By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

In a move that’s expected to bring more than 1,300 drone-related jobs to the area, a company that offers UAV pilot training and markets commercial data products plans to renovate its current facility in order to expand its operations in its home town of Lafayette, Louisiana.

Drone Institute, LLC announced a $340,000 expansion of its Lafayette headquarters to consolidate its drone operations, data processing and pilot training within a single facility. Funding for the building renovation project will be partially financed through a $300,000 performance-based grant from Louisiana Economic Development.

In an interview, Drone Institute CEO George Femmer said the expansion is needed to accommodate the company’s rapid growth.

“We do have a pretty nice space, but we want to renovate it. It’s an older building from the 1970s; It has a wonderful, beautiful style to it. But there are amenities that we’d like to add to make this a more conducive space for training large classes of pilots,” he said.

Launched as an education provider for would-be drone pilots wanting to earn their Part 107 certificates, in November of 2024 the Institute began offering commercial data products for commercial UAV operators in the region.

“That was just kind of a natural evolution,” Femmer said. “We trained numerous different groups over the course of time, and every one of them had similar questions. They wanted some extra handholding throughout the process of getting their operations up and off the ground. Many of them had big, bold and daring ideas for things that they wanted to accomplish.”

Among the data products offered by the Institute is a patented method for damage classification on residential and commercial infrastructure. “We provide inspections using drones, to thousands of buildings at a time. That’s something that’s unique that hadn’t existed yet up until this point in time,” he said.

The company also is actively field-testing AI-driven defect-detection products for roofs, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure — transforming how inspections are planned, executed and analyzed.

In addition, the Institute is working to develop proprietary thermal and ultrasonic payload integrations, AI-assisted image recognition and defect mapping as well as producing American-assembled drone systems for critical industries.

The Drone Institute expansion is just part of a boom in drone-related projects in the region. Drone Institute shares part of its building with another UAV producer, Houston-based DMR Technologies, which recently announced its own ambitious plans to expand its Lafayette operations.

In October, DMR announced that it would invest $1.4 million to establish its first full-scale U.S.-based manufacturing facility in Lafayette, where the company will produce its flagship Field Ranger X50 agricultural spray drone for the American market.

“So, they’re onshoring the assembly of their drones over here,” Femmer said of DMR. We’re actually going to have a unique blend in this one building.” Post-renovation, the building will house drone manufacturing, and on the Drone Institute side, production of data products and geographic information systems, as well as offices devoted to sales, marketing and operations coordination for the pilot network that the Institute oversees.

Expansion expected to spur economic growth in region

Based on a funding agreement with both Louisiana and Lafayette economic development authorities, the Drone Institute will receive $300,000 this year and about $300,000 next year to finance the cost of the building renovations. In exchange, the Institute has made a commitment to substantially grow the number of jobs in the Lafayette area over a 10-year span.

The company, which currently has about 10 employees, is committing to increase the number of direct employment opportunities in the region to a minimum of 640 jobs over the decade-long period. “That track is going to take a little bit of a parabolic curve. We’re going to start this year with where we have 10 employees and from that point, we’re going to get to about 20 by the end of this coming year. We’ll be at near 40 by the next year. And so on for continual, repetitive, increased growth.”

Louisiana Economic Development has estimated that the Drone Institute’s expansion project also would result in the addition of 758 indirect new jobs, for a total of 1,368 potential new job opportunities in the region.

Bruce Bosworth, owner of SoLA Drones, a Lafayette-based agricultural and thermal drone provider, said he is happy to see the expansion of Drone Institute’s facilities and the arrival of new AUV-related business coming into the area.

“I think it allows for a partnership, with our experience in agriculture and their experience in roofing and NDT [non-destructive testing] and commercial industrial-grade drones. That allows us to collaborate together to develop robust training and education across multiple industries,” he said.

Femmer said he is excited that he will be able to work in close proximity to a drone manufacturing facility, “where someone is creating drones, where, those are being used in the field and there’s this nice little cyclical nature to the furtherance of drones being used in commercial applications and getting real user feedback on the ground.”

In addition, he said the renovation project would create a welcoming environment for pilots-in-training at the Institute. “We want pilots to come in to learn all the practices and the traits that they would need to become successful pilots on their own or hopefully to join our team,” he said.

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.