America’s Biggest Civil Helicopter Maker Is Plotting Its Next Act: Drones

The country’s largest non-military chopper maker by numbers sold is branching into smaller fare.

Robinson Helicopter has acquired Ascent AeroSystems, a maker of small drones based in the Boston suburb of Wilmington, for an undisclosed price. Robinson CEO David Smith plans to quickly scale up the ability to manufacture hundreds of Ascent drones a month at the 51-year-old company’s Los Angeles-area factory.

He’s eyeing a large potential customer: the Pentagon, which launched an ambitious initiative called Replicator last August to build thousands of autonomous systems in the next two years, aiming to counter China’s homefield advantage of larger numbers of troops and weapons in a potential war over Taiwan. Smith and Ascent CEO Peter Fuchs told Forbes they hope that Robinson’s decades of manufacturing experience will appeal to Defense Department officials against the backdrop of a domestic drone industry in which most companies are producing at low volumes.

“We will have a unique value proposition that goes right at what the Replicator program is trying to solve,” said Smith.

Along with scaling up drone production, Smith sees the acquisition as an opportunity to bring Ascent’s autonomous flight technology to Robinson helicopters. He also plans to sell drones kitted out with surveillance gear to police departments that are already Robinson customers.

Smith envisions using Robinson police helicopters as motherships to carry Ascent drones to the scene of incidents, where police would launch them while airborne and supervise them from the chopper. The aim is to provide unmanned teaming and a cheaper means of extending aerial surveillance capabilities at a time when public safety agencies’ budgets have fallen from pandemic-era stimulus-fueled highs, said Smith. “It’s more cameras, more sensors, more communication capability, and the ability for that to be cleverly fused into a user interface that doesn’t overly tax the tactical flight officers or crew,” he said.

Ascent makes slim, cylindrical drones propelled by coaxial counter-rotating rotors, a means of propulsion first widely used in Soviet military helicopters. Ascent claims this design results in aircraft that are 75% smaller and 50% lighter than a comparable quadcopter. And because of their smaller size they can fly twice as fast and four times as far, with twice the payload, the company says.

Amid worries over the security risks of Chinese-made commercial drones like those from market leader DJI, Ascent’s Spirit is among a small number of aircraft vetted by the Department of Defense for use by U.S. government agencies. Fuchs says Spirit is priced from $20,000.

But so far it has yet to win big orders. Ascent has nabbed $2.1 million in publicly announced federal contracts since 2017, most notably a $1.1 million award last year from the Army to develop a squad-level recon drone.

Fuchs claims Ascent has more business that it can’t disclose, but he acknowledged that the company needed a “reset” that forced him to lay off half of his staff in 2023.

Fuchs says Ascent could have continued independently but he and cofounder Nathaniel Meringer realized that prospective customers would doubt the company could execute on a large order.

Enter Robinson.

The company was founded in 1973 by Frank Robinson, an engineer who saw space in the market for smaller, more affordable helicopters.

As a private company, Robinson doesn’t release its revenues, but in 2023 it delivered 296 helicopters to customers that were worth $221 million, according to the General Aircraft Manufacturers Association. (Textron division Bell shipped 171 helicopters last year. With a larger, higher-priced lineup, they were worth $799 million.)

While Robinson’s deliveries have risen steadily since the pandemic nadir of 177 in 2020, the helicopter market overall has been soft for 15 years. Robinson’s deliveries peaked in 2008 at 806. In 2015, Robinson said it had the capacity to produce 1,000 helicopters a year.

For a company that prides itself on vertical integration – Robinson makes 85% of the components in its top-of-the-line, five-seat R66 helicopter – the expansion into drones could be a way to make use of plant capacity, said the aviation consultant Brian Foley.

“It gets more square feet of the factory busy,” he said.

Smith said Robinson’s factory is plenty busy – the problem is more one of labor shortages, as is the case throughout the aerospace industry. So one element of the combination that Smith finds attractive is the possibility of integrating the manufacture of Ascent drones in a way that will generate significant volume with just a small increase in headcount. There is some overlap in the parts and materials used to make Robinson’s helicopters. And this, he said, will help the company to quickly ramp production of Ascent’s existing drones to hundreds per month in the next 12 to 24 months.

“We’ve heard from customers that if we had them on the shelf or if we could deliver them within a 60-day period, that would be a deal maker.”

But Caitlin Lee, a researcher at the think tank RAND who tracks Pentagon technology acquisition, told Forbes that at this stage of the Replicator program, manufacturing capability isn’t the issue. Drone makers are lacking basic information as to what the Defense Department wants.

“The question is what missions these UAVs need to do,” she wrote in an email. Defining the mission will tell industry what range, speed and payloads are required, as well as giving a direction to software development.

“The U.S. government hasn’t yet sent a clear demand signal for these UAVs,” Lee said.