By: Dawn Zoldi
With SKYDRA simulation software freshly launched, Volatus Aerospace makes the case that counter-drone readiness begins long before anyone pulls a trigger.
Somewhere right now, a drone delivers contraband into a prison yard. Another loiters over an airport approach corridor, invisible to radar. A third serves as a cheap kamikaze platform in a conflict zone. All of these scenarios are happening today. Yet most of the organizations responsible for responding to them are not ready. On Episode 120 of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, kicking off Defense Tech Month on the Autonomy Global Network, Danielle Gagne, Head of Global Training Strategy and Business Development at Volatus Aerospace laid out where the capability gap actually lives, and what Volatus is doing to close it.
Counter-Drone Was Always the Other Side of the Coin
Volatus has been building what Gagne’s team refers to as the “Volatusphere” for years. This global dual-use ecosystem spans drone manufacturing, operations and training. It includes a secure remote operations center in Vaughan, Ontario capable of running 21 pilot seats simultaneously. Counter-UAS (C-UAS) was never an add-on. It was always part of the foundation.
“Counter-UAS has always been the opposite side of the same coin for drones,” Gagne said. “We just called it by a different name: airspace awareness. There will always be the unaware, the careless and the dangerous. Without detection and proper mitigation strategies, you can’t have a safe airspace, period,” she emphasized.
That reality resonates even more now than it did just two years ago. The war in Ukraine has turned the global drone threat from an abstraction into daily footage. Iranian proxy forces demonstrated what cheap, autonomous platforms can do to expensive military hardware. Regulatory bodies have been scrambling to catch up. The FAA recently published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for critical infrastructure protection and Transport Canada has been updating its own C-UAS authority frameworks. (See prior AG coverage of the 2209 NPRM). The legal architecture is materializing. The question is whether the people responsible for executing under that authority will be ready when it does.
The Four Cs: A Framework for What You’re Actually Facing
Before any organization can build an effective C-UAS program, it has to answer a more basic question: who, or what, is actually flying in their airspace, and why? Volatus anchors its entire curriculum around the Four Cs.
The Clueless operator doesn’t know they’re in restricted airspace. The Careless one does, and keeps flying anyway. The Criminal exploits drone access deliberately, such as the ones that drop contraband, conduct surveillance on protected assets or probe security perimeters. The Combatant uses drone technology as a weapon, with tactics and systems that have evolved dramatically since Ukraine became the world’s most active drone testing ground.
Each category demands a different response, legally, operationally and tactically. Treating a clueless hobbyist as a combatant creates unnecessary escalation and potential liability. Treating a combatant as a careless operator can get people killed. The Four Cs framework gives organizations a structured way to triage threats in real time, before a stressful incident forces improvised decision-making under pressure.
The Problem Isn’t the Hardware. It’s the Humans.
When organizations come to Volatus with a C-UAS problem, the conversation rarely starts where they expect, according to Gagne. Most have already acquired some form of detection or mitigation technology. Very few have figured out what to do with it.
“They know the threat is real,” Gagne said. “They may or may not have hardware in place, but they haven’t worked through what a response actually looks like in their specific environment. They don’t have documented procedures. They haven’t trained their people on how to coordinate. They haven’t run through scenarios that test what happens when something goes wrong.”
The root cause, she argues, is structural. C-UAS isn’t purely a tactical problem that resolves at the field level. It is simultaneously a policy problem, a legal problem and a coordination problem. And the pace of change compounds everything.
“The drones being used by bad actors today are faster, cheaper and harder to detect than they were two years ago, or even three months ago,” she said. “The tactics and systems are changing even faster. It’s kind of like cybersecurity right now.”
That analogy is on point. The cybersecurity industry spent a decade convincing organizations that a firewall wasn’t a security program. Volatus is making a structurally similar argument about counter-drone readiness. And the window for getting ahead of incidents, rather than responding to them, continues to narrow quickly.
A Tiered Curriculum Built for the Entire Command Chain
In response to this challenge, Volatus created a tiered C-UAS training architecture that reaches every level of an organization, not just the operators on the ground.
- At the executive level, training focuses on policy, risk management and decision-making frameworks. Leaders need to understand what they are authorizing, what legal constraints apply to their jurisdiction and what the downstream implications are for people in the air and on the ground.
- At the planner level, the curriculum shifts to operational concept development, regional threat assessment and the kind of cross-departmental coordination that C-UAS demands. “This is definitely a team sport,” Gagne noted.
- At the operator level, training turns to hands-on proficiency: detection, identification, response sequencing and the ability to execute within applicable rules of engagement while under stress.
Most of the advanced training is delivered in-person, and for good reason. A written playbook can’t account for a threat environment that changes faster than any static curriculum can be updated. “We teach them how to think about what they need to do, not just tell them what to do,” Gagne explained.
That meta-cognitive approach maps directly onto the OODA Loop—Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act—a military decision cycle that sits at the heart of any effective C-UAS response. Drilling that cycle under realistic pressure distinguishes a capable team from one that hesitates when it matters.
Volatus has delivered this training globally. Its instructors, many of whom are operators and veterans themselves, have trained more than 4,000 defense personnel across the company’s history, with over 116,000 total enrollments through Volatus Academy. Recent deployments have ranged from disaster response training in Jamaica to sessions heading to Whitehorse, in Northern Canada.
SKYDRA: Rehearsing Before Reality Demands an Answer
The most significant development in Volatus’s C-UAS portfolio isn’t a drone or a sensor system. It’s software. SKYDRA, launched in March 2026, is the company’s proprietary C-UAS simulation platform, a SaaS product deployable anywhere in the world, without necessitating Volatus personnel to be physically present.
Live interdiction training is expensive, legally complicated and often impossible to conduct outside of active conflict zones. Simulation fills the gap. “Think of it as a rehearsal and planning space,” Gagne said. “You can work through a drone incursion at your facility, test your team’s response times, identify gaps in your procedures and fix them before they actually matter.”
Gagne walked through a SKYDRA scenario based on the Suwalki Gap in Eastern Europe, a real-world NATO vulnerability that defense planners actively war-game. Red markers represented a layered threat swarm. Multiple UAS types flew toward a defended area simultaneously. Blue elements represented the defensive response, a mix of radio frequency sensors, electronic jammers and interceptors.
The simulation runs in real time as the scenario plays out. It shows the initial disposition of forces as well as the dynamic interaction between threat and response.
System-agnostic configurability separates SKYDRA from off-the-shelf 3D modeling tools. Users can edit every simulated asset, on both sides of the engagement, to match the exact specifications of real deployed hardware. Threat libraries range from large fixed-wing platforms and micro FPV drones to optical-fiber-guided systems. The latter capability emerged from active combat zones and represents precisely the kind of rapidly evolving threat with which static training programs fail to keep pace. The platform currently operates on a two-dimensional live map, with three-dimensional terrain modeling on the roadmap as Volatus identifies the right partners.
SKYDRA’s intended scope goes beyond a mere training aid. It’s a policy and planning instrument, Gagne noted. “This is about shifting the mindset toward the pre-work that goes into an operation,” she said. “Policy-making, framework building, validation of tactics, techniques, and procedures. SKYDRA brings all of that to the same table.”
For organizations standing up new C-UAS programs, that pre-work phase of getting authorizations right, stress-testing coordination procedures and identifying coverage gaps before an incident exposes them, is often the least visible, but most consequential part of the process.
SKYDRA’s launch could not be better timed. The FIFA World Cup comes to North America in 2026. The U.S. celebrates its 250th anniversary. The 2028 Olympics head to Los Angeles. Each of those events represents a high-profile, high-consequence airspace security scenario. Add the FAA’s recently published NPRM on critical infrastructure drone protection, and the parallel DETER program discussions, and the U.S. regulatory and operational context for a tool like SKYDRA has rarely been more immediate. (See prior AG coverage of DETER)
A NATO Contract and What It Signals
In February 2026, Volatus announced a training contract with a NATO defense partner, a milestone that carries weight beyond the contract itself. While details remain classified, Gagne could confirm that it involves delivering advanced RPAS training for operations in remote and extreme environments, combining classroom instruction with live flight exercises and preparing operators for real-world defense missions including patrol, surveillance, reconnaissance, and emergency response.
“Our established track record of excellence has enabled contracts like what we announced in February,” Gagne said. “For us, it validates that our training model, the combination of structured curriculum and practical fieldwork, is exactly what NATO-aligned defense organizations are looking for right now.”
Every defense engagement, she noted, feeds back into both curriculum development and SKYDRA’s roadmap. Training operators for arctic and remote environments, for instance, sharpens requirements around terrain, weather modeling, and ground risk, capabilities that will improve the platform for civil infrastructure clients as much as for allied military users.
What It Takes to Build a Real C-UAS Program
For governments, military commands, law enforcement agencies and critical infrastructure operators asking where to start, Gagne recommends to begin with the pre-work, not the procurement.
Acquiring hardware before establishing authorization frameworks, documented response procedures and cross-departmental coordination protocols means that hardware will likely sit underutilized. Worse, it could get deployed incorrectly under pressure.
“You have to get the pre-authorizations. You have to have responses drilled in so that when you’re in a stressful situation and you have to act, you can act with confidence that you’re operating within the legal limits of your program,” she said.
Executive and planner-level training matters as much as operator proficiency. A frontline team that knows how to detect and classify a threat is only effective if the command structure above them knows how to authorize an appropriate response, and understands the legal and safety implications of getting it wrong.
Simulation should also be treated as a core planning tool, not an optional supplement. The regulatory environment in North America and Europe makes live-fire or live-interdiction exercises prohibitively difficult for most organizations outside of active combat settings. SKYDRA, and tools like it, allow teams to pressure-test plans in a consequence-free environment before reality demands a real answer.
And readiness must be understood as a process, not an event. “You cannot write a playbook and assume it will hold,” Gagne said. “Organizations need to build the capacity to assess new threats and update their procedures continuously, not just train once and move on.”
The Volatusphere’s Expanding Orbit
Volatus is building toward something that most defense and public safety organizations haven’t yet fully articulated as a need: a complete, scalable C-UAS ecosystem that connects training, simulation, operational planning and hardware agnostically, available globally and continuously updated against a threat environment that doesn’t stand still.
“In three years, the same question nobody asks about cybersecurity anymore, ‘do we need a program?’ should be true for counter-drone,” Gagne said. “We are trying to help organizations get there before an incident forces them to.”
The organizations that wait for the incident are already behind the powercurve.