Space at the Pendleton UAS Range awaits renovation Thursday, Sept. 21, 2023, after the unmanned aerial vehicle test site at the Eastern Oregon Regional Airport, Pendleton, won a $2.25 million biennial grant from Business Oregon to build a Center of Innovation Excellence.

PENDLETON — The high-flying Pendleton UAS Range just got an extra boost thanks to a development grant from Business Oregon.

The $2.25 million biennial windfall recognizes the unmanned aerial systems test range at the Eastern Oregon Regional Airport as a Center of Innovation Excellence, and will enable unmanned aviation development not only locally but potentially throughout the state.

“The state has always been pretty tech-friendly but to create an innovation ecosystem, they wanted to create CIE, Centers of Innovation Excellence, that were geared toward certain high interest industries,” said Steve Chrisman, Pendleton economic development director, “and one of those industries is autonomous vehicles, unmanned aerial systems. Pendleton is one of the busiest, if not the busiest, test range in the United States, so with the help of the state and others, the county and the city, we have built out a pretty top-notch flight UAS test center here.”

Chrisman said the process began with a $102,500 planning grant that materialized about a year ago. From that, the city built out a business plan and submitted an application in May to become a Center of Innovation Excellence.

“It was highly competitive,” he said. “By Business Oregon’s count, there were 19 submissions and only five were selected (for funding,) $9 million were awarded, and Pendleton received the second-most funding out of the five awardees.”

The Pendleton drone test side received a commitment of $2.25 million for this biennium — $1.125 million per year essentially.

“By the time we get the money we’ll be out through the first year, but potentially if we do a good job, there could be future biennium funding,” Chrisman said. “But we’ve got to perform on what we said we were going to do — to help small to mid-sized startups get their product to market, develop their products, speed the process to commercialization, to help them properly grow into companies, to hire Oregonians and produce products and add to our economy.”

Chrisman said the range’s successful grant proposal commitment includes a pledge to redistribute a  portion of the funding to provide grants to startups.

“We’re going to do two batches of five per year, so five every six months,” he said, with the successful startups receiving a $20,000 grant to address any facet of development they need.

“These companies could be anywhere from having a cocktail napkin sketch, to having a full working prototype,” Chrisman said. “We have a couple folks interested in what will come in. We’ve been attracting innovators here for quite some time with the unmanned vehicle test range, so this will just add to that attraction.”

In addition, he said, the city is doing some improvements to the B-17 hangar that will be the headquarters for the Center of Innovation Excellence, as well as to the 33,000-square-foot World War II hangar that is headquarters for the range.

“We’ve already done some substantial upgrades to it,” Chrisman said. “We plan to keep developing it into a world-class UAS tech development center.”

Chrisman said there’s a chance for a substantial annual grant to unmanned aviation startups.

“There’s also a big annual $100,000 grant that we will be awarding to an individual company, a collection of companies, or a coalition,” he said, “to solve industry challenges that are slowing down integration of UAS into the national air space, or inhibiting the development of an addressable market, for commercial UAS testing.”

Chrisman said the Pendleton Round-Up will become an occasion when unmanned startup companies can buck for some attention.

“We will also be helping connect startups with capital investment,” Chrisman said, “so there will be pitch events that we will host. We’re actually planning one pitch event called the ‘Pendleton Investor Round-Up,’ which will occur during Round-Up and we’ll hopefully be able to attract some tech venture capital in, to put some money behind some hopefully brilliant ideas, that are going to shape the future of aviation.”

Chrisman said this was a big undertaking with a lot of components and it will require hiring at least an executive director of the CIE and a couple of part time employees.

“We’re excited to get started,” he said.

Steve Lawn, UAS Range Chief engineer, was project manager for putting together the grant proposal.

“It was a team effort,” Lawn said, “and we actually got a planning grid for a Business Oregon request for grant proposal that they put out for the Centers of Innovation Excellence for the state. So they started by releasing requirements for the CIEs and then they put out a request for proposals for planning grants. And there were a few of those awarded. We got one of them.”

Lawn was assisted by Darryl Abling, Range Manager; Steve Chrisman, Pendleton Economic  Development Officer; Cole Rixe, from DDRC marketing group; Stanley Springer of DelMar Aerospace; and Rain Catalysts. Others helping the effort were Decavo LLC, Sigma Design, Autodesk, Rain Catalysts, DelMar Auerospace, and Blue Mountain Community College,