ROME, New York — Griffiss International Airport was once a cornerstone of Cold War deterrence, serving as a base for the U.S. Air Force’s biggest bombers. Now something smaller is taking flight over its runways: the next generation of drones.
The airport is one of seven sites across the country designated by the Federal Aviation Administration for testing unmanned aerial systems, and local officials say the much smaller aircraft are helping rejuvenate an aerospace sector that once flourished here in Central New York.
More than 2,600 test flights have taken off from the Griffiss tarmac since 2014, according to officials from Nuair, the nonprofit organization that manages the site. They include everything from smaller drones designed to pollinate crops to a four-seat, twin-engine aircraft that operated without a pilot.
As private companies test unmanned aerial systems for delivering goods, Nuair’s team at Griffiss is helping develop technology that will let drones automatically detect and avoid other aircraft, as well as systems that will remotely identify them to law enforcement and air-traffic controllers.
“The concept behind it is not only to test future technologies for unmanned aerial systems, but to operationalize and commercialize that technology,” Nuair CEO Mike Hertzendorf said.
Mr. Hertzendorf said he expects testing to accelerate in 2020. The organization recently completed work on a 50-mile test corridor that stretches between Griffiss and the city of Syracuse, allowing for longer flights. Officials hope to fly a 500-pound drone across the entire airspace later in the spring. The flight path will let researchers see how drones perform over rural and suburban landscapes as well as a major highway.
Data from these flights will help the FAA develop a traffic-management system and loosen the strict regulations currently in place for commercial uses of unmanned aerial systems. Current FAA rules allow for commercial drones that weigh less than 55 pounds, operate below 400 feet and at speeds of 100 mph or less and remain within the pilot’s visual line of sight. Pilots must be licensed, and operations over urban areas are restricted.
Individuals and companies can apply for waivers to operate drones outside those parameters—particularly the line-of-sight requirement. United Parcel Service Inc. received FAA approval to ship medical products and specimens in North Carolina across various hospital campuses. Wing, a division of Google parent Alphabet Inc., was allowed to conduct package delivery in a mostly rural part of Virginia.
The test sites have a blanket exemption from the requirements that allow companies to test their products while they apply for FAA waivers. Flytrex, an Israeli company, won approval to do food deliveries in North Carolina after testing at Griffiss.
The tests at Griffiss are the product of years of effort by business leaders as well as local and state officials. In 1993, the Defense Department announced it would cease most operations at the base as part of a larger realignment.
Oneida County, which includes the cities of Rome and Utica, eventually took over the airfield and began soliciting private companies to locate there. It is still home to an aerospace defense command center and a division of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory that specializes in communications and cybersecurity.
Both Oneida and Onondaga County, which includes Syracuse, have a history in defense electronics. General Electric had major radar manufacturing plants in Utica and just outside Syracuse in Liverpool. Lockheed Martin Corp. now operates the Liverpool plant. Saab AB, a Swedish aerospace and defense company, makes radars and other defense products east of Syracuse in DeWitt.
The FAA solicited proposals for test sites in 2012, and Nuair was formed by CenterState CEO, a Syracuse-based economic development organization, at the urging of the companies and area universities.
CenterState President Robert Simpson said he believed unmanned aerial systems are the logical next step for the region.
“There is a very clear core competency in central New York that was built around sensing technologies and various applications for sensing technology,” he said.
Mr. Simpson and other local officials won $500 million of state economic development funding in a 2015 contest and have dedicated half of it to seeding the drone industry. The state spent $30 million on radar and sensing infrastructure necessary for the new test corridor between Griffiss and Syracuse, and in 2017 announced it would spend $30 million to incentivize Saab to move its North American headquarters to Onondaga County.
The funds have also paid for a competitive business-accelerator program, called GeniusNY, that has attracted more than two dozen companies focusing on unmanned aerial systems to the area. Most are located in a business incubator in downtown Syracuse fashioned from a former parking garage.
On a recent day at the incubator, employees of one company played Ping-Pong during a lunch break while Craig Marcinkowski, senior vice president of the Swiss company Fotokite, showed off the company’s tethered-camera system. It is being marketed to fire departments, and Mr. Marcinkowski is building out the firm’s North American operations from Syracuse.
Syracuse University this year launched the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute to develop courses on the regulatory, technical and social issues that arise from unmanned aerial systems. The school plans to launch a major in the fall of 2020. Local community colleges are also offering courses.
Back at Griffiss, Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente Jr. said he could remember the ever-present din of the heavy bombers and tankers that were once stationed there. He hopes the confluence of Nuair’s testing, the Air Force lab and new companies will create economic opportunity.
“When it comes to aviation, this community and this area looks to the skies,” Mr. Picente said. “Other neighborhoods might look to them as noise, people here look to it as progress and continuing growth.”
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