Volume 11, Number 1 • Spring 2003 • Small Business/SBIR

An Idea Ahead of Its Time

The WSI InFlight Receiver and Low Profile Antenna. Image courtesy of WSI Corporation.

This is a story about success — success that comes from the hard work and determination of a small, minority-owned company in Hampton, VA. In 1979, Dr. Sudhir Mehrotra and Dr. D.M. Roa established a company they called ViGYAN, Inc. Initially, their plan was to provide aerospace research and development services to NASA Langley Research Center, also located in Hampton. The company proved to be much more than that, and NASA’s SBIR program played a role.

In 1990, the company received an SBIR Award from Langley to develop an innovative concept for a graphical weather advisory system for pilots. Several company employees developed Pilot Weather Advisor™, an innovative satellite-based system that provides continuous broadcasts of weather information directly to aircraft cockpits.

Although the idea was a good one, ViGYAN had a slight problem — Pilot Weather Advisor was literally ahead of its time.

ViGYAN vice president Richard White understood the issue, but, at the time, he did not have a solution. “There was not an affordable business model that gave us the satellite capacity to provide the Pilot Weather Advisor service, and there were no displays in the airplanes to support the Pilot Weather idea.”

What makes ViGYAN’s SBIR success even more rewarding is its vision and steadfast belief in the idea. It was an innovation ahead of its time, ahead of the technology and ahead of the marketplace. It needed precious satellite time to test its operation and performance, and the costs were exorbitant then. According to Mehrotra, when a concept is ahead of its time, “you need to believe and continue.”

Still convinced that ViGYAN was on track with the idea, he began investing his own money to keep it afloat. Finally, new cockpit multifunction displays became available, and satellite time became affordable. White recalled that “around 1997, both of these things began happening, and we made a company decision at that point it was now or never.”

With most of the money coming from company profits, some coming from private sources and additional funding from NASA Glenn, ViGYAN’s Pilot Weather Advisor became a reality and was successfully tested in a private aircraft.

Just last spring, more than 10 years after it began, ViGYAN sold its Pilot Weather Advisor to WSI of Billerica, MA, one of the world’s leading providers of weather information systems.

White said, “Without assistance from NASA, we would not have been able to develop the Pilot Weather Advisor as quickly as we did. We certainly would not have had the success in selling this product to WSI without NASA’s Weather Information Communications program.”

Weather contributes to about 30 percent of all aviation accidents, and research has shown that real-time graphical displays in the cockpit help pilots make decisions faster and more safely.

“It’s gratifying to see NASA-sponsored aviation technologies, like graphical weather displays and satellite datalink communications, come together over the last few years and finally make their way into the marketplace,” said Gus Martzaklis, Project Manager of NASA’s Weather Accident Prevention project at Glenn. Q

For more information, contact Robert L. Yang, Manager of the SBIR/STTR Program at NASA Langley Research Center, T: 757/864-9569, r.l.yang@larc.nasa.gov. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

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