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Outstanding Alumni for Excellence in Commercial Enterprise
Over 40 Category

Maciej Stachura is the CTO and co-founder of Black Swift Technologies. He received his PhD in aerospace engineering sciences from CU ÌÇÐÄVlogÆƽâ°æ working with Dr. Eric Frew on cooperative control of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). His undergraduate studies were in aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto.

Stachura co-founded Black Swift during his last year of graduate school and continues to guide its path toward developing technologies to address important challenges such as climate change, monitoring volcanic eruptions, tracking wildfires, and helping forecast severe weather.Ìý

His professional highlights include many ground-breaking missions and world firsts with UAS. This includes being involved with Vortex2 while at CU ÌÇÐÄVlogÆƽâ°æ, which saw the first systematic study of supercell thunderstorms with drones. He continued this type of work at Black Swift, developing drones that have flown in some of the most challenging conditions on Earth. This includes a purpose-built Earth science drone, the S2, which has flown hundreds of successful missions in the Arctic and into the plumes of active volcanoes from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to the jungles of Costa Rica.Ìý

Alongside other CU alumni at Black Swift, Stachura has also helped develop the S0 drone for flights into hurricanes for NOAA. This culminated in 2024 with 19 flights into 4 different hurricanes, including category 5 storms. These missions set multiple Guinness world records, such as the highest wind ever flown by a drone, at over 200 kts, just 30 feet over the ocean. The S0 also survived the highest turbulence ever measured on Earth, by any instrument. Most importantly, these UAS will gather new types of data previously inaccessible that will help forecast and mitigate the devastating effects of these storms.
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