US Air Force’s former assistant secretary Dr. Will Roper becomes Volansi’s new CEO

Volansi​ has announced Dr. Will Rop­er as its new Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer, with co-founder Han­nan Parviz­ian becom­ing the com­pa­ny’s Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer and Prod­uct Archi­tect.

Dr. Rop­er joined Volan­si’s board of direc­tors in March 2021 after pre­vi­ous­ly serv­ing as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of the US Air Force for Acqui­si­tion, Tech­nol­o­gy and Logis­tics. He over­saw an annu­al bud­get of $60 bil­lion and since leav­ing gov­ern­ment at the start of the year, has been an advi­sor and board mem­ber for tech­nol­o­gy and invest­ment com­pa­nies.

Com­ment­ing on his new role, Dr. Rop­er said: “As a Volan­si board mem­ber, I’ve been impressed by the company’s capac­i­ty for inno­va­tion. The company’s VTOL designs are well-suit­ed for a range of com­mer­cial and mil­i­tary appli­ca­tions.

“It felt like a nat­ur­al fit for me to bring my indus­try knowl­edge as well as oper­a­tions and logis­tics expe­ri­ence to help cre­ate dis­rup­tive solu­tions for the trans­porta­tion of medi­um to heavy weight pay­loads. It’s an excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

While serv­ing in the Air Force, Dr. Rop­er was respon­si­ble for all research and devel­op­ment, test, pro­duc­tion, mod­erni­sa­tion, and logis­tics efforts for the Air Force and Space Force. He was the U.S. gov­ern­ment leader in iden­ti­fy­ing and sup­port­ing pri­vate sec­tor tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies to get access to Depart­ment of Defense resources.

He led Air Force-wide tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tions for soft­ware devel­op­ment, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and dig­i­tal engi­neer­ing and also ini­ti­at­ed high-tech pro­grams for hyper­son­ic weapons, autonomous drones, and a mil­i­tarised Inter­net of Things. This was all while over­see­ing the day-to-day logis­tics of more than 5,000 mil­i­tary air­craft and sup­port sys­tems. 

Parviz­ian said: “At Volan­si, we are very proud of hav­ing assem­bled a world-class team and demon­strat­ed a track record of tech­ni­cal excel­lence in design, test, and pro­duc­tion.

“Attract­ing Dr. Rop­er, first to our Board of Direc­tors and now as CEO, will help us sur­pass even our most ambi­tious goals. I look for­ward to work­ing along­side him in my new role as the new Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer and Prod­uct Archi­tect to set the vision and strate­gic direc­tion for the company’s future.”

Volan­si pro­vides fast, on-demand aer­i­al deliv­ery ser­vices for time-crit­i­cal ship­ments over long ranges. It builds and oper­ate autonomous long-range, medi­um-to-heavy­weight pay­load drones for com­mer­cial, fed­er­al, and human­i­tar­i­an appli­ca­tions.

In Octo­ber 2020, it announced it was col­lab­o­rat­ing with multi­na­tion­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny Mer­ck and Vidant Health on a com­mer­cial health­care drone deliv­ery ser­vice project in North Car­oli­na.

And ear­li­er this year, Volan­si part­nered with three of the nine par­tic­i­pants in the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Administration’s BEYOND pro­gram, to accel­er­ate the inte­gra­tion of Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems (UAS) into the Nation­al Air­space Sys­tem (NAS).