Drones

In March 2003, the second Gulf War started and it featured drones.

Nathan Aherne was sitting in his very cheap flat in London. Freezing, wishing he could order a pizza and have it delivered by drone instead walking out into the cold night to buy whatever local food was close.

Sitting there watching the war unfold on the TV, eating defrosted spaghetti bolognaise, he started working on a drone that could deliver a pizza that night. He'd eaten spaghetti bolognaise more times than he wanted to think about. It needed to be able to fly fast, take off and land vertically and fit 3 full size pizza boxes in its fuselage.

It was a mixture between flying wing and helicopter. The blades of the fans that allowed it to takeoff and land vertically embedded in the wings to maximise safety and aerodynamics.

For the next 4 years, in London and Australia, Nathan worked to develop his ideas about drones. No one he knew was working on drones at the time

Joined the Paparazzi UAV Group in January 2007 having worked on drones on his own for 4 years. Bought one of the first consumer autopilots available. It didn't use accelerometers and gyros like todays autopilots, it used thermocouples. We used the thermocouples to detect the horizon by being able to detect the warmth of the earth in comparison the cold of space.

Nathan joined the Openpilot team in 2010 because he wanted to open up drone availability to the world.

Nathan flew to  Portugal in March 2011 to work on Openpilot Development. One of the world first 32 bit autopilots for consumers.

Nathan was very interested in building demand for drones. When he started drones were incredibly complex. His first drone took him 2 years to get flying and promptly crashed. 

There were some incredible hardware and software engineers working on the problem of autopilots so Nathan got to work on the marketing, documentation, example aircraft, component systems, testing multitudes of combinations and footage of aircraft flying. This often lead to catastrophic failure. One time Nathan was flying an aircraft on autopilot using a brand new version of code that had a bug. While the aircraft was flying the GPS reset, which had it then report its location at 0°N 0°E aptly called Null Island. The autopilot calculated the quickest way to get there, which was through the earth, hit full speed and dove towards the earth hitting the ground in a puff of dust and airplane parts. That plane at the time cost over $3,000 and took 48 hours of work to put together.

Nathan envisaged a world where you could buy a drone at service station, get a pizza delivered, fight a war and have them looking for sharks. 22 years after Nathan first started working on drones, these things are a reality.

One of the big developments in drones came with the advent of the smart phone.

Nathan also got involved in developing First Person View technology because he could see the marketing potential of it.