As utilities and critical infrastructure operators look to move beyond small-scale drone trials and toward resilient, repeatable UAS and robotics programs, the need for independent, operationally grounded guidance has never been clearer.
In this Q&A, Nathan Ernst, President of The Tactien Group, discusses what joining the Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition Advisory Board means for the firm, how utilities can scale programs beyond proof-of-concept deployments, and why BVLOS operations, collaboration, and realistic budgeting will be central to the next phase of energy infrastructure inspection and response.
What does joining the Energy Drone & Robotics Coalition Advisory Board mean for Tactien Group and its work with utilities and critical infrastructure operators?
Nathan Ernst, President of The Tactien Group.
The board is largely reserved for utility asset owners. It’s where operators talk candidly about what’s working, what’s painful, and what they’re actually getting out of the hardware, software, and aircraft the industry keeps putting in front of them. Tactien doesn’t sell any of that. We’re independent and vendor-neutral by design, which is exactly why the invitation matters. I’m not in the room to move a product. I’m there to help operators separate out the best of what industry offers, and to bring the pattern recognition that comes from working across many operators and use cases instead of inside a single asset owner’s walls.
That unbiased view is the whole point of the firm, and it’s how Tactien furthers what it’s actually after: successful outcomes for the utility and energy industry from the program, regardless of a win for any one vendor. Most of our work is helping these operators stand up complex UAS programs that outlast the Proof of Concept. The board keeps me close to where the friction shows up across the industry, not just inside one client program, and it puts that work in front of a wider audience. I get as much out of the other operators in the room as I hope they get from me.
What perspectives does Tactien Group hope to contribute to the Advisory Board, particularly around scaling drone and robotics programs beyond pilot projects?
The unglamorous part. Many programs stall right after the pilot. The technology performs, everyone’s impressed, and then it quietly dies because nobody owned the step where a successful demo turns into a budgeted, repeatable operation. The bigger the aircraft and the concept of operations, the more expensive that lesson gets.
What I want to keep the board honest about is that scaling is a cultural and budgeting exercise as much as a technical one. The physical operation was never the hard part. The hard part is defending the budget line in year two, after the novelty’s worn off and a regulatory milestone has slipped six months to the right. It’s getting an organization that’s wired around legacy methods to trust a program that looks nothing like how it’s always been done. That’s where I spend most of my time with clients: the conversation about capability growth, the unflattering realities of what success actually costs, and the mitigations you put in place for the problems you already know are coming. The industry still under-invests in that conversation compared to how much it spends projecting capability.
How do you see BVLOS operations shaping the future of energy infrastructure inspection, monitoring, and response?
BVLOS is the line between episodic and routine operations. Most operators are waiting for it; some are building toward it, and very few are truly doing it today. The first useful exercise is being honest about which of those three buckets you’re actually in, and what it would really take to move up. At scale, BVLOS is an economy-of-scale disrupter, the thing that turns inspection from a scheduled event into something closer to continuous coverage. That disruption won’t happen overnight, though, even if Part 108 drops tomorrow.
I’ve had the privilege of commanding some of the longest FAA-approved BVLOS missions in the country for infrastructure work, and I’ll say it plainly: the technology is largely ready. The economics aren’t palatable for everyone yet, and that’s the part organizations often fail to understand. Part 108 could decide how fast scaled BVLOS arrives on the legal side. The operator’s budget flexibility and tolerance for a bumpy innovation program decide how fast it arrives on the execution side. Those are two different clocks.
When both line up, you’ll see a real jump in true BVLOS operations. When they stay lined up, the number of operators running them keeps climbing instead of spiking and falling back. Right now most of the industry is watching the legal clock and ignoring the execution one, and that’s the half that’s actually in their control.
What are some of the biggest challenges utilities and critical infrastructure organizations face when trying to operationalize UAS programs?
General group 1 sUAS is largely a solved use-case now. It took a painful few years, as early adopters were chasing a narrative that a very young industry was still telling itself, but enough utilities got there that there’s now an unofficial playbook among the infrastructure industry. New operating entities usually succeed on the first attempt because that knowledge-sharing carries them. That part of the market has matured.
Larger than Group 1 UAS is where it falls apart. Larger, more complex aircraft and concepts of operation are a different world, and most of the industry hasn’t cracked it yet. A Group 1 multicopter and a Group 3 fixed-wing share virtually zero similarities but the letters U-A-S. The economic units shift completely, the technology is far more complex, and the regulatory path, while not impossible, is vague enough to stall a program if you don’t know how to navigate it. The industry is going through the same trial-by-fire it went through with small drones, except the budgets at risk are an order of magnitude larger. I watch utilities fund an ambitious program and then watch it die on the vine, whether from cost, regulatory delay, or plain frustration.
I commend the operators who want to push into this space, and they should be excited about it. But it would serve them well to talk to the handful of organizations that have actually done it before writing the check. A few have succeeded, but their results unintentionally hide how much it cost them to get there. The operators with the scars are the most valuable resource a utility can find, because they can help the next one avoid most of those cuts. A program with this little room for error shouldn’t be a first attempt learned the hard way.
How important is collaboration between end users, regulators, technology providers, and advisors as the energy drone and robotics market matures?
It takes a village. Knowing which providers to use and why, building relationships with regulators so trust is established before you need it, and bringing in niche advisors where it counts: all of that is an exercise in eliminating failure modes before they cost you a program.
The trick is reading the value proposition in each of those pieces honestly. Everyone at the table has a different incentive. Providers want their platform adopted. Regulators are solely concerned with managing airspace risk. A good advisor should be telling you when the answer is “not yet.” The end user wants a defensible program that survives an audit and a budget review.
Those interests overlap, but they aren’t identical, and an operator that doesn’t see the difference ends up buying expensive shelfware. The operators who scale are the ones who build their village deliberately, with the best available resource in each seat, instead of letting a single vendor’s voice pace set for the whole program. As the market matures, that one skill, assembling the right people around a problem, is what separates the programs that last from the ones that stall.
