WILMINGTON, Del. — A 2016 report from PwC priced the emerging global market for business services using drones at $127 billion. Drone sales are expected to eclipse $12 billion in 2021, a Business Insider report suggested in August.
There’s a startup in Delaware looking to get a piece of the action.
Founded by the husband and wife combination of Theophilus and Suzanne Nix, Drone Workforce Solutions is a drone education, training and staffing company that just graduated its first class of 12 pilots in December thanks to a grant from the Department of Labor.
The business, ran out of the Emerging Enterprise Center on the Wilmington riverfront, has added a second school in New Jersey and has its sights set on much more than 12 students at a time.
“What we want to grow this into is to be the premier staffing placement company for drone operators in the country,” said CEO Theo Nix, a lawyer by trade whose day job involves providing counsel to DowDuPont.
The 10-week program offered by Drone Workforce Solutions involves totals around 70 hours of education. In that, there are 14 hours of on-site flying, around 10 hours of data editing, which shows students how to edit and create images captured by their flying drones. Instruction is also offered on compliance with the various rules for flying drones in accordance with the Federal Aviation Administration.
Time is also devoted to teaching students how to build a drone from scratch and about the parts that makeup the pilotless aircrafts.
“We want them to understand what this machine does so when things happen they can troubleshoot,” Nix said. “We think they make a better pilot when they can do that.”
