Catching the Bad Guys

"It's known as Rocket City and every day that I go to work I drive down the highway and see a 360-foot-tall Saturn V rocket and an SR-71 Blackbird. It reminds me as a pilot how cool it is to live in a town like this. And we're hoping that in the next few years, we change it from Rocket City to Drone City," says Sloane, the co-founder of SkyFireAI, a developer of drone first responder (DFR) technology.

I just really appreciate and love being part of such a rich aviation culture here in Huntsville.”

But drones? In Huntsville? Home of the space program? Why Huntsville?

“There is so much rich aviation history dating back to the 1950s and ’60s with Dr. Werner von Braun as he developed our space program here. We also have Redstone Arsenal here and it’s the home of the unmanned aircraft systems program office for the Army. Everybody in this town is either a rocket scientist, a federal agent, or a contractor supporting one of those. We also have so many military people here who are making decisions about the future of Army aviation. So, it’s a really great place to operate a drone company,” Sloane says.

First eyes on the scene

If Skyfire sounds familiar, AOPA Pilot reported on its first years in business (“Stars Fell on Alabama,” April 2018 AOPA Pilot). Then we were in rural Alabama observing Skyfire work with a small fire department using drone technology for responding to fires, lost children, and accidents. It was Skyfire’s plan to expand to fire and police departments across the country, aiding them in drone response to enhance their services.

“Back in 2014 this was not something that anybody else had really spent a lot of time thinking about,” says Sloane. “So we were, in a lot of cases, making it up as we went along. Fast-forward over the past 11 years, we’ve worked with nearly 1,000 agencies across the country, police, fire, emergency management, and other types of federal law enforcement.”

Sloane has evolved Skyfire to become a drone first responder unit because, as the past 11 years have shown him, the original concept—drone patrol—took too long. “They would put the drone in the police car or fire truck and drive it to a scene. The problem with that is it takes them five to seven minutes on average to get there. And by the time they get there and take another two to five minutes to set the drone up and get it in the air, the action is over. So, they’ve missed the thing they were looking for. They’re also very busy being firefighters and police officers.”

Skyfire now puts the drones on rooftops of law enforcement agencies. A 911 call comes in and if it’s within the response territory of the drone, it can be there in under three minutes.

“What they are able to do is respond within a two-mile radius of that rooftop location. So, two miles north, south, east, and west gives about a 16-square-mile response area. They’re flying as the crow flies, so they can get there quickly and see what’s going on.”

That saves time and money.

“One of the responses I love to talk about is one that is kind of silly, but we got a call to help a woman who was unconscious in a parking lot at a Little Caesars. We were able to get the drone there in 60 seconds and find out that not only was she not unconscious, but she was eating pizza—with pepperoni. It’s a silly story but it illustrates the point that within 60 seconds we were able to cancel the police department, the fire department, and the ambulance because we were quickly able to find out that there wasn’t anything going on.”

Skyfire has been working with the Huntsville Police Department since December 2024. The program is set up in the crime center of the headquarters building.

Retired military helicopter pilot Curt Worshek is the director of the North Alabama Multi-Agency Crime Center. The Huntsville area drone program has been in place for more than five years and the agency has 34 drones and 34 certified pilots who keep drones in their vehicles. Under his leadership, the agency began looking at the potential of DFR.

“For us DFR means first eyes on the scene,” Worshek says. “And then using those eyes to provide the information necessary to either apprehend a suspect, protect a citizen, or protect our officers. We were learning that time is really the critical issue. We started working with Skyfire and had two preliminary case studies, which were very effective. In fact, there was one case where we actually caught a thief coming out of a storefront.”

He proposed to the “purse-string holders” that working with Skyfire on DFR was viable. The agency is in the midst of a 12-month study.

“Effectively what we’ve done is hire a civilian company that is responsible for launching and flying the drone. Our operational officer—an experienced sworn police officer—manages the drone, tells it exactly what he needs to look at, and tells it where it needs to go,” Worshek says. “In the case of a domestic violence call, we launched the drone and we were there before the officers were there and we saw a potential subject go into an apartment complex. We called the officers when they got there and because we were watching the scene from in here, we could tell them where he was. And then the suspect ran into the woods and the drone, using night vision, guided the officers to apprehend the suspect.”

Situations like this convinced Worshek of the potential of DFR.

“We got a call from a retail store and the suspect had apparently jumped over the counter and was beating the person behind the counter and stealing. We managed to get a drone there as the suspect was coming out the front door and we were able to guide the officers to his vehicle—as opposed to a crime scene where the evidence was going to be skewed. There is adrenaline, it’s five, six minutes in, and everything changes—the description of the scene, the potential suspect, the vehicle they were driving. But we were able to eliminate all that. Once I saw that happen, I knew the potential was extraordinary.”

At the airport

Sloane made two changes to Skyfire in 2024. One was the move to Huntsville. The other was merging with a company called Echelon AI.

“One of the new things we’ve been working on is the implementation of artificial intelligence, so the pilot can be focused on either flying the aircraft or responding to the incident and the AI can handle some of the workload,” says Sloane. “The officer can call the AI agent and ask questions—like: 'Is the suspect near a school?' 'Do we need to lock down?' 'How quickly can they get to a road, and where should we put roadblocks?' What’s really cool about AI from an aviation perspective is that it makes everything safer because AI has to follow a certain pattern. We use checklists as pilots for a reason—sometimes we forget things. AI is hard-coded to check things.”

SkyfireAI is located on Huntsville International Airport (HSV), the largest commercial airport in Alabama. How SkyfireAI got a building on the airport property is another success story. It’s a small building on a 2,200-acre test facility across the street from the airport. This will be the home of the Rise DFR Village, a multiuse concept meant for agencies of all types to come here and test different drones and software.

“It’s essentially a showroom for public safety drone agencies to come out and put together the right package for them,” Sloane says. “We have a great relationship with Huntsville International Airport. We’ve worked very closely with the FAA and airport management to carve out this box of airspace where we can fly up to 400 feet. We are literally across the street from the airport, but we can do that safely with a lot of coordination.

“I’m a manned aircraft pilot; I fly Cessna 172s and 182s. And it’s really important to me that we make sure that all of the manned aircraft pilots above us know we are here and operating safely.”

SkyfireAI’s relationship with the airport came about through discussions with the mayor’s office and the chamber of commerce. Sloane says the city loved the idea of having a drone presence here that was non-defense related. “There’s lots of drone stuff here, but all DOD related,” he says.

On board with the drone presence at HSV is Kevin Vandeberg, the airport’s chief operating officer. Because of Huntsville’s aviation footprint, many agencies were asking for help in expanding and testing drone first responder technology.

“We had the University of Huntsville, we had federal partners, we had commercial organizations coming to us and saying is there a way the airport could help us do this testing more locally?” he says.

In 2021, the FAA tapped five airports to “test and evaluate technologies and systems that could detect and mitigate potential safety risks posed by unmanned aircraft at and near airports,” according to Section 383 of the 2018 Reauthorization Act. Those airports were Atlantic City International Airport (ACY), New Jersey; Syracuse Hancock International Airport (SYR), New York; Rickenbacker International Airport (LCK), Ohio; Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA), Washington; and Huntsville International Airport in Alabama. Testing began in February 2022 and continued through September 2023.

“I think that really drove a lot of interest,” Vandeberg says. “The FAA was on our airport for multiple years. They flew thousands of operations using drones, drone detection. I think the light bulb went off that this could be a good avenue to supplement the missile defense aviation industries here and drones were the next logical step. We support the activity here 100 percent. Helping support these training activities to give our first responders better tools in their toolkits, we’re very supportive of those activities.”

Sloane sees the opportunities as endless. And Huntsville is the perfect place.

“One of the things that’s super cool about having SkyfireAI located here is we’re one of the very few drone companies here that is not doing the traditional approach to defense aviation. It’s been very exciting for the city, for the airport, for the police department to be able to have a drone company here that’s doing something other than your traditional defense-related drone activity. It’s the next natural evolution of this great aviation community.”

Vandeberg is capping a more than 30-year career at HSV in airport management. “It was natural for us to say we can carve out airspace and support those [drone] kinds of activities here at the airport,” he said. “I think the legacy of Huntsville is that you can come here with an idea, and you can grow it into something big.”

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