Hey Kittyhawkers!
It’s been a big few months for Kittyhawk. We’re working on new and exciting products to make your life easier. We’re working with new partners. We’re innovating faster than ever. These newsletters usually start with some trite comment about the weather. Instead, for this month, here’s a forecast: The future is sunny with a 100% chance of new features.
If you’ve been following the industry developments over the last year, particularly if you follow Kittyhawk on LinkedIn, you’ll know that LAANC has been a hot topic for everyone in the industry. For those unfamiliar, LAANC or Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability is going to let commercial operators fly in over 2000 square miles that were previously unavailable to them. A small group of companies were given early access to the LAANC Beta and Test. Everyone else has to go through a six month process that starts on May 15th. That didn’t sit well with us. So we started looking for a creative solution and found one:
Boeing’s Jeppesen and Kittyhawk Team Up to Offer LAANC
We’re thrilled to announce that we’re teaming up with one of the oldest and most respected names in aviation. For the last 84 years, Jeppesen has been helping pilots and their billions of passengers arrive at their destinations safely. It’s a great sign for the drone industry when an incumbent takes such an interest in a disruptive industry by teaming up with an early stage startup. We see this new LAANC collaboration as the start of a very productive relationship.
We’ll be rolling LAANC out in the coming weeks to our enterprise customers. Also, if you’re not “LAANC Ready” with a confirmed drone registration and phone number in Kittyhawk, you can do it all right from the app.
Kittyhawk API & Reporting
We’re working on improved reporting functionality. The first step of this was our custom GraphQL API. This has empowered our enterprise customers to get the data they need in the format they want. Watching the integrations into new enterprise work flows happen has been awesome. We’ll soon be deploying the new reporting with select enterprise clients and then to the larger user base.
¡Bienvenidos los hispanoparlantes!
We know that drone aviation doesn’t just happen in America and it certainly doesn’t just happen in English. Kittyhawk is used by people in over 34 countries. We saw that a lot of folks were signing a petition to translate DJI GO 4 into Spanish. We unfortunately can’t help them with DJI but since one of the Kittyhawkers speaks Spanish, we thought this was an excellent first opportunity to begin localizing. Keep an eye out for other languages coming soon. If you have suggestions about what locale we should tackle next, we’re happy to listen.
New Kittyhawker Alert!
Congratulations to our CEO Jonathan Hegranes for adding a brand new pilot to the family. We’ve heard that she’s already studying for her Part 107 certificate. Watch out world!
We’re Hiring!
Kittyhawk is hiring. We’re hiring for all kinds of roles and want to work with passionate people looking to build an industry. Check out our careers page, particularly if you’re a front end aficionado.
Sincerely,
Jon Hegranes, Josh Ziering and the entire Kittyhawk team!