By Alyssa Stahr
HAZON Solutions is a developer of small UAV inspection service operations, development, training, safety and testing programs. Service areas include infrastructure inspection, disaster response, insurance assessments, aerial imagery, program design, standardization, training, safety and more.
Started in July 2014, HAZON has the unique distinction of being rooted in naval carrier aviation and intelligence systems. CEO/Co-Founder David Culler Jr. and his business partner are prior naval aviators who take their experience flying F18s on and off aircraft carriers to the business world.
“In combat you have to have the right safety standards in place; you have to have the right standard operating procedures in the training program,” Culler said. “Being a provider doing inspections—it really is a nice way of folding in what we did in naval aviation into what we’re doing here at HAZON Solutions.”
The management team has more than 100 years of cumulative command and operations experience in the most challenging and hostile aerial environments in the world. The company has similar practices in its safety program—pre-mission prep, briefing on the mission, executing and debriefing to make sure everything was done correctly.
“We’re always trying to adapt and change. One of the big things that I wanted to do when we got started in this industry is to get exemptions from the Federal Aviation Administration, which allowed us to do commercial work,” Culler said. “There are a lot of restrictions that you have to follow, so it made it kind of constraining as to what you could and could not do.”
HAZON has been doing testing work for more than a year. Culler said that he likes to push the envelope when it comes to capabilities that provide the efficiency and safety to his customers.
“We have the ‘full capability package,’” he said. “We’re system agnostic, which means we don’t manufacture the systems, but we try to capture and get the best systems that we can utilize.”
He used the tower community as an example of the types of flying HAZON does when it comes to UAVs.
“We’re looking at different systems that can do it more autonomously; you still have to have a UAV pilot, but it flies a smarter flight profile, taking high definition still imagery to create 3D photogrammetry, so you can have a 3D model of the structure that’s going to make us more effective and more efficient as we’re collecting all this data for our customers,” he said.
HAZON also boasts a backend deliverable tool, called the HAZON Inspection Visualization Environment, that doesn’t just provide the customer with data that takes up precious bandwidth. Instead, the tool provides information, data and imagery that is actionable for the customer who can then make smart, informed decisions.
Looking to the future, Culler is excited about being awarded a contract with a major telecommunications carrier and trying to find value in using unmanned systems, which HAZON is testing this summer.
Eighty five percent of the company’s leaders are prior naval officers or aviators.“We’re a very veteran-based company, which brings a professionalism to the company,” Culler said. “We’re very excited about supporting the telecommunications industry and doing our part to make it a safer environment to work and enhance situational knowledge to our customers.”
For more information, visit http://www.hazonsolutions.com/.
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