Meet Jack Elston | Aerospace Engineer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jack Elston and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jack, how does your business help the community?
Black Swift Technologies is recognized for delivering reliable, robust, and highly accurate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) capable of flying scientific payloads in demanding atmospheric environments (high-altitude, arctic, desert, corrosive particulates, and strong turbulence). Its purpose-built scientific aerial platforms are used around the globe for a variety of specialized atmospheric research missions in extreme conditions, including monitoring and assessing wildland fires, volcanoes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. In many of these observation campaigns we’re either gathering data from an area never before sampled, or providing the kind of routine data that’s hard to come by, but very necessary for improving models. It’s these improved models that can provide advance warning to help save lives and property.

What should our readers know about your business?
Black Swift literally started in my living room.  At the time, the other co-founder and I had just finished up the tornado chasing research at CU and were unhappy with the state of the autopilot ecosystem.  Most were DoD heritage, which made them hard to obtain and generally expensive.  Plus their antiquated interfaces made them hard to setup and use.  So we set out to build a better autopilot system.  At that point what would become the dronecode effort was still several disparate university projects and there weren’t any commercial options – so we built everything from the ground up ourselves, including hardware, control algorithms and the user interface.  We had success with early customer adoption, and had the opportunity to integrate our systems with several platforms.  Part of what set us apart was our in-depth understanding of UAS, which was constantly tested.  One of our early customers had us integrate our autopilot system into his aircraft – and then took us out for a flight test to make sure our system was robust before buying anything further.  Having been a national champion remote control glider pilot, he was more than capable of putting the aircraft into bad situations, and to our delight the autopilot always did what it was supposed to, recovering the aircraft from any number of inverted, over-speed and otherwise unexpected situations.

Unfortunately, given integrating autopilot systems isn’t incredibly simple, we ended up having to provide levels of support that ate through our margins.  So, when we received funding from NASA to develop a UAS version of a soil moisture sensor we took that opportunity to design our own aircraft, which became the S2 UAS.  From there, we’ve used many different projects spanning everything from volcano observations to wildfire overflights and arctic atmospheric sampling to continue to develop our technology portfolio, eventually producing a commercially successful line of aircraft and sensor suites.  Our expertise continues to be in demand, and we’re developing a lot of great new technologies, including even designing a glider for the upper atmosphere of Venus.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Boulder is all about the outdoors – not to be missed are the available biking, hiking, and climbing experiences. No trip is complete without a trip to Chautauqua, and there are many other miles of trails to explore based on the level of interest. Obviously Pearl street would be a common evening destination, and there are several great rooftops like Avanti, The Rio, The West End, and Rosetta Hall. Generally there’s something going on from Buffs sporting events to seasonal festivals and even tube to work day that shouldn’t be missed – and if you’re headed to a basketball game, the Dark Horse is certainly a great base of operations. There are other hidden gems not to be missed scattered all throughout town like Southern Sun and their great beer selection and Wapos up North with their amazing atmosphere, food and service.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Being a small business, we owe a lot of our initial success to both the great Boulder startup community as well as the opportunities afforded through great programs like the small business innovative research grants, and the Colorado OEDIT advanced industries grants.

Website: https://bst.aero

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2545189

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlackSwiftTech

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackSwiftTechnologies

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTstBNVXx-_lIV_duY34xeQ