Transplanted Californian:Dianne Zimnavoda, presidentof RCF Technologies, moved hercompany from L.A. to Vidalia.

And in a few years, through federal coercion,more robots will be sharing the friendly skies overyour neighborhood with passenger planes and othertraditional aircraft.

All of which could ensure a lucrative future foran already soaring aerospace industry in Georgia.Last year, Georgia’s worldwide aerospace exportstopped $5.75 billion – fourth highest in the U.S.“It is an industry that definitely keeps me busy,”

says Steve Justice, director of the Georgia Center of

Innovation (COI) for Aerospace, which operatesunder the Georgia Department of EconomicDevelopment (GDEcD). “We’ve got 500 companiesspread out all over the state, and it’s so geographi-cally diverse, it’s sometimes hard for people to get ahandle on it.”

An engineer by training, Justice has worked forsome of Georgia’s blockbuster aerospace and avia-tion companies throughout his career. Today, he isGeorgia’s aerospace guy, so his boss, GDEcD

www.georgiatrend.com I AUGUST 2012 I 31

T he flying robot invasion has already begun. Lethal, bat-tle-tested drones (unmanned aviation vehicles or UAVs) are being usedin Pakistan, and the military wants more of them. Selected universities,

law enforcement agencies and aerospace firms currently are operating UAVsin limited domestic airspace.

B Y J E R R Y G R I L L O P H O T O B Y H E R B P I L C H E R

G E O R G I A’ S A E R O S PAC EI N D U S T RY I S T H R I V I N G

Commissioner Chris Cummiskey, depends on Justice andthe COI to, “think ahead, look for new ideas.

“We want to keep focusing on what the next major move-ment in aerospace is,” Cummiskey says.

Congress gave a pretty good hint of at least one of thenext major movements in February, when it passed a lawrequiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to opennational airspace by late 2015 to civil and commercial UAVs.Leading up to that, the FAA is going to designate six UAVtest sites around the country, and states are lining up for theopportunity.“There’s a lot of potential for Georgia, and there are a lot

of people running the numbers right now on how much eco-nomic activity might result,” says Lora Weiss, lab chief sci-entist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), one ofthe leading brain-centers in the development of fullyautonomous (or pilotless) UAVs for the Department ofDefense – actual flying robots that think for themselves, cancommunicate with other autonomous robots (in the air or onthe ground) to spy, hunt, kill, whatever.

Georgia Tech, along with Middle Georgia College andstate industry leaders like Justice, are part of a public andprivate collection of entities pitching the FAA this summer,“going after the economic activity that we think would followif Georgia gets selected [as a test site],”Weiss says.

The expectation, of course, is that such a site would attractsupporting industries and create jobs – parts and aircraftmakers and suppliers, maintenance and logistics people,technicians and researchers, adding to the more than 80,000people (fifth in the nation) currently employed in all facets ofGeorgia’s aerospace industry.

SHARP ASCENTIn 1993, when she was still living in Los Angeles, Dianne

Zimnavoda was contacted by the state of Georgia.“They had formed a consortium of power companies, uni-

versities, state government agencies, and they were lookingspecifically to recruit aerospace companies. Somehow wemade their short list,” says Zimnavoda, president of RCFTechnologies, the company her engineer father founded inLos Angeles in 1975. They make specialty seals, hoses andcouplings for aircraft out of an extremely heat resistant andproprietary material called Rishon.“I met with a whole group of people, toured the larger

aerospace places, and they basically raved about the state,how awesome it was to work here and so forth. Then I visit-

ed areas of the state I thought I’d be interested in,” Zimna-voda says.“Our customer base is pretty much anyone you’ve ever

heard of in aerospace. I ship around the world. But the partswe make are relatively small and extremely lightweight, sowe use carriers like FedEx and UPS, which means we can belocated anywhere – it makes no difference where I manufac-ture.”

So she moved her small, cutting-edge aerospace companyfrom Los Angeles – “they’re not interested in businessthere,” Zimnavoda says – to the home of the world’s mostfamous onion.

“Vidalia made us a very good offer,” she says. “Gave usland, put up a building, and we’ve been here ever since.”

And she’s seen the aerospace industry skyrocket. In 2000,Georgia’s aerospace exports were $801 million. They’vegrown 618 percent since then. They grew 31 percent between2010 and 2011 and 23 percent the year before that.

Job growth hasn’t been nearly as dramatic, but there hasbeen some – 3,600 jobs in the past five years, to go with $982million in projects from new or existing aerospace compa-nies, according to GDEcD.

The biggest chunk of that is attributed to GulfstreamAerospace Corporation, which manufactures business jetsand announced in November 2010 that it would spend $500

million and create 1,000 jobs in a seven-year expansion proj-ect at its Savannah plant.

“I think we’ve done pretty well, been consistent. Our totalaerospace employment has gone up while other states havebeen losing jobs,” Justice says.

The total job tally is up about 3.7 percent over the past fiveyears, according to Justice, although the aerospace employ-ment pulse has been uneven, with companies shrinking andexpanding like balloons. “It would be fair to say that aviation and aerospace was

heavily impacted by the economic downturn,” says HaleyDunne, communications director for Bombardier (maker ofthe Learjet), the Canada-based aerospace company thatopened a service center in Macon two years ago.“We’ve had to reduce production on several product

lines. There have been layoffs, but we’ve fared better thanmost. We invested in our company through the downturn,and we’re expanding again.”

Bombardier, the world’s only manufacturer that makesboth trains and planes, employs about 70,000 people world-wide, about 5,000 of them devoted to servicing and main-

32 I AUGUST 2012 I GeorgiaTrend

“The parts we make are relatively small and extremely lightweight,”says RCF Technologies’ DIANNE ZIMNAVODA,“so we use carrierslike FedEx and UPS, which means we can be located anywhere.” Shemoved from Los Angeles to Vidalia.

taining aircraft for a variety of clients. They employ about 160in Macon and expect to be adding more jobs after signing anine-year heavy maintenance agreement with RepublicAirlines.

One of Bombardier’s neighbors in Macon’s MiddleGeorgia Regional Airport is TIMCO Aviation Services, whichhas rebounded after “a rough patch in the road for a fewyears,” according to Keith Statzer, general manager ofTIMCO’s Macon facility.“The years 2008 and 2009 were hard for us. We got down

to 100 employees, but we’ve added jobs. We’re comingback.”

TIMCO is one of the world’s largest independent aircraftmaintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) providers; its air-frame facility has been in Macon since 1999. Over the pasttwo years, they’ve added the Boeing 767 to their workload,modifying their 115,000-square-foot plant to accommodatethe planes and adding personnel. They’re up to 300 employ-ees at the Macon facility now.

BUILD MODEMacon is in the middle of an area that boosters have

dubbed Georgia’s “Aerospace Corridor,” a calling card that

tries to prop up the aerospace activity and potential of theregion near Robins Air Force Base, home of the WarnerRobins Air Logistic Center (WR-ALC), where advocates areworking to defend the mission of the massive military com-plex.“Our goal in life is to make sure we are well positioned for

the future, no matter what the national economic, political orsocial situation is,” says retired Major Gen. Rick Goddard,senior advisor to 21st Century Partnership, a coalition ofregional political, business and civic leaders focused onRobins’ continued wellbeing.

Goddard is the former WR-ALC commander, and a for-mer Republican Congressional candidate. His top priority ismaintaining the base’s military mission: “If this country hasto go to war, we need to have the critical mechanisms inplace. That’s what these logistics centers are all about.”

Goddard, who piloted an F-100 fighter in 227 combat mis-sions during the Vietnam War, is fighting for the future of theWR-ALC, one of three Air Force logistics centers in the U.S.(The others are in Oklahoma City and Ogden, Utah.)“Each one is totally different, so we’re hoping the Air

Force will realize they need these three logistics centersgoing forward,” says Goddard, thinking ahead to the next

34 I AUGUST 2012 I GeorgiaTrend

Well-Positioned: Retired Maj. Gen.Rick Goddard is senior advisor to

the 21st Century Partnership.

WW

W.H

ER

BP

ILC

HE

R.C

OM

BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure)process.

President Obama has suggestedanother round of BRAC for 2013.Goddard figures it might actually be2015 or 2017, so 21st Century Partner-ship is gathering itself to make a case forRobins’ continued existence.

Meanwhile, Goddard is worriedmore about being slowly nickeled anddimed into irrelevance: Pending andprolonged cuts in the nation’s defensebudget (the Aerospace Industries Asso-ciation predicts a million jobs nation-wide could be lost) and the recent

realignment of Air Force MaterielCommand, resulting in the loss of hun-dreds of civilian jobs at Robins. “What we don’t want,” he says, “is

death by a thousand cuts.”A deep cut was made in Marietta,

where the last F-22 Raptor rolled off theproduction line at Lockheed Martin inDecember, ending a 20-year, $65-billionprogram for the corporation, America’slargest military contractor.

The end of the F-22 did not result inimmediate job losses, says plant gener-al manager Shan Cooper.“We’ve been fortunate so far. We’ve

“We’re focusing on modernizing and sustaining the F-22,” saysMarietta’s Lockheed Martin General Manager SHAN COOPER.“The aircraft that are already out there will need to be maintained, and we know the F-22 better than anyone else.”

New Focus: Lockheed Martin General ManagerShan Cooper

WW

W.JE

NN

IFER

STALC

UP.C

OM

transitioned a lot of folks over to the F-35 program. I’d like tosay that we’ll have no layoffs, but I can’t say that,” Coopersays. “We have placed some people in the P-3 and C-130 pro-grams, and we’d like to keep everyone on board if possible.“Meanwhile, we’re focusing on modernizing and sustain-

ing the F-22. The aircraft that are already out there will needto be maintained, and we know the F-22 better than anyoneelse.”

Lockheed, which shares runway space with Dobbins AirReserve Base and employs about 7,800 people in Marietta,sends green ripples across the state, spending about $325million a year with 350 different suppliers in Georgia.

One of those is RCF Technologies, about 200 miles away inVidalia.“Lockheed just informed us that a very small part we

make has been designated as the part for the C-130 aircraft,so our orders for that are up to 3,000 a month,” saysZimnavoda, who employs 32 people at RCF.

“For two solid years nothing was being done in the way ofdesign anywhere in the industry, everything was on hold,people were closing down. We lost two thirds of our income.”

But now they’re making parts for Boeing’s 787, and twoyears ago they started branching into high-performance autoracing, Formula One and some NASCAR.“Thank heavens,” Zimnavoda says, “we’re back in build

mode.”

ROBOTS ARE FLYINGCongress gave the FAA until Sept. 30, 2015, to fully inte-

grate UAVs into domestic airspace. But in April, the FAAreleased a list of more than 60 U.S. public and private entitiesthat are already authorized to fly drones. It took some legalarm-twisting – the FAA was responding to a Freedom ofInformation lawsuit filed by Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The list included the usual suspects – Defense AdvancedResearch Projects Agency (DARPA), the different U.S. armed

forces, NASA, local and federal law enforce-ment agencies, and about two dozen universi-ties. The Georgia Tech Police Department’sOffice of Emergency Preparedness and theGeorgia Tech Research Institute were both onthe list.

The robots are flying. Justice at theAerospace Center of Innovation expects to beflying them this year, “to support our agricul-ture sector,” he says. “We’re working jointly with universities

and companies to test them. One of the thingswe’re looking to do is to gather imagery offarms, peanut fields,” he says. “Generallyspeaking, the idea is to ultimately help farm-ers increase their yields. It’s the intersection ofaerospace technology and agriculture.”

Georgia is well equipped in aerospaceresearch muscle – Tech’s Daniel GuggenheimSchool of Aerospace Engineering, for example,is considered one of the best in the nation.Then there is the work of Weiss and her col-leagues at the GTRI who are developing thenext generation of humanless flight.

Weiss says she works in the area of roboticautonomy, “making them fully autonomous,so they can make robust, reliable, proper deci-sions on their own, in unforeseen situations,as opposed to trying to script everything – ifyou see this, do that.“And we’re looking at how they collaborate

with other UAVs, or ground vehicles, andmachines made by different manufacturers,with different software architecture – interop-erability of disparate UAVs.”

The current trend is for humans to fly thedrones from remote locations (the Air Forcetrains more pilots for UAVs than for any other

36 I AUGUST 2012 I GeorgiaTrend

Aerospace Booster: Steve Justice,of the Georgia Center of Innovationfor Aerospace, with an F-22 model

LOC

KH

EE

D M

AR

TIN

www.georgiatrend.com I AUGUST 2012 I 37

weapons system). Human-controlled drones have been usedby the CIA to hunt down suspected terrorists in Pakistan.Unfortunately, they’ve also been responsible for a number ofcivilian deaths.

After four decades of research in robotic flight, the dronesare pretty capable of doing the work on their own – as Weissand her colleagues have demonstrated, last year, for exam-ple, in the U.S. Army Robotics Rodeo at Fort Benning.

But if the thought of autonomous robots making life anddeath decisions gives you discomfort, you’re not alone.“Researchers are doing a great job of making these

machines smarter, capable of thinking for themselves,”Weiss says. “But robots making the decisions – that makespeople nervous.”

Humans wouldn’t be rendered completely inessential,though. Not by a long shot. As robots and unmanned sys-tems proliferate, maintenance and operations could becomebig growth areas, Weiss says, adding, “instead of humanoperators being ‘in the loop,’ or totally in command of theUAV, operators will be ‘on the loop.’“So, the robot is making decisions autonomously, but the

operator is there to hit the override. If this was cruise control,it would be like taking the wheel or hitting the pedal.”

In other words, you may not be driving, but you canalways hit the kill switch. Just in case.

Potential: Lora Weiss, lab chief scientist at the Georgia Tech ResearchInstitute

GE

OR

GIA

TE

CH