Sofcoast is pioneering the development of a new category of flying system called a Hybrid Air System. Hybrid Air Systems combine the most desirable features of Small Unmanned Aerial System's, aerostats (balloons on strings) and kites to deliver a superior persistent fixed or mobile elevated platform.
Sofcoast's first Hybrid Air System, MAKO, gives a wide variety of end user's the ability to easily transport and elevate lightweight technologies to provide actionable information to support a broad range of activity based information related needs for various end user's. Many fielded aerostat systems range from large to extremely large, requiring large logistics support infrastructure including transporting large steel bottles of helium. The MAKO system is truly man-portable, and coupled with the right types of payloads, in this instance a developmental pan tilt zoom (PTZ) HD Color and High Resolution Thermal Imager (EO/IR), MAKO provides a quiet, easy to use, easy to deploy and inexpensive aerial coverage asset for a wide variety of use cases and customer's.