OEM Leader: How Sagetech Avionics Builds Layers of Aviation Safety for Dual-Use BVLOS Capabilities

September 17, 2025 | Dawn Zoldi

Aviation safety has always advanced in layers: first radar, then transponders, then collision‑avoidance systems that became standard in the jet age. Now, with commercial drones and military uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) sharing increasingly complex skies, the next layer is here: scalable, low‑SWaP avionics that can tell friend from foe, see unseen threats and guide aircraft away from danger. From pioneering Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) solutions like the MX12B transponder to developing next‑gen detect‑and‑avoid (DAA) systems built on the new ACAS‑X framework, Sagetech Avionics has emerged as an OEM leader at the intersection of defense and commercial aviation.

From Navy Cockpits to Certified Avionics Leadership

When Sagetech Avionics’ CEO Tom Furey looks back at his career trajectory, one thing stands out: the enduring importance of safety in aviation. He began his professional journey as a U.S. Navy A-6 Intruder Naval Flight Officer, launching off aircraft carriers and operating in high-stakes, high-risk environments. That formative experience continues to shape his thinking today.

But Furey’s background stretches beyond naval aviation. Over a 20-year career, he held senior engineering, manufacturing and general management roles in the aerospace, automotive, chemical and printing industries. That breadth has given him a grounded perspective on how to turn breakthrough ideas into certified, production-ready technologies, a process far less forgiving than the software-centric world of Silicon Valley innovation. “Silicon Valley can reboot,” he says. “Aerospace can’t.”

That philosophy became foundational when Sagetech Corporation, known for its miniature Mode A/C/S transponders used widely in early Department of Defense (DoD) UAS programs, decided to spin out its avionics unit into a standalone company in late 2019.

Under Furey’s leadership, Sagetech Avionics refocused its efforts on safety-critical, certifiable, low-SWaP (size, weight, and power) avionics solutions to bridge the needs of commercial and defense customers. These solutions provide critical layers of aviation safety across both military and commercial domains, enabling drones and aircraft to better integrate in crowded, complex airspace. “We’re here to create very robust, certifiable technology to help keep things safe,” Furey said. “That’s our mission, and it hasn’t wavered.”

The company’s flagship breakthrough? A transponder the size of a deck of cards, yet powerful enough to carry encrypted military identity friend or foe (IFF) capability once found only in equipment the size of a cinder block.

IFF, The MX12B and The High Stakes of Misidentification

IFF isn’t a new concept. It dates back to World War II, when British forces sought a way to distinguish returning Allied bombers from incoming German raids over London. Modern IFF systems work by encrypting responses to radar interrogations: when challenged by an allied radar, an aircraft equipped with IFF confidentially signals itself as “friendly.” This prevents blue-on-blue mistakes or red-on-blue tragedies.

Furey explained, “Now when a Patriot missile battery or a ship or an F-35 interrogates another aircraft, they get back the little green light that says it’s friendly. They don’t shoot them down.”

The challenge has always been size. Legacy IFF transponders were bulky and heavy, weighing upwards of seven pounds. This made them unsuitable for drones. Sagetech’s engineers saw an opening. The result was the MX12B, the world’s first micro-IFF transponder certified for Mode 5 operations. Weighing just a third of a pound, with diversity (dual) antennas for full spherical coverage, it packs the same secure identification power once reserved for crewed aircraft into the smallest Group 2 and Group 3 drones.

That advance couldn’t have been timelier. In early 2024, the Jordan Tower 22 incident highlighted the consequences of drone misidentification. A hostile Iranian-style drone was mistaken for a friendly UAV returning to base. This successful attack killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens more.

“Because they weren’t leveraging IFF technology, another drone came in at the same time and was assumed to be ours coming home,” Furey noted somberly. “It was not.”

Sagetech’s work with the MX12B directly addresses that gap. Had IFF been universally implemented, Tower 22 might have ended differently. As drone proliferation accelerates, globally, from NATO allies to adversaries, the demand for even more compact, robust IFF systems continues to climb.

Commercial Collisions and the Next Frontier: ACAS-X

But protecting warfighters is only half of Sagetech’s story. The other half plays out in civilian skies, where traffic congestion and rising drone integration create their own hazards.

The most striking example came in early 2025, when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk collided with an American Airlines passenger jet near Washington, D.C., killing 67 people. The aircraft were operating in one of the most tightly managed airspaces in the world. Reliance on the century-old principle of “see-and-avoid” proved tragically inadequate.

The incident sharpened focus on collision avoidance systems. For decades, commercial airliners leaned on TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System), which issues climb-or-descend alerts when two transponder-equipped aircraft converge dangerously. However, TCAS comes with hard limits: it relies solely on vertical maneuvers, is designed only for faster, large aircraft and suppresses certain alerts below 1,000 feet—ironically, exactly where the DC crash occurred.

Enter the Airborne Collision Avoidance System – X (ACAS-X), the FAA and ICAO’s next-generation evolution. Unlike TCAS, ACAS-X leverages machine learning and probabilistic modeling to deliver smarter guidance. It supports not just climb and descend instructions but also horizontal maneuvers—turn right, turn left, or blended combinations. Equally important, ACAS-X includes multiple tailored variants:

• ACAS Xa – successor for large commercial transports.
• ACAS Xu – designed for large fixed-wing drones like the MQ-9 Reaper.
• ACAS sXu – scalable for small <55 lb UAS and future BVLOS systems.
• ACAS Xr – optimized for rotorcraft, marking the first rotorcraft-tailored collision avoidance solution.

Furey emphasized: “For the first time, rotorcraft have a collision avoidance system that is relevant for their aircraft.”

The time is right for this technology. During recent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) hearings on the DC collision, Sagetech’s Director of Systems Engineering, Stacy Rowlan, testified alongside Army representatives, demonstrating how ACAS-X could have changed the outcome. Independent simulations by MIT confirmed it: in 13 out of 15 scenarios replicating the accident, collisions or near-misses occurred. In the two scenarios involving ACAS-Xr-equipped helicopters, safe separation exceeded 1,800 feet. Pilots received more than a full minute of advance warning and direct guidance.

Furey summed it up: “That is a lot of time in an aircraft to perform avoidance maneuvers, particularly when you’re told what those maneuvers should be.”

Bridging to FAA Part 108: Safety for BVLOS

The ACAS-X story doesn’t end with helicopters and airliners. It bridges directly to the FAA’s long-awaited Part 108 Notice of Public Rulemaking for BVLOS operations, published in August 2025.

The proposed rule establishes a tiered framework where increasing operational complexity, such as denser air risk, proximity to people or higher-consequence infrastructure, triggers greater requirements for autonomy and DAA systems. While the FAA has yet to finalize what specific solutions will qualify, Furey sees where the logic leads.

“It does appear that in the NPRM, the FAA is contemplating requiring that there be some sort of detect-and-avoid system on board for both cooperative and non-cooperative traffic,” he noted. “That’s exactly what we live in now, with ACAS as the brains.”

In other words, technologies like ACAS Xu and sXu may become the safety linchpin for BVLOS UAS integration. With them, the vision of scalable drone-based logistics, inspection and emergency response should move closer to reality.

Dual-Use and the Future of Sagetech Avionics

Despite its 50-person size, Sagetech continues to punch far above its weight class. Today, the company is actively partnering with the U.S. Army to investigate retrofitting helicopter fleets with an integrated avionics package that fuses the MX12B IFF transponder and ACAS-Xr in a single low-SWaP box. That means shrinking two critical safety systems into a unit barely larger than a paperback, an achievement Furey calls a breakthrough for cost, size and survivability.

“Next up for us is layering ACAS right inside that same box,” he explains. “So it’ll be one super low-SWaP solution for both crewed aviation and drones.”

The path forward, Furey stressed, won’t see Sagetech veer from its core. Instead, it will be “more of the same”: more stringent certification work, more systems that thrive in the tightrope balance between military ruggedness and commercial scalability and more commitment to the layers of aviation safety needed in an increasingly autonomous world.

In Furey’s words, “Our vision hasn’t changed: safe airspace through advancing technology.”