Flying high

MicroPilot may not be the largest company in Manitoba, but its reach is one of the most significant.

Apart from the Canadian Wheat Board, MicroPilot may be the only company in the province with customers in 60 countries.

In a small industrial building in Stony Mountain, Howard Loewen and his 19 employees quietly built a company that ranks among world leaders in developing and supplying autopilots for UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, with $3 million to $5 million in annual sales.

The former head of software development at Comcheq, the company his father founded and sold to CIBC, Loewen started MicroPilot out of personal interest long before he identified specific market potential.

"I like flying. I have a pilot's licence. I thought I would see if I could make a model plane that could fly by itself," Loewen said.

By the mid-'90s, Loewen completed most of the groundwork needed to make a product that worked. Fortunately, the company came out just as the Internet was starting to become popular.

"I designed a website and then the phone started ringing," he said. "That is one of the real untold stories of the Internet. A company like ours just would not be able to exist without it. It really is an enabling technology that allows small, specialized niche companies to reach customers everywhere."

Autopiloted UAVs come in all sizes and levels of sophistication -- from the U.S. military's $20-million Predators to glorified model airplanes -- and they are deployed for all sorts of reasons.

Research institutions use autopiloted UAVs to gather data for many types of research. Militaries around the world use them for target practice. MicroPilot loves that because, depending on the excellence of marksmanship, those customers need to keep reordering.

The company imports an inexpensive UAV from a Czech manufacturer, installing MicroPilot's mini autopilot (which weighs less than a pound) and a small camera and sells the unit -- the CropCam -- for about $7,000.

"We are trying to bring the price down a little, but we want to build something that the people in the region can use," said Loewen.

He is promoting the CropCam as an inexpensive and more timely alternative to satellite images for agriculture, forestry, oil and gas, surveys, mapping, land management drainage, environmental and other uses.

The market for UAV autopilots continues to grow, but MicroPilot has relatively few competitors -- a couple of American firms and another in Spain -- and the increasingly complex technology is an imposing barrier to entry in what continues to be very specialized global demand.

Because of North American regulators' indecision as to what sort of airspace to designate for UAVs, it is hard to legally fly a UAV in the U.S. and slightly less so in Canada unless you are the military. Loewen is determined that will not stop his company's success.

"The problem is that there are a whole bunch of recreational pilots out there that use the same airspace that UAVs want to use," Loewen said. "It wouldn't be hard to designate certain altitudes for UAV use, but the recreational pilots are not keen on that, and politically, they are much more powerful."

Recreational pilots use visual flight rules -- maintaining separation from other aircraft by keeping a lookout and knowing where other aircraft are, not via air traffic controllers. UAVs can't see and so some perceive them to be a safety concern.

The regulatory environment is much looser in Europe and Asia, where much of MicroPilot's sales are. But there are a growing number of UAV users in North America who have not let the regulations get in their way.

Loewen is not complaining about that, but it means that most of his customers are so far away -- the closest customer is in Ottawa -- that MicroPilot never has a good sense of its customers' experience with the product. Even though Loewen is shipping his product all over the world, he is not contemplating moving his operations closer to his customer base, wherever that might happen to be.

"Canada and Manitoba has a lot going for it from a business perspective," he said citing, among other things, attractive provincial research tax credits.

His location, just north of the city, is minutes from the airport, making it easy for international customers to visit the plant. Its 40-acre lot complete with a field station is ideal for flight tests with complicated, pre-programmed flight plans in its own backyard.

MicroPilot may not have a lot in common with the province's composite parts manufacturers like Boeing and Bristol Aerospace or the engine and airframe maintenance shops like StandardAero and Aveos, but it holds its own as a global leader in its aerospace niche.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 19, 2009 E2