By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill
Tulsa builds a full drone industry ecosystem from the ground up.
Tulsa Oklahoma, long identified as a capital of the oil industry, is striving to be rechristened as “The Drone Capital of the World.”
The city seemed to be well on its way to securing that title last month after Irish drone delivery company MANNA announced the selection of Tulsa as the base for its expansion into the U.S. market. The company expects to establish an American manufacturing presence to support its commercial drone delivery business, and in the process create more than 1,000 jobs over the next three years.
MANNA’s move marks the most recent addition to Tulsa’s growing roster of drone-related companies.
Jennifer Hankins, managing director of Tulsa Innovation Labs (TIL), said roots of the Drone Capital initiative date back to January 2020 with TIL’s founding.
“We were tasked to build an innovation economy in Tulsa,” Hankins said in an interview. “What we did was take a deep look at all of the industries available to us in our region and identified what we call right-to-win opportunities in those future-advanced industries.”
Based in large part on Tulsa’s existing thriving aerospace industry, TIL identified the unmanned aerial vehicle industry and advanced air mobility (AAM) as two emerging technologies to target for future development in Tulsa.
“And so, we said, ‘All right. We’re going to take our existing aerospace cluster and position it for the future,” she said. ‘We don’t want to just have a part of it, we want to win it, and we want to be the best.'”
International Drone Companies Choose Tulsa as Their U.S. Home Base
Over the past several years, in addition to MANNA, Tulsa has attracted several drone-related industrial players to establish new businesses or expand their operations into the city. Among the first was AirWise, a unified drone operating software platform for public safety and critical infrastructure teams, which was founded in Tulsa in 2021.
More recently, last September Switzerland’s WindShape opened a 20,000-square-foot facility at the Skyway Range on the Osage Nation Reservation near Tulsa to conduct wind- and weather-related drone testing. This year, Israel-based High Lander, which provides drone fleet management and uncrewed traffic management (UTM) solutions, was selected to deploy its airspace management platform for the SAFE-T Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) Accelerator Program at Tulsa’s Skyway Range.
Hankins said the public/private partnership behind the Drone Capital initiative has pursued a strategy of attracting companies involved in the entire drone value chain, from research, to manufacturing, to commercial applications.
“MANNA was really excited to choose Tulsa because we not only have the testing infrastructure, which we’ve built in the last five or so years, we also have the manufacturing capability where they can produce their equipment and their drones at scale,” she said. “And then they also have a workforce pipeline, which Tulsa Innovation Labs and our partners have been investing in very seriously.”
She said the team is also proud of the fact that they’ve been able to attract so many overseas-based companies seeking to find a home base from which they plan to reach into U.S. markets. “They wanted somewhere where they could do all those things at scale with low barriers to entry,” she said.
Tulsa’s Aerospace Base Fuels Domestic Drone Supply Chain
The presence of these companies in turn also spurs the growth of American drone-related technologies, by providing a market for homegrown parts and equipment.
“We have a strategy under way that helps our local manufacturers. Again, we’re home to one of the best aerospace maintenance repair and overhaul clusters in the entire country. We have an aerospace manufacturing base that is ready and interested to enter this market,” Hankins said.
She said the Drone Capital team is also studying drone supply chains across the country, to determine both what industry needs can be filled by Tulsa-area manufacturers and to reach out to other American manufacturers to provide the required resources.
“The testing, the manufacturing: all of those things are really great and already pretty gosh-darn competitive when you look across the country and where can companies go to achieve all of this. But I think the biggest thing is the scale at which we’ve assembled public-private partnerships to get this all done in such a short window of time.”
Drone Capital Planning Takes Shape
Planning for the Drone Capital initiative evolved over the last several years. In November 2024, then Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum released a report “Blue Ribbon Commission: A Roadmap for City of Tulsa Drone Leadership,” which established specific actionable recommendations aimed at making Tulsa the Drone Capital of the World.
The Blue Ribbon Commission had brought together 19 organizations representing public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Bailey Siegfried, vice president for Tulsa-based aerospace research and manufacturing company NORDAM, said the commission conducted multiple meetings among representatives of the city’s aerospace industry, Tulsa Tech and Oklahoma Career Tech, regional healthcare entities and partners in state and municipal government.
“I think we’re building momentum,” said Siegfried, who also serves as a commissioner on the Oklahoma Department of Aerospace, Aviation and Space.
“It doesn’t just have to be building drones. There’s a lot of pieces; OneSky and High Lander and some others are working on unmanned traffic management systems,” he said. “I think it’s we’re building capability, capacity, the network and the policies for the infrastructure and framework for safe drone operation, which is the beginning ultimately of commercializing.”
Drone Education and Workforce Pipeline Built From the Ground Up
Siegfried is also an active promoter of STEM education and is the creator of the Siegfried Drone Competition for high school students, as part of the annual Siegfried Drone & Aviation Showcase hosted by the Tulsa Regional STEM Alliance.
Through his work at NORDAM, Siegfried takes part in regional student and workforce training initiatives tied to Tulsa’s drone and AAM sectors. He said his interaction with students and workforce trainees helps expose them to the potential of enjoying future careers in the drone and manned aviation industries.
“I bring them in, and meet with them, and give them a tour of our operation at NORDAM. And it usually opens their eyes because they’re coming from somewhere else, and they are like, ‘God, I just couldn’t have imagined this!'”
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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
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