Airbus Finds More Wind in its Sails in Boeing's Backyard: A Saga of two Aviation Rivals in the Columbia River Gorge

This is an opinion piece. It reflects my views and my views alone.

This is largely written in the format of a first-person account.

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This is too good to not share. Airbus Helicopters has acquired Aerovel. Perhaps that should read “Aerovel has agreed to a takeover offer put forth by Airbus,” but more on that later.

Wow, there is so much to unpack here. Why do I feel compelled to share? On its face, the acquisition is exciting enough, but if you are aware of some of the backstory here, it just gets more and more interesting.

For those not familiar with the old-school timeline and some of the highly ironic roots that underpin this story, allow me to help you out. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

Back in 2008, Boeing bought Insitu, Inc., a little-known manufacturer of group 2 UAS, or drones, positioned in the most unlikely of places, the PNW, along the border of Oregon and Washington. Let’s be fair, back in 2008, if someone had told you the mecca for cutting-edge military drones was headquartered in a little hippy town called Hood River, Oregon, you wouldn’t have believed them. This is, in fact, how I learned of Insitu.

In early 2009, two fellow aircrewman from a sister squadron in Brunswick, Maine described that they were getting out of the Navy to go fly drones as contractors overseas for a company based in Oregon. I remember my initial disbelief quite clearly: I truly thought they had to be ‘on’ something. Mind you, we were at a bar (the Navy way, naturally) so it could have been I thought the booze was doing the talking for them. Months later, I would go on to fly the very same drones produced by the very same company as an active-duty sailor assigned to Naval Special Reconnaissance Team One.

My disbelief be damned, it turns out those two aircrewmen weren’t ‘on’ something. This little company that no one had ever heard of had just been acquired by the world’s largest airplane manufacturer.

For about the next ten years, the growth that Insitu (a Boeing Company) saw was nothing short of exponential. I don’t have hard and fast numbers to offer here, just anecdotal evidence: from my first interactions in 2009 to my last in 2018, the employee count alone went from roughly 300 to 1300+. Pre-acquisition revenues back in 2006 were likely in the tens of millions and by 2018 they were undoubtedly in the 100’s of millions. Sure, one could attribute some tailwinds provided by the deeper pockets of Boeing to fund some of that growth. However, anyone familiar with the revolution in military affairs and the capabilities offered by the Scan Eagle at the time, knows that it was largely driven by the very strong product that the Scan Eagle was.

I must digress, however. The real story here lies in the godfather of the Scan Eagle and Group II UAS: Tad Mcgeer. A PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics, Tad founded Insitu back in 1994 and developed some early drone prototypes that would ultimately lead to the Scan Eagle as a proven system. The Scan Eagle would go on to provide more than one million flight hours in support of the GWOT for U.S. DOD and international customers. He also founded Aerovel in 2006. In 2008, Tad agreed to Boeing’s takeover offer, freeing himself up to pursue his other ventures.

I got out of the Navy in 2012 and started working on Insitu contracts, first as a subcontractor, and then directly for Insitu in 2013. I remember not hearing much about Tad until sometime in 2017, when buzz began brewing about his other start up, Aerovel. The Flexrotor, Aerovel’s leading VTOL UAS, was a game-changer then and still is now by anyone’s standards. And this is where it gets really interesting.

2017-2018 was a pivotal period for the drone industry, and multiple factors came into play during this time. Chiefly, the GWOT was winding down and the ISIS threat had been essentially eliminated. On top of that, innovations largely driven by small startups, like Aerovel and others, began pushing requirements away from traditional clunky launch and recovery contraptions to the more minimalist footprint afforded by VTOL systems. With waning contract vehicles from a lack of full-scale wars, and the absence of innovation efforts by executives towards the VTOL UAS revolution, Insitu began its inevitable “controlled flight into terrain” that you could see coming from miles away; Ground Proximity Warning System engaged.

The Flexrotor advertises itself; no commercials and very little knowledge of aerospace are needed to know what capabilities this can provide. Not only does it perform at the leading edge of VTOL, but due to its fuselage diameter, it can also conveniently utilize existing state-of-the-art (HoodTech) payload imaging systems - already proven through millions of hours of flight time on the Scan Eagle. Insitu holds no exclusive agreements on HoodTech Vision imagers, leaving Aerovel to fully exploit this parts-commonality advantage.

As an old friend who had experience with the Flexrotor once described it to me, “[i]t’s remarkable. I honestly think it’s the most beautifully designed and built UAS in the industry… [i]t’s a f***ing Pagani of UAS.”

Understanding this, it would be foolish to assume that Boeing did not make advances to acquire Aerovel and/or the Flexrotor over the last few years. Located on the same side of the Colombia River Gorge, in Bingen, WA, the two companies have been next-door neighbors for at least the last 17+ years. What they lacked in innovation, Boeing once again likely tried to make up for with bankroll. To no avail apparently.

What is most likely is that Boeing’s advances were repeatedly turned down this time by none other than Tad Mcgeer. One could rightfully speculate that Tad perhaps no longer trusted Boeing leadership to take these exquisite systems in the right direction as was ultimately evidenced by their 2008 takeover of Insitu. Speculative perhaps, but easy to see a thread of the potential rationale on Tad’s part for not succumbing to Boeing this time around.

In perhaps the ultimate irony of this whole saga, Tad agreed to a takeover offer from none other than Boeing’s biggest rival: Airbus. The irony is so thick here, you couldn’t cut through it with a Directed Energy weapon.

The last 5 to 6 years at Boeing have been downright awful. It’s hard to watch at this point. Although it has been perhaps the most painful downfall of an American aviation stalwart with a rich legacy, Boeing rightly deserves every bit of it for their unimaginative thinking and hubris.

Conversely, Airbus deserves its continued success for its willingness to push the boundaries of advancement in modern aviation, through smart acquisitions in differentiated aviation segments, and clearly good business sense.

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