The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Takes R&D to New Heights

March marks the beginning of a month dedicated to the theme of “R&D to Real World Operations” month on the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, proudly sponsored by the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO). In this article, we interview James Grimsley, the Executive Director of Advanced Technology Initiatives at CNO, who has been instrumental in shaping the drone industry. With a focus on emerging aviation and related technologies, and in collaboration with key stakeholders, CNO has pioneered the creation of a groundbreaking Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) complex and sandbox for real world operations for aerial technologies  in Durant, Oklahoma. Here we dive deep into how the CNO’s history and culture inform its vision of establishing an aviation technology and innovation hub that will transform its own people, rural society and the world at large. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: James, tell us a bit about yourself. 

 

James Grimsley: I currently serve as the Executive Director of Advanced Technology Initiatives with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO). I grew up right in the heart of the reservation. Both sides of my family go back multiple generations. I was our family’s first college graduate. I’m proud to say that I not only obtained a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, I also obtained a graduate degree in mechanical engineering. I started my career working with the Air Force as a civilian electronics engineer. After that, I jumped into defense contract work. I also worked in academia, with other parts of the federal government and also founded my own R&D company. Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) kept coming up throughout my career and I realized about 20 years ago that UAS must be my destiny. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us about the Choctaw Nation. 

 

James Grimsley: The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the third largest federally recognized tribal government. The Choctaws were the first to come across the Trail of Tears. They were forcibly moved to a wilderness in the 1830s. So the story of the Choctaws is one of resilience. I was very fortunate to grow up in the heart of the Choctaw Nation. Our culture in this part of the state is the Choctaw culture, from the sense of humor, to the way that people are very friendly and get along with each other to long-term planning. The Choctaws think generationally. In terms of a return on vision, we look through the lens of what any given initiative will do for our people’s grandchildren and great grandchildren. I very much admire that the Choctaws can lay out a long term plan and patiently work toward it, while not being influenced or distracted by hype. These are some of the things that I love about working with the CNO.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: How did you come into your current position with CNO? 

 

James Grimsley: It’s really an interesting story. The Choctaw Nation started from scratch with UAS about six years ago. At the time, I was working at the University of Oklahoma as an associate vice president for research, managing the applied research portfolio. The CNO had bought 44,500+ acres of property and wanted to use it innovatively, while keeping the area pristine. In my mind, this was an ideal situation for an aviation test range for emerging aviation. We realized that UAS companies would need access to places where they could test safely, quietly, privately, where someone could control the ground risks and the air risks and also help them move towards getting approvals for their vehicles to fly early. Initially I consulted with CNO and we created this unique RDT&E environment. We were selected by the FAA as the only tribal government to be involved in their initial Integration Pilot Program (IPP) for UAS. When it started looking very promising, the CNO made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse: to come down and actually build and run an emerging tech ecosystem. I’ve always had high regard for the Choctaw Nation and respect for their Chata spirit, focused on faith, family and culture, because I grew up in it. I accepted the offer and have stayed ever since to continue developing their emerging aviation initiatives.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: How has the history of the CNO shaped its efforts in emerging aviation? 

 

James Grimsley: When the Choctaw was forcibly moved, they could only take with them what they could carry. When they got to the Mississippi River, they were told they could not even bring as much they were carrying. They showed up with just the clothes on their back, their culture and traditions – but that was about it. We believe several thousand died along the trail. As a result, this area has experienced generational poverty for a long time. We have had some of the highest unemployment rates in the country here. There were not a lot of opportunities, so for many years we had a net exodus of people leaving the area. Some of them were lucky enough to access an education; most of them did not return. As fate would have it, we are on the border of the Dallas-Fort Worth region, which hosts some of the most significant economic growth in the country and this has helped the tribe grow economically. The tribe continues leveraging our location, combined with our emerging aviation efforts, to turn things around. I love the Chief’s directive to us: to make people whole. So, we create opportunities for the tribal members now while making investments that will take the tribe into the future and enable it to live out its sovereignty, take care of itself and live with self-determination. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: How the CNO’s involvement in emerging aviation brought pride to its people? 

 

James Grimsley: Our work in emerging aviation has been a much bigger success than we had anticipated. Six or seven years ago, if you went to aviation conferences, conventions or trade shows around the world, people wouldn’t have known about the Choctaw Nation. Now we go just about anywhere and people know the Choctaw Nation because they know that we’re associated with this emerging aviation technology. This has become a point of pride for the tribe. It’s also having all sorts of positive side effects, ranging from STEM education to economic development.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: How do you view emerging aviation as a way to bolster betterment for the CNO, the region and society as whole? 

 

James Grimsley:  We are changing the game for the reservation and other rural areas with UAS technology. Our infrastructure remains less than optimal and this has profound safety implications for the people. Within a place like the Choctaw Nation Reservation, you have more than twice the chances of dying in a road fatality than you do in an urban area, even though we’re much more sparsely populated. There’s not enough money on the horizon in the U.S. to get all of our deteriorating roads up to par. In the meantime, because we have our own hospital system, our own clinics and our own pharmacy system, we also have a lot of people driving around on dangerous roads. They move test samples between clinics or help get people’s prescriptions to them. With emerging aviation, we plan to literally leapfrog this problem. It will improve the quality of life for people on the reservation by giving people safe and rapid access to the things that they need. The primary way that we plan to better our people and society revolves around access, especially access to immediate health care. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: What do you see as the timeline for some of these anticipated positive changes? 

 

James Grimsley: We believe change will come in phases, over the next 20 to 30 years. Right now, we are building an infrastructure corridor that will connect the North Dallas area to a whole quarter of the Choctaw Nation. It will involve an existing highway freight corridor, existing railway lines and airports. We’re already working on this and have some limited approvals to start flying segments of that area right now. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: Besides the critical health care use case, what other emerging aviation cases are you focused on developing? 

 

James Grimsley: To help make people whole and address the generational deficits we discussed, we are also looking at advanced air mobility (AAM) applications to move people around more safely in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, as well as doing things like drone deliveries including healthcare deliveries.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: I imagine that to ultimately execute these types of real world operations, you need a lot of R&D to help build out supportive safety cases? 

 

James Grimsley: That’s true and so we work with various agencies, institutions of higher education and emerging aviation businesses. For example, we conduct weather research here to study the lower atmospheric boundary layer, which remains an active area of research and one of meteorology’s  biggest challenges. A lot of companies also fly here for the first time because we manage both the air and ground risk for them. In fact, because we own the land, we are one of the only nonmilitary sites in the country that actually can safely and effectively manage ground risk.  Last summer, we made history again by being the first entity in North America to fly using FCC-approved protected C-Band for small UAS for BVLOS missions. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: Is most of the R&D technical? 

 

James Grimsley: Mostly, but we are also involved in some of the social sciences. Any emerging technology entrant needs to understand how communities will think about it in terms of expectations, benefits and risks. All of this will, in turn, inform regulations. So we’re very active in working with the communities, cities and counties throughout the reservation.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us more about your community outreach. 

 

James Grimsley:  One of our responsibilities to the community involves doing STEM outreach. We travel to the schools, bring operations trailers and even let the kids fly drones under Part 107. We also host a lot of schools out here at the Emerging Aviation Technology Center. We facilitate camps and generally anything we can to inspire kids. It’s important to me, personally because when I was a young kid growing up in rural Oklahoma, I never met an engineer and didn’t really know a scientist. I remember sitting and watching the black and white TV broadcasts of the Apollo missions and that influenced my life. We want kids to see what we do and get as much hands-on experience with UAS as possible. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: Can you share any success stories from your outreach? 

 

James Grimsley: We had a young lady that was in high school. Her aunt contacted me and asked if she could come to the test site to see what we did. We made her a temporary intern and put her on our flight crew. Now she is an aerospace engineering major who aspires to do this as a career. This shows that our outreach matters. We’re changing lives. This will change families forever.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Besides outreach and education, what do you offer in terms of infrastructure for emerging aviation R&D? 

 

James Grimsley: We recently completed two buildings in addition to our operations trailers, the small operation center in one of the hangars and several tiny-house guest residences. We also broke ground on an Emerging Aviation Technology Center, which we envision to be a makerspace on steroids. This  top notch world class three-story building will be the hub of everything we do. It will have labs, telemetry rooms and a very large remote operations center. We plan to build a fabrication facility right next to it. We are also building a RV park because a lot of the contractors and partners we have like to bring RVs and stay for a long time. We also have additional lodging for our staff on site within the compound.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: What are the construction timelines for these buildings? 

 

James Grimsley: The new fabrication facility should be completed and active in July. By January of 2025, all of Phase One will be completed. Phase Two will involve quite a few more hangars. We have some other initiatives that we cannot discuss yet, but will be announcing soon, as part of this infrastructure build-out.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Besides the ops centers, what other infrastructure do you have to manage air and ground risk? 

 

James Grimsley:  We have our own radar systems. We actually built our own ground based radar network. We also built our own ADS-B receiver network throughout the reservation. We built our own communications radio network as well. Clients have access to multiple bands, including the protected C-Band, where we have a license. We have miles and miles of 345 KV transmission lines that provide power and spectrum. We always think holistically as we continue building out our infrastructure so we can function across the entire Choctaw Reservation and beyond. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: What special FAA approvals do you have that can benefit those who want to do R&D at Daisy Ranch? 

 

James Grimsely: We have the FAA’s permission for the largest BVLOS area so far. It is a 43 mile corridor, roughly half the length of the longer term corridor we aim ultimately to create.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Do you offer hardware solutions also? 

 

James Grimsley: We actually design our own custom UAS to have our own assurances of reliability. Our OSSI-250 vehicle, in theory, can fly 180 miles on a single charge. We used it in our first public beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operation and it flew over 22 miles that day. Our OSSI-320 is a bit bigger but still under 55 pounds. We buy a fiberglass carbon airframe and then we build it out. We integrate everything in it ourselves. We plan to eventually also start building the airframes. The goal of building these aircraft is to build our own drone delivery fleet. Right now, we’re flying equivalent inert payloads to work through the logistics and collect a lot of data.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us about the Economic Development Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that is helping to pay for some of this. 

 

James Grimsley: If you came out to the test site maybe five or six years ago, there was nothing here. It was just a big beautiful pasture and pristine property. Since then, we’ve actually received quite a bit of funding from EDA, USDA and other entities. That said, we do pay for most of our improvements using tribal funds, including all operations and our initial infrastructure.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: We’ve talked a lot about R&D. Does the CNO do real world UAS operations as well? 

 

James Grimsley: We actively support the Choctaw Nation Emergency Management Team. We deploy during tornadoes and other disasters to help provide situational awareness and provide videos for insurance purposes. We also support our forestry and fire fighting communities, with everything from overwatch for controlled burns to situational awareness from the sky with a thermal camera that sees through smoke and can show hotspots locations. This saves lives. We’re also actively involved in agriculture. We have multiple large ranches that produce specialty crops, including cotton groves. We raise cattle and bison. We use UAS to actively support these efforts and have started to normalize UAS across all of them. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: What advice do you have for companies looking to succeed in emerging aviation? 

 

James Grimsley: A lot of times people make the mistake of bringing their business case to the FAA without a safety case. The FAA wants to see a safety case. They don’t necessarily care about the business case. Bring us your safety case or your business case to us so we determine if we can help you with the safety case. As part of the FAA’s BEYOND Program (the successor program to the IPP noted above), that’s what we do. We help partner companies to get expedited waivers or to fly under some of the existing authorities that we already have. We do quite a bit of military work. We don’t necessarily advertise everything that we do. There’s a lot of work going on the defense side right now. Just give us ideas and we will try to work with you. I would urge people to come up with a proposition and contact us.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Can you help companies partner with each other? 

 

James Grimsley: Yes. We have a very unique location with just about every industry component represented on our test range. We divide them into three buckets: vehicle developers, infrastructure developers and operators. We work with all of them. Some of our partners want to operate in stealth mode, which we can accommodate. But for those who want to partner, we can make introductions to the folks who otherwise work with us. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: You mentioned internships earlier. Do you also advertise internships or work opportunities? If so, where can people find that information?  

 

James Grimsley: We typically post jobs through the Choctaw Nation’s website at https://jobs.choctawnation.com/jobs/. 

 

Dawn Zoldi: How can people plug into the CNO’s efforts and tap into your expertise and resources? 

 

James Grimsley: The easiest way is just email uas@choctawnation.com. Bring us your propositions.  

 

Dawn Zoldi: Any closing comments, James? 

 

James Grimsley: There’s so many neat things converging in emerging aviation and we’re seeing a huge generational impact. If you think about it, we may have eVTOLS flying in the next five or ten years. That means we’ve beat the Jetsons by about 30 years! It’s equally exciting to see the Choctaw Nation step out and lead in this emerging industry, both as a tribal government and as one of the governments in the U.S. The next ten years are going to wow us, especially in the UAS industry. Buckle up, it’s going to be a fun ride for the next few years!