New Book From Drone Industry Vets Is a Must-Read

There’s no shortage of drone books out there, covering everything from flying to shooting better aerial video to how to pass the Part 107 test. While they’re all useful in their own right, Sharon Rossmark, founder and CEO of Women and Drones, noticed a gap on that shelf, and it has nothing to do with flight skills.

Her new book, Future Flight: How Talent, Capital and Manufacturing will Shape the Next Era of Uncrewed Aviation, is about the structural barriers that determine whether the U.S. drone industry can actually scale . It digs into who will build and fly the systems, who will fund them, and who will manufacture them domestically rather than overseas.

“Most drone books are written from the cockpit or the workbench,” Rossmark said. “Mine is written from the boardroom and the classroom and the factory floor, because that’s actually where this industry is going to be won or lost.”

Why write it now

Rossmark has spent more than a decade in the thick of the industry, not just as a Part 107 pilot, but as the person connecting operators, educators, investors, and policymakers through Women and Drones. She also previously wrote a series of drone books for kids. Before any of that, she was a corporate executive, which gives her a lens most drone commentators simply don’t have. She’s focused on how industries adopt technology at scale, not just how drones fly.

That perspective anchors the book’s central argument: the U.S. already has the technology to lead in uncrewed aviation. What it doesn’t yet have is a coordinated pipeline of talent, capital, and domestic manufacturing.

“You can’t fix the talent shortage without fixing how capital flows into training and companies,” she said. “You can’t fix manufacturing without the workforce to run the lines.”

What to expect in this new book

Most drone books are either  technical how-tos for people who already fly, or futurist takes written from far outside the trenches. Future Flight is something entirely different, aimed at the executives, policymakers, educators, and investors whose decisions will determine whether the U.S. leads this sector or watches others do it first.

The book also tackles the fact that the U.S. still has no truly American-made consumer or prosumer drone. Nearly every foldable quadcopter used for public safety, inspections, real estate, STEM programs, drone light shows, or weekend flying is built overseas. Domestic manufacturers have focused on defense and enterprise platforms, leaving the entry-level and prosumer tiers with few to no American-made options..

Meanwhile, Drone as First Responder programs are spreading fast, with police and fire departments across the country adopting them faster than domestic manufacturers can keep pace. Infrastructure owners face inspection backlogs across 600,000+ U.S. bridges. Part 107 certificate holders have climbed past 492,000. There are a lot of use cases for flying low-cost drones, but there’s  no strong domestic option at their price point.

“There’s real progress happening in defense-grade drones,” Rossmark said, “but if a police department’s first-responder drone, a bridge inspector’s platform, and a kid’s STEM classroom drone are all still Chinese-made because there’s no domestic option in their price range, we haven’t actually built a domestic industry.Every year we wait, more of this industry’s workforce trains itself on hardware that was never ours to begin with.”

Who this book is for

The book opens with a foreword from Dr. Robin Murphy, the field robotics pioneer who led one of the first major disaster-response drone deployments during Hurricane Katrina. It signals that Future Flight is meant for the people shaping the industry’s future, inluding leaders, decision-makers, and practitioners who understand that scaling uncrewed aviation requires more than better aircraft. 

More specifically, that includes executives building or scaling UAS companies, policymakers writing the rules, educators developing training pipelines, investors looking for where the real opportunities lie, and anyone who’s ever wondered why drone technology keeps outpacing the systems meant to support it.

“The window is open right now,” she said. “It won’t stay open forever. This book is my attempt to name exactly what’s missing and give people something specific to do about it, not just another forecast telling them the future is coming.”

Future Flight is available now in paperback, hardcover, and ebook at FutureFlightBook.com, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

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