Pacific · Ag · Utility
San Francisco
Bay Area · Central Valley agriculture · PG&E transmission · wine country · Monterey · the Sierra wildfire zone.
Debut · AUVSI XPONENTIAL · Detroit · May 2026
Serious drone networks that solve the BVLOS dead zone .
Autonomous, long-range fixed-wing aircraft. 100+ mile range. Part 108 ready. Manned-aircraft-quality sensor payloads. Networked and integrated with the systems you already run — so pipeline, utility & rail, and agriculture are finally addressable.
ALT 375 GS 58 HDG 094°
FIRST FLIGHT · MAY 2026
Droneforce™ 55 · Multiple patents pending
100+ mi
BVLOS range
Satellite
Global C2 link
Part 108
Ready by design
Full bore
Sensor payload
The Thesis
Our sweet spot is where the market wants to fly. Almost no one else can.
Between short-range delivery drones and Group 3+ military platforms sits a 60–185 mile band of US airspace incumbents can’t economically cover — the BVLOS dead zone. It’s the Droneforce™ sweet spot. Long-range BVLOS used to require heavy SATCOM or fragile terrestrial radio. A new generation of satellite connectivity collapsed that barrier: lightweight, global, commercial-cost C2 and data backhaul. The middle just became economically tractable. One aircraft unlocks the corridor; a networked Droneforce™ fleet turns BVLOS from a project into infrastructure.
Range band · mi 0 — 250+
Consumer quadcopters
0-4 mi
Short-range delivery
4-15 mi
Hand-launch tactical
15-60 mi
SWEET SPOT
60-185 mi
Droneforce™
sweet spot
sweet spot
Group 3+ strategic
185+ mi
100 miles, drawn
What a 100-mile radius actually covers.
Range is abstract. A radius on a map is not. From any operating base, Droneforce™ reaches anything inside a 100-mile circle — persistently, autonomously, without ground-based radio infrastructure. And because satellite coverage reaches everywhere, mission command runs from any desk on Earth — San Francisco, Houston, Detroit, or wherever the operator happens to be.
Gulf Coast · Energy
Houston
Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor · Port of Houston pipelines · East Texas oil & gas · Beaumont refining belt.
Great Lakes · Industrial
Detroit
Great Lakes rail corridors · Michigan agriculture · southern Ontario gas infrastructure — and, from the XPONENTIAL floor, the length of Michigan’s linear infrastructure network.
Coverage
A handful of networked aircraft. A whole region covered.
100+ mile range per aircraft stacks into continuous coverage along the corridors that matter. One networked Droneforce™ fleet covers a multi-state pipeline end-to-end — deconflicted and scheduled by Droneforce One, integrated with the systems your operations team already uses.
Illustrative · ~1,500-mile pipeline system · 15 networked bases · 100+ mi range each
Platform
Purpose-built for the missions the market can’t fly today.
An autonomous fixed-wing airframe engineered to manned-aircraft reliability and safety standards. Designed around a simple premise: if the aircraft can’t stay aloft long enough, reach far enough, and carry the right sensor, the data doesn’t exist. Every subsystem — airframe, propulsion, autonomy, payload, link — is engineered toward that outcome.
Electric Jet Propulsion
Quieter, simpler, safer than exposed props.
The electric jet is shrouded, self-contained, and quieter than an open rotor. Neighborly overhead for the communities below — and low signature when the mission requires it. Safer on the ground for lightly trained crews and bystanders.
Payload Bay
Generous envelope. Full bore sensors and special mission loadouts.
Methane LiDAR, hyperspectral imagers, mapping-grade LiDAR. Most small UAS can lift the weight. Few can fit the sensor — or accept diverse mission loadouts.
- BVLOS Range
- 100+ mi
- Propulsion
- Electric Jet
- C2 / Data Link
- Satellite · primary
- Edge Compute
- AI/ML · on-board
- Software Platform
- Droneforce One · open APIs
- Regulatory Path
- Part 108 ready · BlueUAS by design
- Sensor Payload
- Manned-aircraft-quality (EO/IR, multispectral, LiDAR)
- Mission Profile
- Corridor inspection · ISR · area coverage
Applications
The missions that keep critical systems running.
Pipeline, power, farmland, infrastructure — the operations the country actually runs on. Droneforce™ delivers persistent autonomous coverage at distances and economics that no previous generation of commercial platform could match.
Phase 1 · Immediate
Pipeline Integrity
Persistent corridor inspection for oil, gas, and utility rights-of-way. Automated anomaly detection, geo-referenced reporting, and revisit cadences the crews you have today can’t match.
- ROW patrol at scale
- Leak & encroachment detection
- Turnkey reporting pipeline
Phase 1 · Immediate
Precision Agriculture
Multispectral and EO/IR mission profiles across large acreage. Crop health indices, irrigation stress mapping, and season-long temporal stacks — at the revisit frequency the crop actually needs.
- Large-block acreage
- NDVI / multispectral capture
- Stand-count and yield maps
Phase 2 · Mid term
Utility & Rail Corridors
Pipeline, utility transmission, and rail are three expressions of the same capability — linear BVLOS corridor inspection with real-time data backhaul. Same aircraft, same Droneforce One software stack, new operators. The missions helicopters used to fly, at a cadence and cost profile that matches how fast the asset actually changes.
- Transmission & distribution rights-of-way
- Rail corridor inspection
- Real-time data backhaul
Separate program
Droneforce 55 HP
The Droneforce 55 HP is a higher-performance airframe for demanding missions which can also be tailored to serve US defense operations. Distinct program, supply chain, and a dedicated team.
Outputs
What actually lands in your system.
Data from a networked Droneforce™ fleet, integrated with the systems you already run — keyed to the assets you already manage, delivered into the tools your operations team already uses.
Pipeline
Methane, encroachment, erosion — segment-keyed.
Methane concentration maps, right-of-way encroachment alerts, and exposure / erosion flags. Severity-ranked, tagged to your pipeline segment IDs. Engineered to deliver via Droneforce One’s API into the GIS, SCADA, and reporting workflows your operations team already uses.
Instead of helicopter video a technician has to transcribe.
Precision Agriculture
Prescription maps, at crop-calendar cadence.
Multispectral and thermal at whole-farm scale every week, not every satellite pass. Zone-level prescription maps designed for variable-rate application systems. Season-long temporal stacks engineered to surface yield-delta alerts when a zone diverges from its baseline.
Instead of satellite imagery that’s three days late and weather-gated.
Utility & Rail
A living defect register, asset by asset.
Thermal hotspots, corona, hardware defects, and vegetation-clearance metrics — every tower or mile-marker, ranked by failure risk. Engineered to deliver structured records ready for your asset-management and CMMS systems.
Instead of aircraft video a crew has to watch and transcribe.
And you don’t have to be there.
Live mission view from any desk. In-flight retasking as the operation evolves. Designed so the operator doesn’t need to be in the field — just connected.
Droneforce One · live mission view
01 Pipeline Integrity
Deep Dive
What manned patrols do. Without the pilot.
Linear inspection is a corridor problem, not an area one. A 100-mile range aligns with pipeline geometry — but payload is the real unlock.
The Droneforce™ sweet spot
A single airframe covering a 50–80 mile segment out and back, carrying the gas-detection stack a corridor inspection actually needs — without relocating ground crews. Today, that combination means a manned aircraft, complexity, and handoffs. A networked Droneforce™ fleet is flexible, integrated with your integrity-management systems, an extension of your field team, and autonomous on the cadence you set.
Payload advantage
The methane LiDAR that wouldn’t fit on anything else.
Serious methane-detection payloads are heavy. The commercial-drone category can’t lift one — which is why pipeline operators have stayed with manned aircraft, and why revisit cadence keeps stretching past what PHMSA would actually prefer. The Droneforce 55 closes that gap: methane-mapping LiDAR alongside high-resolution RGB and thermal, on the revisit schedule you want — without aircrew.
Where it wins
Operational, not transactional.
- vs. manned fixed-wing Routine revisit cadence, unmanned, no aircrew scheduling.
- vs. helicopters Same sensor quality, unmanned.
- vs. satellite methane monitoring Pinpoint source resolution, on-demand tasking, not weather-gated.
- vs. standard commercial drones The category can’t lift a real methane LiDAR. This is the unlock.
02 Utility & Rail Corridors
Deep Dive
What the helicopter does. Without the helicopter.
Transmission corridors run hundreds of miles. Range meets the corridor; payload makes the sweep worth making.
On rail corridors Track geometry and rail flaw detection require on-rail contact, so aerial complements rather than replaces them. The same platform adds value for ROW vegetation, post-incident rapid assessment, bridge and culvert inspection, and washout-risk monitoring in mountainous terrain.
The Droneforce™ sweet spot
Post-storm damage assessment, where utilities survey hundreds of miles in a few days and helicopter fleets are overwhelmed. Wildfire-risk vegetation management in California and the West, where PSPS (Public Safety Power Shutoff) schedules reward routine corridor sweep. Today, that combination means a flight crew, an aircraft, and a scheduling window. A networked Droneforce™ fleet is flexible, integrated with your outage-response workflow, an extension of your operations center, and either autonomous or operator-directed — your call.
Payload advantage
The full corridor stack, every sortie.
A commercial RGB + thermal inspection gimbal, a corona/UV camera, and a compact LiDAR — the full corridor-inspection stack, simultaneously. Standard commercial drones fly one of these at a time. Manned aircraft carry the whole stack, but crew availability gates the revisit cadence. The Droneforce 55 runs the whole sweep unmanned, on demand.
Where it wins
Across corridor-scale inspection.
- vs. helicopters Autonomous corridor sweep — no crew, no aircraft scheduling.
- vs. ground patrols Orders of magnitude faster over long corridors; no truck rolls.
- vs. short-range inspection drones Corridor sweep, not tower-by-tower. Different job.
- vs. fixed-wing LiDAR survey Same corridor, routine revisit — not once every few years.
03 Precision Agriculture
Deep Dive
What a week of flying does. In one pass.
Range gets the aircraft to the field. Payload determines what the flight is worth.
The Droneforce™ sweet spot
Large-acreage, high-value decisions: variable-rate prescription mapping, insurance loss adjustment across regions, forestry carbon inventory, and precision irrigation planning. The combined range-plus-payload profile turns a week of logistics into a single sortie.
Payload advantage
Sensor stacking and specialty instruments.
Typical ag drones carry a single multispectral camera or an RGB system. The Droneforce 55 can fly a high-resolution RGB camera, a 5–10 band multispectral sensor, a thermal imager, and a hyperspectral pushbroom scanner at the same time. The pushbroom scanner alone has been prohibitively heavy for most drones. Or LiDAR for canopy structure plus a multispectral payload on a single flight — fused 3D and spectral datasets in one pass. Multiple flight days collapse into one mission. Diagnostics like early-stage disease detection, nitrogen stress quantification, and sub-canopy moisture analysis stop being research-grade and become routine output.
Where it wins
Across every alternative.
- vs. satellites Higher resolution, on-demand tasking, cloud-penetrating thermal and LiDAR.
- vs. manned aircraft Whole-farm coverage in one mission, emissions-free, no pilot scheduling.
- vs. standard ag multirotors Orders of magnitude more coverage per flight and richer simultaneous sensor fusion.
- vs. fixed-wing mapping drones Comparable range but much greater sensor flexibility from the payload capacity.
Launch partners · Summer 2026
Three operators. Three missions. One aircraft.
Droneforce™ is selecting a small number of launch-partner operators across our three target segments for integrated pilots beginning Summer 2026. Partners get front-of-line access to the first operational aircraft, direct influence over mission profiles, and the reference-case position as we expand.
01
Energy · Pipeline
Pipeline integrity operator
Oil, gas, or utility rights-of-way requiring persistent BVLOS corridor inspection and automated anomaly reporting.
Slot open · Summer 2026
02
Utility & Rail
Utility or rail operator
Electrical transmission or distribution rights-of-way, or rail corridors, needing BVLOS-scale inspection with real-time data backhaul.
Slot open · Summer 2026
03
Agriculture
Precision-ag operator
Large-block acreage, season-long temporal stacks, multispectral-driven agronomic workflows.
Slot open · Summer 2026
Think your operation fits?
Short application. Discovery conversation. If it’s a fit, you’re on the manifest.
The How
The engineering that makes the rest possible.
Long-range autonomous fixed-wing is an integration problem. These are the four sub-systems we didn’t cut corners on.
01 · Autonomy
Droneforce One mission planning
Automated corridor, grid, and persistent-loiter mission generation. Contingency logic and fail-safe behaviors built in, not bolted on.
02 · Edge
AI/ML on-board
Real-time detection, classification, and geotagging at the airframe. Reduces link bandwidth, accelerates time-to-insight for customers.
03 · Link
Satellite C2 and data
Persistent satellite connectivity for command-and-control and payload downlink. Global coverage without terrestrial radio infrastructure.
04 · Operations
Networked fleet orchestration
Droneforce One schedules, deconflicts, and coordinates a networked fleet across distributed sites. Open APIs let your dispatch, asset-management, and data pipelines talk to the network directly — one integration covers every aircraft.
Compliance
Engineered for next-generation compliance, from the airframe up.
The Droneforce 55’s airframe, avionics, and supply chain are aligned with the commercial BVLOS regulatory path from day one — Part 108, BlueUAS, and the FAA waiver workflow operators actually fly under.
Safety & reliability
Part 108 ready
Engineered to the Part 108 envelope from day one — the FAA framework that holds unmanned BVLOS operations to manned-aircraft safety and reliability standards. Airframe, avionics, and autonomy designed for that bar, not retrofitted to meet it.
Federal civilian eligible
BlueUAS by design
Supply chain, components, and software pipeline architected to satisfy BlueUAS criteria from the first flight. Eligible for federal civilian procurement.
Flight validation path
Test-range engagement
Active coordination with FAA-coordinated test ranges for autonomy, link, and payload validation. Repeatable environment as the program progresses toward operational authorization.
Team
Built by engineers with a generation of American aerospace behind them.
A founding team and advisory bench drawn from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Scaled Composites, NASA, and the US Air Force. The unfair advantage is knowing what not to redesign.
Founder & CEO
Will Lovis
Former Lockheed Martin drone engineer, with a successful mid-career exit already on the board. Multiple years of industry experience across Energy, Utility, and Defense. BS aerospace engineering for the airframe, MS industrial engineering for mass manufacturing and system integration, and an MBA for strategy and commercial execution.
100+ YEARS
Combined aerospace and aviation expertise
5+ PATENTS
Across the founding team and advisory bench
A+ PEDIGREE
Lockheed Martin · Northrop Grumman · Scaled Composites · NASA · US Air Force
Meet us in person
AUVSI XPONENTIAL · Detroit · May 2026
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