Hartford Business Journal

By Matt Pilon mpilon@hartfordbusiness.com A growing push by the U.S. government to stem the market domi- nance of Chinese-made drones over espionage concerns is creating a business op- portunity in downtown Hartford. Barry Alexander, a longtime pilot and flight instructor who has worked for cargo airlines based in Florida and New York, has big plans for Aquiline Drones, which he hopes will become a major drone manu- facturer and provider of related services and technology, mainly for commercial and government buyers. He formed the company last year and is now readying product launches and expansion in 2020. The 51-year-old Newington resi- dent is CEO and majority sharehold- er of the privately held company, which he said has raised more than $1 million in equity investments from 30 investors, including fel- low pilots. The funding will get the company through at least one year of operations, Alexander said. Aquiline recently inked a downtown Hartford lease, which starts Feb. 1, for the 16th and 17th floors of the Stark Building at 750 Main St., where the company has been renting a smaller third-floor space since last year. Its 15-employee team — which includes Chief Strategic Advisor Brooks Bash, a retired three-star Air Force lieutenant general who was recently president of a Florida-based cargo airline — is expected to more than double this year, as the compa- ny readies to launch its first prod- uct, a cloud-computing network dedicated specifically to drones. The network, dubbed the "Aqui- line Drone Cloud," will allow drone users to store photos and video, but also offer other specialized features like "geofencing," which warns drone operators when their unmanned aerial vehicles approach a restricted boundary (like an airport), Alexander said. It will also support software applications, including from third parties, that analyze or map bridges, construction sites, wind turbines and various other infrastructure. "When we start building apps on our cloud, you will end up with some higher level of autonomy where you can oper- ate the drone without basically any [hu- man] input," said Alexander, who has hired network architects and others to help build the cloud offering, which he estimated will be priced at around $199 per year for a standard package. This year, Alexander also intends to manufacture customized drones for various com- mercial uses, which might include firefight- ing, heavy-asset inspection, oil aerial ranching, law enforcement and border sur- veillance. Those drones will be created by Aquiline with specialized 3D printers, first in its expanded Stark Building space, and later, potentially, in a larger Bridge- port factory Alexander says he's eyeing for lease. Aquiline plans to use high-end 3D printers built by Califor- nia-based Carbon, which has worked with Adidas and Ford to print product parts. Aquiline has one Carbon printer in the Stark Building, with plans to add two more this year. Carbon is trying to shift 3D print- ing from a prototyping to a mass- production technology. Alexander also plans to launch a "drone-on-demand" rental service, he said. Bash, the retired general who start- ed working for Aquiline last year, said there's a gap for companies that want to use drones but don't want to deal with the complex federal regulations governing how they can be flown. That's why an on-demand service could be popular. "Once you get past hobbyists, there's Who is Barry Alexander? B arry Alexander has major ambitions to build a large- scale drone manufacturing company in downtown Hartford, but he's not a household name in the business community. A licensed airplane and helicopter pilot, Alexander has flown Boeing 747 jets, mostly recently for Atlas Air, and has worked as a flight in- structor as well as an aircraft-main- tenance technician, including for aircraft manufacturer Bombardier. He was previously director at the Hartford Jet Center, a fixed-based operator at Hartford-Brainard Airport. He has also dabbled in entrepre- neurship, founding one company that offered web design and de- velopment of prepaid debit card programs, and another — BLM En- terprises — that offers construction and project-management services. BLM remains active. Alexander made headlines in the late 1990s when he was working as a construction contractor and was arrested for felony larceny stemming from a scheme that, according to the Hartford Courant, bilked approximately $200,000 from Hartford Neigh- borhood Cen- ters, a nonprofit that operates a summer day camp for low- income youth. In 1996 and 1997, Alexander and Lois Stevenson, who at the time was a Hartford Neighborhood Centers board member with control of its capital-projects account, steered phantom or inflated contracts to Alexander Construction for improve- ments at the camp, most of which were never completed, according to the Courant. The prosecutor portrayed Steven- son as the scheme's mastermind, and she ultimately received a steep- er sentence than Alexander, who got a six-year prison sentence, suspend- ed after 60 days time served. He also got five years of probation and community service, according to the Courant. In 2005, he successfully applied High Hopes Newington pilot has grand aspirations for Hartford drone startup Barry Alexander (right), CEO of Aquiline Drones, with his chief strategic advisor, Brooks Bash, a retired Air Force lieutenant general in Aquiline's Stark Building offices in downtown Hartford. HBJ PHOTO | MATT PILON 22 Hartford Business Journal • January 27, 2020 • www.HartfordBusiness.com Barry Alexander, Founder, Aquiline Drones

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