24 “We ended up not hiring any traditional certification experts – they’re incredibly smart people, but to make something both certified and miniaturised, we had to teach ourselves certification,” Ramsey says. “Essentially, we tracked every guideline, and everywhere possible, we challenged what the rulebook said to try and do things our way. We even got directed to our nearest ‘innovative’ Aircraft Certification Office for our configuration management, and they objected to our use of GitHub and cloud-based tools instead of a 15-year-old Microsoft 95 configuration management library. “And since certification requires you to get approval on all design and engineering tools you used along the way, we had to teach them all about GitHub, as well as a bunch of other modern software and hardware tools; quite the exercise!” Circling the future Aside from endlessly miniaturising and re-miniaturising its products, one might expect a day to come when uAvionix is finished innovating new solutions – a day when UAVs, passenger jets, urban air taxis and so on all share airspace with clear visibility, avoidance responsibilities, airspace segregation and traffic management. However, that future remains some way off. Regulatory foot-dragging has forced UAV engineers to keep their systems from interfering with commercial and general aviation, rather than integrating them smoothly. But waning tolerance for invisibility in the air (in the wake of mounting drone-related incidents) is expected to contribute to detailed and clear requirements for BVLOS operations that open vast new possibilities for UAV capabilities. “In terms of what technologies will enable those operations, C2 ought to be a key part of it, but frankly you don’t see a lot of industry investment in the C2 side of things, aside from cellular-related movements by a few players,” Ramsey notes. “The whole idea of longer-range, protected-spectrum C2 links for UAS and Advanced Air Mobility [AAM] vehicles – which is what our SkyLine and C-band [5 GHz] systems are built around, including the cloud-based management portal and ground-based radio networks – still stands out to us as the right path forward for those kinds of operations. “It’ll definitely be a key part of that integrated future; we’re just not totally sure when. It’s a bit of a ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem; the systems have to exist for us to offer them as a service, people want to adopt them in time for the regulations to go live, but the regulations sort of have to exist first so you can feel assured that the systems will be compliant.” Progress in untying this knot (in line with the protected-spectrum approach) can be seen in announcements such as the FCC’s part 88 publication in August 2024, allowing UAV operators to obtain direct frequency assignments in part of the 5030-5091 MHz band. But Ramsey adds that active conversations are ongoing, and uAvionix is thus on the cusp of iterating on the designs of some key C-band products to stay ahead of the curve. “We’ll see if that’s how the UAS industry ends up integrating alongside everything else in the sky; how AAM’s going to work is a whole different question,” Ramsey muses. “To an extent, a transponder is a transponder; plenty of those air taxis you’ve seen at air shows over the past few months could work just as well with our GA tailBeaconX as with our UAV ping200X TSO, but a lot will also be decided based on whether AAM vehicles end up being piloted or unpiloted. “On the less appealing side of things, we’ve had just so many AAM manufacturers come to us asking for incredibly elaborate, customised arrangements of C2, comms, cockpit and other systems, and in nowhere near the volumes necessary to make a profit. “It’s a far cry from how things are going in the UAS industry, where we expect some really exciting NAS news in the years ahead.” August/September 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology In conversation | Christian Ramsey Christian Ramsey graduated from James Madison University in 1996 with a BS in Computer Science. He worked as a software engineer (on training simulation systems for aircraft weapons and maintenance) at Lockheed Martin for the next year, before going on to a 22 year tenure at Rockwell Collins, called NLX Corporation when he joined. While there, he went from continued simulation engineering to eventually heading corporate strategy for product development, also achieving his MBA in Executive Management from George Mason University’s Costello College of Business in 2010. He joined ITT Corporation (later Harris and then L3Harris) in 2011 to lead work on a variety of airport management systems, leading to his movement to uAvionix in 2016 as VP business development. There, he has held a variety of positions, including president and numerous different managing director hats, always with responsibility over strategy and success for its UAS product portfolio (and increasingly over its solutions for crewed aviation too). In addition to having been a pilot in his spare time, Ramsey and his wife occasionally help with softball coaching for their children’s Little League teams. He also functioned as a member of the FAA Drone Advisory Committee from 2020 to 2024. Christian Ramsey
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