GRAND FORKS – Dana Sande doesn’t think anyone could have predicted how far North Dakota’s unmanned aircraft industry has come.

As a member of the Grand Forks City Council for 15 years and business development manager for UND’s Aerospace Foundation for 20, Sande has had a front-row view of the state’s UAS industry essentially since its beginnings two decades ago. He, like many others at that time, assumed the future of UAS in Grand Forks was small unmanned aircraft.

He’ll admit that in those early days, he wondered if GrandSky – the first-of-its-kind unmanned aviation business park in the U.S., located just west of Grand Forks – would struggle to get buy-in.

Ten years after GrandSky opened its doors to public and private UAS tenants, many of those early assumptions have been proven wron

See Full Page