▸ 31 March 2026 · Dr Joni Sytsma
Crew Manifest #1: somewhere between ten and thirty aircraft
A manifest lists who is aboard in the order they came aboard, so ours starts with employee number one. Patrick Ward came to us from underground mining, has destroyed somewhere between ten and thirty of our aircraft, and rides an electric unicycle up mountains.
A manifest is the list of who is aboard, in the order they came aboard. So ours starts on 31 March 2026, the day Patrick Ward stopped being our intern and became the first person this company employed. There is very little we have built since that has not had his hands on it at some point.
I sent the crew ten questions, written to be as easy as possible to answer, because people freeze when you ask them for a bio and answer instantly when you ask them a question. Patrick dictated his while travelling, which I recommend, because the transcript is better than anything he would have typed.
Patrick Ward, Junior Mechatronics Engineer
Before us he was an electrical engineer at Komatsu, a year in underground mining, which he describes as “pretty much as far away as you can get from aerospace, in fact the opposite direction”. Before that, a year studying at university in Korea.
What he actually does on a Tuesday changes week to week. Last Tuesday it was setting our systems up so we can onboard a lot more people. In a flight week it is retrofitting old airframes, repairing them, or building new ones for the next test campaign, everything from connecting a powertrain to 3D printing the parts that do not exist yet.
His favourite Tuesday was the one where he exploded a capacitor.
We were ground testing the powertrain for a new aircraft, partly to verify a supply chain, and a capacitor on an electronic speed controller let go under fifty volts. Patrick was filming it with a thermal camera, and there is one frame he describes as “an absolute smear of hot mess”. Everybody was behind glass, which is the boring half of the story and the half that matters.
This is not an anecdote about something going wrong. It is the job. A part arrives, we run it until it fails, we film the failure and we write down what we learnt. Patrick’s version of that is that he got to watch something explode at work, which is a healthier way to hold it than mine.
The thing he is proudest of is the simulator, still in development: a video game engine with our aircraft in it, flying on real physics with the actual flight control software in the loop, in hardware and in software, and producing imagery good enough to train machine vision on. What makes it more than a toy is that the interface a pilot sees in the simulator is the interface they see on the flight line.
He said yes because it was his dream to make things fly in Australian skies. Why he stayed is the more interesting answer, and I am quoting it in full because it is not mine to paraphrase.
As someone who is neurodivergent, the best I could hope for from leadership in previous roles was for them to politely ignore my differences. That is not the case at Rocket Fast Drones. Those differences are embraced, supported, and given the tools to help us succeed. We are all a little bit neurospicy, and that support makes us one of the best teams out there.
I did not know he was going to write that. I am glad he did.
The last question asks who should get in touch. Patrick turned it around: there are people all through his life who believed in him more than he believed in himself, he is still in contact with a good number of them, and he owes the rest an update. So if you taught him, employed him, or once told him he could do it, he is talking about you.
The manifest
Name: Patrick Ward
Rank: Junior Mechatronics Engineer
Rank he would give himself: Systems Engineer
Aircraft harmed in the making of this employment: more than ten and fewer than thirty. He would like it noted that it depends on your definition of destroyed and that it was a team effort. His own scale: the sub-100 gram and sub-2 kilogram ones are easy, an EP250 “hurts the soul a bit”, and an EP450 “makes for a rough day”.
Something he is good at that has nothing to do with this job: he rides an electric unicycle, and it is what he is best known for outside work. He uses it to explore, climb mountains and get around the public transport network.
The hill he will die on: he skipped this question. On the strength of everything above it I am recording it as “the differences are the feature”, and he is welcome to correct me in public.
Employee number one, and still the person most likely to be holding the aircraft when it stops being one.