North Dakota might seem like an unlikely venue for a major commercial drone exposition. But last week’s 16th Annual UAS Summit and Expo held in Grand Forks – which attracted more than 600 academics, business leaders and state and local politicians – confirmed the state’s reputation as the epicenter of the US drone industry.  North Dakota was the first state in the nation to establish a drone business park, the first with a university degree program devoted exclusively to drones (at the University of North Dakota), and most recently, the site of the nation’s first unmanned drone airport.

North Dakota has several things going for it. Its physical setting is ideal for drone testing.  The state is a wide open rural prairie with huge tracts of farmland, 39 million acres in all.  But its population is tiny:  just 760,000 inhabitants.  Bismarck, the capital, has just 75,000 people.  Hundreds of small towns, most of them with less than 1,500 residents, dot the rural countryside.  The airspace is just as open, with few commercial overflights.

From the beginning, the federal government has smiled favorably on North Dakota.  When the state lobbied to become one of the FAA’s six designated drone test sites, it beat out 37 other bids.  The FAA also granted North Dakota a series of special waivers to allow law enforcement pilots to use drones at night to search for murder suspects and to fly beyond the pilot’s line of sight – restrictions that remain in place elsewhere.

North Dakota’s own laws also favor drone operators.  While pilots are prevented under FAA regulations from flying in (or over) national parks, no such restrictions apply to North Dakota’s 13 state parks, which cover more than 21,000 acres.  Local drone laws are non-existent.  No one seems especially concerned about drones invading their “privacy.”  Given the spacious physical and human setting, most North Dakotans – to date at least – have yet to come in contact with a drone.

This could well change as North Dakota’s heady drone development continues to accelerate. But a large number of federal government and major business stakeholders are promoting the drone industry, including Northrop Grumman, and more and more North Dakotans are becoming dependent on drone-related employment (there are 40.0 drone-related jobs per 100,000 people, second among all states). The Pentagon is testing many of its latest drone prototypes at the 215-acre business park, which is attached to the Grand Forks Air Force base.  In fact, much of last week’s Expo in Grand Forks featured discussions of ways to further integrate drones into US defense and national security strategy.

Drone start-ups are booming in Grand Forks and since 2015 the state has committed more than $100 million to support the build-up of business infrastructure.   It’s not for nothing that local analysts have begun referring to North Dakota as the “Silicon Valley of Drones.”  If current trends hold, it won’t be long before the rest of the country does too.

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