Founder Story

I've spent most of my life building things that fly.

I learned to fly young — first through Air Cadets, and later training on Canadian Forces Base Borden, where civilians were occasionally allowed to train alongside military personnel. I wanted it badly enough that I sold my pickup truck for $7,500, moved into the aircraft hangar, slept on the hangar floor, and stayed there until I had earned my pilot licence. That was my introduction to aviation: commitment first, comfort later.

Years later, I built and led a small aviation company where we designed and manufactured complete aircraft powerplants based on horizontally-opposed Subaru architectures. These weren't bolt-on experiments — they were fully engineered propulsion systems that involved machining more than 400 custom components per engine. Gear reduction drives, twin-turbo altitude systems, advanced telemetry packages, redundancy layers, and flight-critical electronics.

I hired and worked alongside engineers from Pratt & Whitney and Bombardier, collaborated with researchers from the National Research Council of Canada, and test-flew nearly everything we built. We pushed our engines into real aircraft, real missions, and real risk — because that was the only way to learn what mattered.

We also worked closely with university research groups, including McMaster Manufacturing Research Institute on advanced machining processes, and we supported private spaceflight initiatives during the X-Prize era with the University of Toronto team. Aviation for us wasn't a narrow field; it was an ecosystem of disciplines where machining, electronics, thermodynamics, software, and human factors all had to align.

Along the way, I became involved with the early research around NASA's Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS). A team from Virginia flew their aircraft up to my home airport in Collingwood, Ontario, and I joined them to operate and evaluate the SATS technologies in their Aero Commander during the visit. Seeing that system work in real conditions — in real airspace — reinforced something important: small aircraft, equipped with the right automation and oversight, could achieve levels of safety and capability normally reserved for larger platforms.

Experimental aviation teaches you a very specific truth: flight is binary. Systems either work, or they don't. There's no bluffing at altitude. You learn to build with honesty, test with discipline, and fly with confidence. I've dealt with more in-flight failures than anyone ever wants, and I'm still here because that ethos was not optional.

Over time, I began to see where aviation was heading. Electric propulsion, high-resolution sensors, AI-driven autonomy, and advanced software workflows were all converging. The "toy drone" era was ending. Small unmanned systems were becoming safer, more capable, and increasingly suited for industrial tasks where manned aircraft were expensive, risky, or simply the wrong tool.

It wasn't a pivot for me — it was a continuation. Drones unified everything I had spent decades working on: machining, avionics, control logic, telemetrics, robotics, reliability engineering, and applied data systems. The same principles that kept me safe in experimental aircraft map perfectly onto industrial UAV systems today.

That's why I created Aerial Robotics Canada (ARC).

ARC is the next chapter in a career shaped by engines, airframes, failures, fixes, and the quiet discipline that aviation forces into you. The goal is straightforward: build UAV platforms that are reliable, intelligent, and suited for the work Canadians actually need done — infrastructure inspection, land surveying, emergency support, mining operations, dust control, environmental monitoring, and the heavy-lift challenges emerging across the country.

Behind ARC is the OIEIEIO Reactor Lab — an engineering and research division I've been building for years. It focuses on power systems, flight-control electronics, machining, automation, and AI-assisted robotics. It's where ideas turn into prototypes, and prototypes evolve into field-ready systems.

I built aircraft, engines, and flight systems the same way I approach ARC today:

ARC is simply the next evolution of that philosophy — a continuation of the same commitment to reliability that kept me alive through countless hours in the air.