01:13:01 · Ty Morse
[01:13:01] S1: and so you just sort of have to break through assumptions sometimes. What's been the evolution of your testing process since end of twenty twenty four to today?
01:13:09 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:13:09] S0: We've gotten wildly better at running testing in the company. So there's a, you know, a few different types of testing. In development, there's like benchtop component level testing that you can do. This is things like measuring the thrust efficiency curves of motors and propellers, and then there's actual, you know, flight testing and trying to replicate the conditions that you expect for the, you know, the product to actually be used in in a test environment and and understand how it performs. You do a lot of testing in development, and then you also do a lot of testing in qualification to ensure that the product is, you know, meeting or exceeding the requirements that you've set and will be reliable. And then there's testing and manufacturing. So there's component level testing along the line to make sure that every component before it gets built into a drone is actually functional, and then end of line testing to to see if the whole system is is is meeting spec. So again, yeah, wide category, we've gotten better at all of it, but I was sort of talking about the like performance, the flight testing in development. We, I think, have good instinct there given our racing background, but it's also an engineering task. So our our our... The person who leads our flight test team, Levi, he's an old friend of mine from drone racing. He's one of the only people in the company who's younger than me, he he runs our flight testing team and does an incredible job at it. But I've also get... I've gotten to see him grow in that role by learning from working with amazing engineers to understand, like, what is the data output they need from a flight test to make the product better. Because a drone racer, you hand them a drone, and you say like, alright, how does this fly? Or like, go fly it and tell me what you think. Be like, yeah, man, it's locked in. It flies on rails. Like, there's just like these terms that are completely useless to engineering. An engineer does not want to hear the drone is
01:15:18 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:15:18] S1: Locked in. [01:15:19] S0: You know, locked in or or not locked in. So we, you know, we we built a team that's much better at at giving, you know, analytical feedback and stuff that's really helpful to engineers, and we test every single day. So we operate out in on the desert, and so our team is able to go from our headquarters to the desert every day, and they actually can stay out in the desert. And so we we just like run... I mean, we're usually testing like three, four, five different things at once and doing it every single day and maximizing the number of sets and reps. [01:16:05] S1: How do you decide to do Archer fiber?
01:16:08 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[01:16:08] S0: So I'd say fiber optic has been one of the bigger development step changes in FPV over the last two years. In many ways, like you look at a an FPV drone from two years ago to one today, a lot of them look really similar. There's small differences, there's things that are tweaks, drones are generally getting a little bit bigger, you know, there's shifted frequencies, but a lot of the technologies also stayed the same. Fiber has been one of those sort of actual significant shifts. So what it enables is operation when you would not be able to sustain a radio link, so that's either in a highly contested jammed environment, or beyond radio line of sight or even, you know, in a tunnel or something like that. So it's still, you know, it's not... It's been a huge factor in Ukraine, but it's not like the majority of missions are being flown with fiber. Fiber's really finicky use and and much more expensive, and it reduces your payload and you need bigger drones. There's a lot of drawbacks, but we saw how important it is as one of the tools in the tool belt, one of the pieces of the complete FPV ecosystem, and what we've been building is a complete FPV ecosystem. So to to do that, we need to have a fiber optic solution, and just like everything else, there is no alternative or no option that doesn't have Chinese components. So we we started working on it, and then we actually found a partner on it to to help move quickly, and so we've, you know, now validated our ultra fiber. It's it's going into production shortly and will be, you know, very important. It will not be the majority of drones that we ship, but it would be, an important percentage of drones that we ship.
01:17:54 · Ty Morse
[01:17:54] S1: One of the things that you really want to work on and scale up is this idea of being able to supply other OEMs and other drone manufacturers with components. How are you kind of thinking about that over the next like year or two?
01:18:10 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
[01:18:10] S0: So I personally care the most about making a drone industrial base that's competitive with China, and making, you know, an American and an allied drone industrial base that's extremely strong. There's two things to balance here for us, like, Neros needs to be in control of our own destiny, which means we need to do a lot of stuff ourselves, and then make a lot of great partnerships. And then there's how can we lift up the entire drone industrial base? That is... That ties in well to needing to build our own components to hit our scale, because then we get to be able to provide those components to other people. So I think, you know, we care a lot about making like the best FPV system and scaling the componentry that goes into those systems, but then there's a lot of shared componentry between FPVs and other types of drones, and eventually we should be doing this high rate manufacturing of sort of all the critical technology that goes into a drone, and being able to to provide that to to other companies as well. Because, you know, we're not gonna go out and make every single type of of platform, and we want to be we want to be lifting, you know, lifts all boats. Right? So if we can, like, both unblock our own supply chain and help other drone companies at the same time, that's that's the win win scenario for, you know, for the country and and for everyone. [01:19:40] S1: How fast do you think you're gonna be able to scale that up?