground up.”

SiFly has pursued an innovative design approach, based on the first principle of optimization. The designers took into account factors such as how much weight the drone is carrying per square foot of area, the percentage of total weight that the battery comprises, and the use of the most energy-dense and cost-effective battery cells on the market.

In addition, unlike most multi-rotor drones, which are designed for hovering, SiFly’s vehicles are designed for forward flight.

“What that means is that, from a first-principles basis, we’ve redesigned the blades themselves to resemble much closer to what helicopter blades would look like, so you get efficiency for a flight,” Jones said.

The drones’ rotors are given an aerodynamic tilt to where the rotors are offset so that in its natural position, the drone is more streamlined in how it flies forward. “Then finally, the struts that go from the body or the fuselage out to the motors, it’s important to streamline them so we have what’re called wing struts,” he said.

Finally, similar to those in a helicopter, SiFly’s drones’ rotors employ auto-rotation, which allows the vehicle to land safely, even if the motors fail. This feature also allows the company to build larger platforms than would be possible with aerial vehicles using traditional multi-rotor design.

“Our first platform, called the Q 12, has a max takeoff weight of just under 30 pounds. It is the beginning of a family of platforms that will scale up into multi-rotors that could directly compete with the capability of light helicopters in the marketplace,” Jones said.

Read more:

• SiFly Launches NDAA-Compliant Long-Endurance Drones to Expand Industrial and Public Safety Capabilities
• Rotor Unveils Airtruck and Sprayhawk: Drones with Helicopter DNA
• Inside Ascent AeroSystems: A Revolutionary Approach to Drones

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.