But Strauss says the startup's drones are generating their own double-takes these days, including for their ability to fly through tropical-storm-force winds that would ground other drones.
WaveAerospace participated this month in Project Convergence at Fort Irwin, California, an annual two-month exhibition for the U.S. Army to showcase emerging technologies and capabilities. In the California desert, WaveAerospace demonstrated its Mule drone, a table-size quadcopter with angled surfaces reminiscent of a stealth fighter jet, which the company is promoting for surveillance and cargo missions.
"It doesn't look like anything they've seen," Strauss said.
Strauss co-founded WaveAerospace 10 years ago with Steve Bofill, who worked on the MQ-1 Predator drone at General Atomics before doing a stint at Sikorsky based in Stratford. Bofill is a co-founder of Vengo Labs, which won funding in a pitch on ABC's "Shark Tank" to develop a digital vending machine.
In a hangar at Igor I. Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford, WaveAerospace has a production line of smaller Falcon II LE drones under assembly, designed for overhead surveillance or to deliver light loads in winds up to 69 mph. And slung into a test rig is a third drone under development — Huntress, a large quadcopter with booms extending nearly 15 feet in diameter from a core, jet-turbine engine. The drone is designed to fly 300 mph, hover, and turn on a dime.
WaveAerospace's core premise is to build drones to fly in weather that others cannot. That could be heavy winds, precipitation or even icing conditions by redistributing waste heat produced by onboard systems onto flight surfaces to counter freezing air flow.
"There are a ton of good, small-drone manufacturers out there — but when I say good, I mean if it's a sunny day and there's not that much wind, they work great," Strauss said. "But the best and most valuable times, in my opinion, to be using these small aircraft are ... when conditions are terrible."
That was the case two years ago during the deadly crash of an airplane losing oil pressure, whose pilot was attempting to make it to Westchester County Airport. With bad weather keeping a search helicopter and other drones grounded, WaveAerospace's Falcon drone was deployed to perform aerial scans of the area around the airport to find the downed plane.
While Strauss and Bofill hope to interest emergency responders in its drones, the start-up business sees the military as the best bet to generate early revenue. The U.S. House of Representatives approved funding last year to create a U.S. Army "drone corps," but the measure was not included in the National Defense Authorization Act passed by the U.S. Senate.
If the Department of Defense or NATO show any interest in purchasing WaveAerospace drones, Strauss estimated the company would require about 100,000 square feet of space to house a headquarters production plant. Employing about 15 people today, WaveAerospace has built more than 50 drone prototypes on $4 million in initial funding, Strauss said.
The larger Mule was one of several drones from a number of manufacturers exhibited in March at Project Convergence in California. Next up for WaveAerospace is Huntress, the muscle drone that is slated for flight tests this spring.
Huntress is designed to get to places in a hurry, and can shut off the loud, jet-turbine engine while still out of earshot, then fly closer on its comparatively quiet, battery-power quadcopter rotors for surveillance or landing. Strauss and Bofill derived the name from the 2016 documentary "The Eagle Huntress," chronicling a Mongolian girl who won a falconry-style competition for handlers of trained golden eagles.
"It's capable of ultra-high-speed flight, and it's capable of stopping and sitting dead still," Strauss said. "It's designed so that when you see it on radar, you can't readily identify it. That causes problems — and it may only cause them for a minute or two, but that's all we need. Escape or approach — we're already gone by the time [a combatant] knows to shoot at it."
Velocity counts in the world of emergency response as well, Strauss said, not just in the context of pushing through high winds but also for search-and-rescue scenarios when the clock is ticking, and drone pilots need to cover large areas to locate anyone needing help.
Despite Connecticut's aviation heritage through Sikorsky, United Technologies and Kaman, the state has not seen many homegrown drone developers. Bloomfield-based Kaman has a contract to produce a cargo rotor drone for the U.S. Marine Corps, while Sikorsky is developing what it calls a "blown-wing" drone that it has test-flown this year. In Groton, ThayerMahan is developing semiautonomous sea drones for underwater surveillance.
Not lost on WaveAerospace employees, according to Bofill, is the company's location not far from where Igor Sikorsky built his namesake company — and the possibility that one day a WaveAerospace drone might help save people's lives, like so many Sikorsky helicopter crews have done over the decades.
"That's the hope, doing something we can be proud of," Bofill said. "They didn't believe in [Sikorsky] either, when he tried it."
© 2025 The Hour (Norwalk, Conn.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
