What Would The World Miss if Vigilant Aerospace Systems Didn’t Exist?

There are moments in people's lives that feel less like decisions and more like turning points. For the team at Vigilant Aerospace Systems, that moment arrived when CEO Kraettli L. Epperson met Ricardo Arteaga, a patent inventor, and long-time researcher focused on flight safety and autonomy at NASA Armstrong in California. Ricardo had developed a patent that would form the very backbone of what Vigilant builds today. Vigilant licensed that patent, then a second patent adding radar to the innovation, signing a formal research agreement with NASA, then real-world flight tests in the desert airfield at NASA Armstrong. Kraettli also co-authored a couple of NASA research papers with Ricardo while simultaneously launching the company. It was a whirlwind and only the beginning.

What has emerged since is a journey of constant evolution through multiple product iterations and shifting regulations, across an industry that transformed from a niche specialist's playground into a booming commercial frontier. Today, Vigilant has four product versions on the market for different kinds of users, and its leadership has spent time on technical standards committees and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulatory bodies, helping shape the very rules governing autonomous aviation in the United States (US).

The Problem That Needed Solving

Before Vigilant existed, there was a significant and largely unaddressed gap in the drone industry: The glaring absence of an independent, comprehensive, effective detect-and-avoid (DAA) system that could be adapted to any uncrewed aircraft. There were numerous companies that put together bits and pieces of the whole picture or systems for their own unique model of aircraft, but Vigilant was the first to assemble all of the pieces into a single, modular product that could be adapted to any aircraft. By integrating software, algorithms, a user interface, and hardware, including autopilot software integration, transponder compatibility, and multiple radar models, the company built one of the few DAA systems that is fully platform agnostic on the market. It knows where the drone is at all times, understands its performance capabilities, and can execute fully autonomous avoidance maneuvers. It is also compliant with key industry technical standards, making it not just innovative, but deployable.

Without Vigilant, companies needing a comprehensive safety system would face the daunting alternative of having to build their own. They would need to source components, integrate them, test the system, and navigate complex certification, a path demanding enormous resources, specialized knowledge, and time. Vigilant has already done that work. And the solution is especially well-suited for larger drones or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) capable of carrying payloads, flying long distances, and delivering meaningful economic value.

The Rule That Saved the Industry

In 2015, the commercial drone industry was an uncertain frontier. Everyone was scrambling to figure out where things were going, what regulations would look like, who the customers would be and whether a market would even materialize. But when Part 107, the FAA rules and regulations for operating commercial small UAS (sUAS,) took effect in 2016, it answered those questions.

According to Kraettli “The reality is that if the FAA’s Part 107 rule had not been published in 2016, not long after we had started this journey, we probably wouldn’t have a company today.” It launched the commercial drone industry, transforming drones from a highly specialized, almost inaccessible industry into something small companies could build on and thrive around. Investment poured in. Public interest surged and use cases in inspection, surveying, agriculture, and public safety had a clear regulatory framework. For Vigilant, Part 107 was the lifeblood that kept the company alive long enough to become what it is today.

Built to Run 24/7

One of Vigilant's standout achievements is the large-scale airspace management system it operates for the Oklahoma Air and Spaceport at Burns Flat in western Oklahoma. This system is a national showcase and one of the largest privately operated airspace surveillance systems in the U.S. and is built on the company’s FlightHorizon TEMPO service. The system today displays live aircraft tracks from multiple radars and transponders, real-time weather data, 3D maps, and color-coded airspace classes, all running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It looks seamless. It looks effortless.

What it doesn't show is the months of painstaking work that went into getting radars properly positioned, correctly configured, and capable of tracking everything flying around an active UAS testing range and one of only 14 commercial spaceports in the entire nation. Now that the system is in place and sending data to Vigilant's servers, it can support the full spectrum of airspace activity. It just works. And that, quietly, is one of the company's proudest accomplishments.

The "No" That Became a Centerpiece

In early 2024, Vigilant had made a strategic pivot by shifting most of its effort toward ground-based airspace management systems. The market was moving in that direction, and the company followed, sensibly, intelligently, and with eyes on where the demand was growing. Then the US Air Force called and needed an onboard DAA system for a new, classified drone under development. Drone warfare had emerged as a major global concern almost overnight, and the U.S. needed to maintain its competitive edge in autonomous aerial technology. Taking on the project meant returning to onboard DAA development, which presented real technical challenges given the available sensor hardware.

Vigilant accepted the challenge anyway and now, the FlightHorizon PILOT onboard DAA system is one of the most compelling elements of the company's sales pitch. It's a reminder that sometimes the best opportunities arrive wearing the most inconvenient packaging.

The Silent Innovation Nobody Sees

Ask Vigilant what piece of their technology they wish more people understood, and the answer comes without hesitation: the target correlation and de-duplication engine at the heart of FlightHorizon.

When ten sensors of various types and update rates all hit a server simultaneously with hundreds of target and track messages, the coordination problem is immense. Multiple sensors may detect the same aircraft at the same time. Some detections may actually be your own drone, which need to be matched back to the flight controller's tracking data. Every target must be run through complex statistical, geometric, and recursive filtering calculations to eliminate duplicates and determine what's real. Then for the remaining targets, the system still needs to run a trajectory predictor, calculate potential conflicts, and generate resolution advisories if a collision risk is detected. This is the silent innovation that makes DAA possible. When a multi-sensor airspace picture resolves cleanly on a screen without clutter or confusion, it looks like magic. That's because, in a very real sense, it is.

The Case Against DIY

Vigilant has effectively saved clients millions of dollars by offering a streamlined, fixed-fee annual subscription model for airspace management and detect-and-avoid systems that deliver on their promise.

Building your own system is expensive, risky, and slow. It means sourcing untested components, cobbling them together, doing technical integration, or relying on teams of people watching multiple screens to alert remote pilots via radio or cell phone when something goes wrong. It's fragile and costs far more than it needs to. Vigilant's pitch is straightforward: Before you commit to that road, make a 20-minute call. It might save you a fortune.

A Historic Flight Along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline

If there's one story that captures the spirit of what Vigilant does and the extremes it's willing to go to in order to prove its technology works, it's the Trans-Alaska Pipeline flight. In May 2021, near Fairbanks, Alaska, Vigilant deployed its onboard detect-and-avoid system in one of the most remote and demanding environments imaginable. With seven photographers watching, a drone carrying a radar and transponder, all connected to Vigilant's flight computer, took off and traveled for miles along the pipeline. The team was cautioned to be mindful of bears on the way to and from the test site.

It was one of the first commercial Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flights in the United States, part of an FAA project designed to test the limits of what autonomous drone safety systems could do. The system performed. It detected and tracked aircraft from miles away using only its onboard equipment. It was a historic milestone for the UAS industry and Vigilant was at the center of it.

Safety is a System

Vigilant's motto, ‘There's no autonomy without autonomous safety’, though visibly simple, encapsulates a truth that the drone industry has consistently struggled to internalize.

Time and again, conversations with potential buyers reveal a critical blind spot. People buy a radar and assume they've solved their safety problem, or they invest in a camera system and believe that's enough. Vigilant constantly fights this myth.

Effective airspace safety requires software integration, systems thinking, a clear operational plan, and an end-to-end solution that turns raw sensor data into actionable, automated safety decisions. The reality is that safety is a layered system and not a single purchase. An effective safety solution needs to know where the aircraft is at all times. It needs to understand the aircraft's available performance envelope. It needs to calculate a well-clear distance and execute a compliant avoidance maneuver when necessary. Without all of those pieces working together, you don't have a safety system. You have an expensive component with nowhere to go.

Vigilant started this conversation and keeps having it. The team has seen too many organizations wing it, spending enormous amounts of time and money without a coherent plan, ending up with a system that doesn't work and a team that doesn't know how to use it The lucky organizations are those who hear it before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on hardware they can't operationalize. Getting companies to think about safety as a complete, integrated process rather than a single purchase has been one of Vigilant's most important and underappreciated contributions to the industry.

Advice for Those Just Starting Out

The advice from Kraettli to anyone entering the drone or autonomous aviation space today is to know your customer specifically. Quantify your market before you've committed to a product. This is an early stage, fast-changing industry where the difference between thriving and failing often comes down to how clearly you can answer: "Who am I selling to, and what exactly are they buying?" In Kraettli’s own words, “You need to be sure that you know who you’re going to sell to and what you’re going to sell as early as possible and then deliver a prototype as quickly as possible to establish proof of concept and viability. Be sensitive to your customer’s available budget and to the actual regulatory need that must be fulfilled so you don’t end up engineering an “exquisite solution” that nobody needs or can afford.”

What the World Would Miss

So what would the world miss if Vigilant didn't exist? It would miss the company that first assembled all the pieces of a detect-and-avoid system into a single, modular, aircraft-agnostic product. It would miss the organization that flew one of the first commercial BVLOS missions in the United States and proved that onboard autonomous safety was real and ready. It would miss the team that built the most sophisticated multi-sensor data fusion engine in the drone safety space and made it look effortless. It would miss the voice in regulatory and standards committees pushing for an industry infrastructure that prioritizes safety alongside innovation.

Most of all, it would miss the company that keeps asking the harder question. "Do you actually have a safety system? Or did you buy a sensor?". Vigilant plans on asking the question until the entire industry can answer yes.

That is what Vigilant Aerospace Systems is. And that is exactly what the world would miss.