Ezekiel Bierschank is Managing Director of NW Blue, a U.S.-based manufacturer and authorized CubePilot partner specializing in NDAA-compliant sUAS components. The company manufactures the HereLink Blue in the United States and introduced the Pro H757 flight controller at XPONENTIAL in Düsseldorf. NW Blue received Blue List approval as an accessory manufacturer in June 2026.
Managing Director, NW Blue
Q: What does genuine NDAA compliance actually require at the component level, and how do you build supply chain resilience around it?
A: Every component gets evaluated individually—not just for compliance, but for supply chain depth. We ask how many units of that specific part exist in the market right now and what the backup is. If a capacitor has a million units available, we’re comfortable; if there are twenty thousand, we need a qualified alternate ready before we commit. For chips, we always prioritize alliance-country sources. We also select automotive-grade passives throughout.
Q: The Pro H757 is billed as CubePilot-class reliability in an FPV footprint. What’s the real engineering tradeoff?
A: The Cube Orange Plus has redundant sensors—multiple IMUs, magnetometers, barometers. The H757 has one of each. That’s the direct cost of the form factor. What you retain is the CubePilot engineering lineage, the firmware ecosystem, the build quality, with the same automotive-grade standard applied to the passives. We ship it empty, with no firmware loaded, which keeps it ITAR-free. The customer loads what they need—ArduPilot, PX4, Betaflight, INAV—whatever fits the mission.
Q: What mission profiles does that combination of size and capability actually open up?
A: This is a professional controller in an FPV-sized package—not an FPV product in the racing sense. The applications we focus on are indoor inspection, smaller ISR platforms, and one-way operations: anywhere you need CubePilot reliability and engineering depth in a tight footprint. The platform supports dual-use development across commercial and defense applications, and because it ships firmware-free, the operator determines the stack. That flexibility is part of the point.
Q: NW Blue currently builds the HereLink Blue by hand in the U.S. What does the production scale-up look like?
A: Right now we’re producing a few hundred HereLink Blues a month through hand assembly—that gives us quality control at every stage. We’re working with CubePilot on an automated line with robotic arms that will move us into thousands per month once it’s running. For the H757, lead times are already shorter because it runs through pick-and-place with minimal hand interaction—we can scale that to tens of thousands. We’re managing across multiple PCB suppliers to avoid lead-time choke points.
Q: The DoD is a customer. What does that relationship actually look like, and what does end-to-end support mean for a components company?
A: It’s ongoing and consultative—not just procurement. They bring development ideas and we help think through the best approach, drawing on the operational context we’ve built working across the sUAS supply chain. On the support side, we have ArduPilot developers on staff. When a customer—or a non-customer—hits a development problem, we connect them with either the manufacturer or our own ArduPilot engineers and work through it. In a market where NDAA-compliant options are multiplying fast, that end-to-end engagement is where the real differentiation is.
