No second attempt
Once it leaves the ground, nothing can be swapped, restarted or talked through. KopterMax builds the flight-critical systems that off-the-shelf hardware cannot deliver — architected, built and kept working by the same people, for the whole service life.
Ten years in, we still use everything we sell — which is why we are willing to sell it.
The expensive mistakes are made in the first three weeks
Most of the problems we are called in to solve were designed in before anyone wrote a line of flight code. A wrong bus topology, a link budget that does not survive real terrain, a sensor whose supply dries up in year two — these surface during integration or qualification, when the schedule has no slack and changing direction costs programme years.
We are regularly engaged for the architecture alone: no hardware, no firmware, just the decisions and the reasoning behind them. Clients come to us because the alternative — finding out empirically — is the most expensive way to learn it.
Why our advice is worth more than an opinion
We distribute thousands of components a month and have done for ten years. That is not a side business sitting next to the engineering — it is the evidence underneath it.
We see which parts come back, which fail in the cold, which vendors quietly revise a datasheet, and which have a real second source rather than a promised one. No consultancy without a parts business has that data, and no distributor without an engineering practice knows what to do with it.
What we do
System architecture and technology selection
The decisions made in the first three weeks of a programme determine what it costs for the next five years. Most of the expensive problems we are called in to fix were designed in before anyone wrote a line of flight code.
Resilient navigation and positioning
Centimetre accuracy is straightforward with a clear sky and a cooperative environment. We build the positioning systems that hold up when neither is available.
Autonomy and onboard AI
Autonomy that depends on a radio link, a satellite constellation or a ground station is not autonomy. We build vehicles that keep making correct decisions when every external reference is gone.
Telemetry and ground link
Most telemetry gives you a filtered summary of a vehicle you cannot reach. We build links that give you the vehicle itself — every subsystem addressable from the ground station as though the bus ran through your desk.
Power and safety-critical control
Batteries and termination systems are the two subsystems where a design shortcut is not recoverable in flight. We treat both as safety-critical, because they are.
Fleet operations, updates and predictive maintenance
A system is delivered once and maintained for a decade. Most of the cost, and nearly all of the risk, is in the second part.
Businesses, OEMs and integrators
Talk to us directly. Development programmes, architecture and technology selection, volume manufacture of the end product, and trade distribution of components.Buying from the catalogue
Our products and the brands we distribute are listed and priced in the shop run by our sister company HeliEngadin, with normal ordering, support and shipping. If you know the part you need, that is the faster route.Selected work
Extending the manoeuvre envelope of a specialised airframe
A stock flight controller lost authority during exactly the manoeuvres the aircraft existed to perform. We identified the airframe, established what its structure could actually take, rebuilt the control laws around both, and released the envelope the design had always implied.
Infrastructure survey, and a restricted programmePositioning that holds when the signal is jammed, spoofed or simply gone
Three ways a position fails — lost, quietly wrong, or never available at all — and one requirement underneath all of them: never act on a position you cannot trust, and keep flying when there is none.
Autonomous ground and air vehiclesCentimetre positioning that does not stop at the door
A vehicle that knows where it is to a couple of centimetres outside is no use if it loses that the moment it goes in. Warehouses, plant buildings, parking structures and tunnels are where much of the work is — and where GNSS ends.
UAV manufacturer, flight test and fleet operationsOne fault found in a sortie, and the next one seen coming
Bench-grade access in flight found a fault that had never reproduced on the ground. Keeping that capture rather than discarding it is what, years later, made it possible to warn before failures instead of reporting them.
Commercial fleet operatorUpdating a distributed fleet without bricking a single unit
A fleet that had quietly drifted into a dozen firmware and configuration combinations, spread across sites, with no practical way to recall units.
Propulsion test and launchAn abort path that works when everything else has failed
Shutoff and bleed control for rocketry, designed to remain commandable precisely when the primary avionics are the thing that has gone wrong.