Context
Distar CZ was founded in 2001 by Viktor Rohach, an aviation designer and constructor who spent his career in Soviet aviation and aerospace and moved to the Czech Republic in 1995. Two decades on he was still chief executive and still running research and development himself.
By then the company built composite aircraft and unmanned platforms, made its own engines and building machinery, manufactured industrial diamond tooling, constructed small aerodromes, and had an energy arm putting up photovoltaic plants. It sold through its own dealer network in fourteen countries, with aircraft certified in Europe and the USA.
It was also building fifteen or sixteen aircraft a year in a factory that could make twenty-five, and everything it had ever made had sold with no marketing and almost no advertising. That works while buyers arrive knowing what they want. It stops the moment the company has to go and explain itself.
The first job was narrow: prepare the company for a European grant application.
Diagnosis
A company like this has a presentation problem before it has an operational one. Grant assessors, partners and buyers all need to know what the business is, and that list doesn’t survive the question.
The clearest evidence sat in their own paperwork. The same two drones appear as URBAN CONQUEROR and SKY PROTECTOR in the English catalogue, as Intruder and Watcher in the Russian teaser, and as the "SAMBA UAV" in the Indonesian proposal. Three audiences, three sets of names, one product line.
The idle capacity said the rest. Production was never the constraint. Demand was, and nobody had worked on it because the aircraft had always sold themselves.
The grant was never about merit. They qualified. They couldn’t explain themselves in the terms the programme needed, so the work was structuring the information and building the project logic. The review after it found processes that had accumulated rather than been designed: no ERP, no digitalisation.
The last finding changed the company. Converting existing airframes into unmanned platforms wasn’t a product to invent, it was a new use for assets they owned.
Results
Distar got the grant, and the operational work that followed rebuilt how the company ran: digitalised processes, new branding, ERP, a supply system across all four lines.
The engine is the part I’d show anyone. Every aircraft flew on a bought-in aviation engine. The four realistic options on the European market cost about $16,100 to $29,900, burned sixteen to thirty-five litres an hour, and took six to seven months from order to delivery, which meant next year’s engines had to be ordered in June. Prices were expected to rise another 12 to 15% on Asian demand.
Instead of arguing about which of the four was best, we wrote down what the engine actually had to do: 110 to 120 horsepower, no more than eight or nine litres an hour, under $5,750 all in, under 75 kilos dry, delivered inside sixty days, and reliability proven by large production volumes.
Nothing in the category met it. So we left the category. A Škoda 1.0 TSI, already flown on an aircraft since 2012 and running seven years without trouble, came in under $4,600.
The last line of that requirement is what did the work. Reliability proven by large production volumes is the same fact as cheap and available. A car engine is inexpensive and in stock precisely because millions have been built, and that’s also the reason it can be trusted. The constraint and the answer turned out to be one property.
The UAV programme reached a completed transaction with a Chinese partner. That reads as opportunistic until you see the board had a Chinese vice-president, certification was already running with the Chinese aviation authority, and the solar equipment for the energy arm came from a Chinese manufacturer. The sale was the end of an axis, not a lucky meeting.
Three phases, none planned from the beginning. That’s usually how it goes: fix what you were hired for, and the next constraint shows you where the business actually is.