Odys Aviation + Nominal: From SD Cards to Real-Time Flight Test

Mission Brief

• Launched: 2021
• Headquarters: Long Beach, CA
• Mission: Build long-range, dual-use hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft for defense, logistics, and civil applications.
• Aircraft: Laila (tactical cargo drone, 450-mile range) and Alta (regional VTOL, 1,200-mile range)
• Operational Focus: Rapid flight test iteration on a novel VTOL architecture using flap-based thrust vectoring with hybrid-electric propulsion.

Where Odys began

Odys Aviation is building an aircraft around an architecture that doesn't exist anywhere else, scalable from UAV logistics to crewed regional passenger travel and designed for an endless range of missions. No legacy dataset to benchmark against. No off-the-shelf flight test handbook. No historical encumbrance.

Every test flight generates data that validates (and occasionally informs) the team's understanding of aircraft behavior, and is the basis for clearing today’s gate and green-lighting the next flight.

They started smart and scrappy - focusing on the aircraft and core software systems and getting into the air at record speeds. And that meant flight data logged to onboard SD cards - with engineers running scripts to upload, store, and parse various file formats into local analysis tools. Limited realtime streaming capability, limited shared context across test runs, data generation at an increasing cadence, and no centralized system that met their scaling needs.

When we first spoke with James Dorris, Founder and CEO of Odys, he already had a vision for what the test data backbone at Odys should look like - he’d seen this scenario go unsolved at multiple companies before, and the downstream negative effects it can have. The ask was clear: centralized datastore, ingestible from anywhere in realtime, accessible from anywhere in realtime, and maximizing automated analyses to drive decisions at speed.

Live data, live decisions

With streaming telemetry flowing directly into Nominal during flight, data was available to the entire company in real-time - to the engineers at the flight test site, but also to the cadre of support back at HQ. Propulsion performance, control surface response, battery state, flight dynamics: all of it, live, visible to every engineer regardless of where they sit. The Chief Engineer in Long Beach and the propulsion engineer in Germany could see the same data at the same time as the crew at the airfield.

Post-flight analysis begins before touchdown. Pre-configured workbook templates populate automatically as streaming data arrives, so the first structured review is ready within minutes of the aircraft returning. Not hours. Minutes.

This meant more eyes on more data and decisions supported by the entire brain trust. Whether to extend a test, adjust a profile, or close out another successful day: those calls now happen on instrumented data, with the full engineering team watching the same streams. For a team iterating on a novel aircraft, that compression of learning compounds across every test in the campaign.

One catalog. Every test. Every rig.

Odys runs a lot more testing than just the aircraft flight tests. Ground test rigs, component-level test stands, and integrated system validations alongside their flight program. Before Nominal, those streams lived in different tools, different formats, and different corners of the organization.

Now flight test and ground test data flow into the same environment. Every test run carries shared context: configuration, conditions, intent, outcomes. Event and range tagging let engineers query across the full history of the program. When the test catalog is searchable and connected across every rig and every flight, engineers can iterate more quickly. Testing timelines shrink.

From analysis to execution

Most data platforms for test programs stop at analysis. Odys is pushing further.

The team is now testing Nominal Connect for procedures, checklists, and automated validation. Connect introduces a structured, repeatable execution layer inside the same environment where data is already being captured and analyzed. Procedures define what a test should do. Connect executes and validates each step. Data flows into Nominal automatically. Workbooks analyze the results. The next procedure is informed by what the previous test actually showed, all within the same platform.

The bet that paid off

Odys's leadership standardized on Nominal before every engineer was ready to move off their existing workflows. The team was small, the test cadence ramping, and some engineers were skeptical that the platform benefits would justify the transition.

The engineers who were initially skeptical became some of the platform's heaviest users. Not because they were mandated to, but because streaming, shared workbooks, queryable test history, and automated procedures solved problems they were spending real hours on every day.

Nominal's Mission Operations team worked alongside Odys's engineers throughout: supporting ingestion pipelines, building workbook templates, defining the metadata schema that makes the test catalog useful at scale. The result is that Nominal is infrastructure Odys runs on. The system of record for a flight test program building an aircraft nobody else has built.

Results

• Test flights per day: +43% on average, with analysis beginning during the flight itself
• Remote observability: full real-time visibility for engineers regardless of location
• Average time in-product: 8–10 hours/week per engineer, with power users exceeding 30 hours/week
• Engagement volume: 40,000+ actions per week from top users supporting active flight test programs
• Nominal Connect: adoption under test for procedures, checklists, and automated validation
• Testing stages unified: flight test and ground test data in a single searchable catalog with shared metadata and full data lineage

The work continues

Odys is continuing full-scale flight testing, expanding into international operations, and advancing their aircraft toward production. The test tempo will increase. Nominal will scale with it.

Instrument everything. Understand immediately. Fly again tomorrow.