Scion hopes to lift fortune with unmanned copter

FORT COLLINS – If, sometime in the first quarter of 2012, you happen to hear the chop-chop of a helicopter overhead, and you look up to see a very small chopper hovering above you, then you will know that Jim Sampson is having a pretty good day.

Sampson, the founding CEO of Scion Aviation in For Collins, has been waiting for years to send one of his unmanned helicopters on a test flight. He wrote his first business plan for a company based around a light-weight helicopter targeting the law enforcement market in 1995. Since then, he has endured setbacks that might have driven a less-determined spirit back to a steady day job with benefits. But for Sampson, failure was not an option. And now that he’s paid his dues, he says opportunity is finally knocking.

“Unmanned helicopters have so many applications today. We’re going to see a lot of these craft in the future,” Sampson says. “It’s an open niche right now, one in which we have a great deal of experience. We feel we can carve out a very nice space for ourselves there.”

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Getting to the point of testing a prototype of his craft (“The Weasel”) certainly tested Sampson’s resolve on more than one occasion. Trained as an aircraft mechanic who specialized in the whirly birds, Sampson founded Scion in 1994 to produce composite structurals for helicopters. “I was looking for a way to make a niche in the industry,” he said. That’s when he set to work on the business plan for the mini-helicopter.

“We were just at the point where we were fundraising and getting ready to go when 9/11 happened. All the venture capital money dried up. No one in aviation could get funded,” he said. “So we reinvented ourselves just to survive.”

Small problem: Scion had just quadrupled its overhead by building a new fabrication facility for helicopter production. “Talk about stress,” he said. “I sold my house, got an apartment and ate a lot of Top Ramen.”

Then fortune smiled on Scion. A German manufacturer of aircraft composite materials contracted with Scion as its U.S. representative. “That saved us post-9/11. We machined the composite for the U.S. customer. Overnight, we were on the approved vendor list for Boeing and all the rest.” No more Ramen – at least for a while.

The relationship had a fuse burning, though: After several years, the parent company built its own U.S. operation and cut its ties with Scion. Sampson knew it was coming and had been scrambling to build up another book of business. It did R&D for aviation/aerospace, built prototypes for customers, especially light jet companies, and machined custom aircraft parts. Its customer list included some industry giants like Lockheed. Among the prototypes were unmanned aircraft.

“Those were tough times, just trying to keep the doors open,” Sampson said. “We watched a lot of our contemporaries go away.”

But trends were turning in Scion’s favor. The markets for light jets and light unmanned craft were expanding, however slowly. “New companies with new funding strategies were emerging, particularly in light jets,” he said. “They were outsourcing the R&D. We started to get a lot of it.”

One customer, Stratos Aircraft in Bend, Ore., was especially pleased with the worked Scion turned in on its light craft prototype.

Stratos Chief Technology Officer Carston Sundin explains: “We were looking for someone to build a mock-up of the cockpit only, for the prototype jet we were developing. They provided a top-notch end result, a full-scale cockpit. Very creative. Other bidders weren’t talking about a full-size model. They gave us the best product for the lowest price.”

Meantime, work was moving ahead on Scion’s own in-house products: the light-weight, unmanned helicopters known in Scion’s skunk works as The Weasel and a larger helicopter, the Badger. “We knew it was time to put our own product together as early as 2006, but the financing just wasn’t there,” Sampson said. With new prototype business flowing in and overhead no longer killing Scion, 2011 became the “Year of the Weasel and Badger” as Scion developers pushed ahead on the prototypes.

Today, the Weasel is achingly close to its first test flight. Sampson has already been talking to potential partners, such as the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department. “We see many applications in law enforcement for this product,” he said. “There are military uses too, of course, such as identifying IEDs without anyone getting killed in the process. But the civilian government process is much faster than the military process, so we’ll focus there first.”

If the Weasel passes its flight tests, and if, as Sampson hopes, law enforcement agencies see the value of unmanned craft for search-and-rescue, surveillance and other applications, Scion may soon be adding to its staff of 12. And that success would bring the company back to its lightweight helicopter roots – after a 16-year detour fueled too often by cheap noodles.