Members of PDW's executive team cut the ribbon on the company's new 90,000 square-foot factory on Diamond Drive in Huntsville. (Scott Turner/al.com via TNS)
(Tribune News Service) — A Huntsville, Ala., drone manufacturer hopes to help America play catch-up to China in the production market.
The company — Performance Drone Works — unveiled its new 90,000-square-foot facility on Wednesday. PDW began manufacturing drones at the facility on July 1. It is expected to produce 60,000 drones a year, according to PDW CEO and co-founder Ryan Gury.
“PDW is the most important drone company in the United States,” Gury said. “The reason why is that China has begun a campaign of economic sabotage to undermine the U.S. drone market. They had the foresight to realize the future warfare will involve these small drones. We need to ensure that on U.S. soil that we have the best drone technology. We have a domestic supply chain. So now we are ready. We need plenty of PDWs.”
China is producing drones cheaper than U.S. manufacturers, Gury and co-founder Matt Higgins said. Higgins cited a statistic that 90% of all U.S. law enforcement use Chinese-made drones.
To challenge China, PDW is expanding its operation in Huntsville. The company is in the process of hiring more than 500 people to work at the facility — known as Drone Factory 1 — with a starting salary of more than $100,000 per year, according to its agreement with the city of Huntsville.
The company is expecting to have an $81 million impact a year in north Alabama.
“We already support the Army with our mother ship, the C100 platform,” Gury said. “We will soon be pushing out our AM10 platform, which is the $3,500 attributable multimotored drone which will compete against systems much, much larger and more expensive.”
A C100 drone produced at PDW's new factory in Huntsville, Ala. (Scott Turner/al.com via TNS)
The company has received numerous contracts from the U.S. Army, including the Medium Range Reconnaissance (MRR) program and Transformation in Contact Initiative. C100 also provides mission-critical capabilities for public safety operations, closing the preparedness gap and giving front line forces an exponential edge, PDW said.
“We all feel such tremendous urgency here,” Higgins said. “We understand we are playing catch-up, not as a company, but as a country. Unfortunately, China and others have a head start. But we are throwing everything at it. The U.S. military and the Trump Administration are doing a fantastic job to prioritize drones.”
The state-of-the-art facility features production at scale, materials management and robust quality engineering capabilities. It also features 99.9% pathogen reduction via Lit Thinking’s Visium Far-UVC devices, ensuring DF01 is the cleanest engineering facility in the world, PDW claimed.
“PDW is an innovation engine for national defense and an economic catalyst for Huntsville,” Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said. “This expansion brings high-quality jobs, strengthens our advanced manufacturing sector, and reinforces Huntsville’s position as a strategic hub for defense and aerospace. We’re proud to have PDW growing here and contributing to our community’s future.”
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