US 10502584

I'll search for this specific patent number, including checking for any CAFC 2026 activity.

Let me check for any litigation or CAFC activity involving this patent or its assignee.

Identification — US 10,502,584 B1

Prosecution chain (from the printed front page, "Related U.S. Application Data"): App. 16/217,715 is a continuation of 15/243,752 (filed Aug. 22, 2016, now abandoned), which is a continuation of 15/159,202 (issued as US 9,821,910), which is a continuation of 14/741,283 (issued as US 9,310,222), which is a continuation of 14/142,390 (published US 2014/0343765 A1).

Family note: Later Otto Aero Company grants share this priority lineage — e.g., US 11,699,351 B2 ("Flight assistant"), US 11,657,721 B1 ("Aircraft with flight assistant"), US 12,073,731 B1 ("Mission monitor"), and US 12,260,769 B1 ("System and apparatus for reducing the urgency of a flight condition").

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Abstract (verbatim)

"A system and related method for monitoring the performance of one or more autonomous unmanned aircraft (UA) includes a flight assistant for periodically determining the viability of an aircraft flight command, flight, or mission by comparing expected flight segment configuration and performance against at least actual performance. The flight assistant may trend actual performance as a function of differences in expected position and actual position and determine whether a flight command, flight, or mission may be performed or continued according to a hierarchy of user selectable detected anomalies or safety concerns. The flight assistant may report to an operator, controller, pilot, or monitor a rate of deviation, size of deviation, or change in the rate of deviation in accordance with a hierarchy based at least in part on flight segment, altitude, proximity to people or things."

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Plain-language overview of the independent claim

Claim 1 — "A flight control sending unit" (the sole independent claim). It is an on-board box/processor that watches the aircraft's sound and uses a threshold test to decide whether to tell the flight control system to change something. The elements, in order:

1. Input — acoustics. At least one acoustic sensor mounted on the aircraft senses an acoustic profile of the aircraft.
2. Hardware. At least one processor is coupled by a system bus both to the acoustic sensor and to the aircraft's control system.
3. (a)–(b) Data intake. The processor receives the sensed acoustic profile, and receives the aircraft's position and/or altitude over the bus.
4. (c) Segment ID. From that position/altitude it determines the current flight segment (e.g., takeoff, cruise, descent — see dependent claim 7).
5. (d)–(e) Compare expected vs. current. It determines an expected configuration for that segment, and determines the current configuration from the sensed acoustic profile.
6. (f)–(g) Deviation and threshold. It computes the deviation of current from expected, and flags an unusual condition if that deviation crosses at least one threshold.
7. (h)–(i) Act. If an unusual condition is detected, the processor generates instructions corresponding to a configuration change — a corrective configuration and/or an emergency configuration — and forwards those instructions to the aircraft's control system.

Note the framing: the claimed unit sends instructions rather than being the flight control itself, and the diagnostic channel that makes it novel is acoustic (the specification ties acoustics to airframe vibration, motor/engine instrumentation, battery discharge, wind noise, control-surface position, etc.).

Dependent claims (2–19), grouped:

• Configuration content: expected configuration as expected position/altitude/setting (2); current configuration as energy state (8); flight segment enumerated (7); configuration change as heading change or landing (3).
• Geometry/position: datum conventions, DME radial, or bearing triangulation (4); AGL vs. MSL altitude (5).
• Payload: payload status in either configuration; change may be jettison of the payload (6).
• Energy/landing: reachable range and landing sites within it (9); hierarchy of nearest landing sites plus emergency levels — land immediately / as soon as possible / as soon as practicable (10); hierarchy keyed to proximity, slope, width, length, obstruction, proximate facility (11).
• UAS architecture: wireless transceiver to a remote control unit, uplink of position/altitude/acoustic parameters and downlink of control input (12).
• Environment-aware detection: flight environment information (traffic, weather, wind, flight plan, terrain, airport, second-aircraft data, traffic-control/ground/space signals, arrival pattern) used to set the threshold (13); resulting changes to flight plan, return to origin, or diversion to a non-destination landing site (14); traffic data as TCAS/radar/ATC feed/ADS-B/road traffic (15); terrain as DTED level 1, DTED level 2, satellite imagery (16); airport data as runway length/width/lighting, ARFF, medical/maintenance facilities (17); weather as surface wind, altitude-based wind model, ceiling, visibility, barometric pressure, braking action, illumination (18); second-aircraft data as configuration, possible configuration change, control-surface position, performance, weight, pilot control input, autopilot status, MEL status, DTED, satellite imagery (19).

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Caveats, inconsistencies, and things I could not verify

• CAFC / litigation search came back negative. I searched for Federal Circuit or other 2026 docket activity tied to the number 10,502,584, to "Otto Aero," and to the inventors, and retrieved no appellate, district-court, or PTAB proceeding. I do not have authoritative information that any CAFC 2026 docket involves this patent, and I cannot rule out a proceeding that is not indexed in the sources I could reach. Treat the absence of results as "not found," not as "confirmed none." Non-patent noise also matched the bare numeric string (e.g., a European retail product SKU "10502584"); I disregarded those.
• Assignees. The Google Patents record lists the original assignee as "Individual" and shows two Otto Aero Company reassignments, one dated 2021-05-13 and another dated 2026-04-22. I could not independently confirm the circumstances of the second recordation.
• Specification vs. claims mismatch. The written description is far broader than the single granted independent claim: it describes, as "additional embodiments of the present invention," systems for directing a UAS to a reachable alternative landing site, for presenting available alternative landing sites, and for assisting a pilot in an emergency. None of those appear as independent claims in this patent. Several of those subject areas instead appear to have been pursued in the later Otto Aero family members noted above.
• Internal claim-drafting issue worth flagging. Claim 10 depends from claim 1 but refers to "the one or more landing sites," a term introduced only in claim 9 (from which claim 10 does not depend), and to "the emergency configuration," which claim 1 introduces as "an emergency configuration." A validity challenge could press antecedent-basis/indefiniteness under 35 U.S.C. § 112(b) on that language. I note this as an observation, not a legal conclusion.
• Terminology. The claim uses the unusual phrase "flight control sending unit," while the abstract refers to "autonomous unmanned aircraft (UA)" and the claims to "aircraft"/"unmanned aircraft system (UAS)." The specification's own definition of "configuration and configured" is (1) position relative to expected position, (2) attitude relative to expected attitude, and (3) position of controllable members/settings relative to expected settings — useful context for construing claims 1–3.
• The authoritative source for this analysis is the patent text itself (Google Patents, US10502584B1, and the granted-PDF front page at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com); the title, dates, and abstract above were consistent across the Google Patents, Justia, and Golden records I retrieved.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10502584.

Initial searches returned only false positives (wine SKUs, an unrelated drug patent 10,925,844). Let me run more targeted searches.

Let me try litigation-specific databases.

Litigation Search Results — US Patent No. 10,502,584

Bottom Line

Based on the searches I was able to run, I found no litigation (district court, ITC, PTAB, or CAFC) involving U.S. Patent No. 10,502,584. I also found no evidence of any lawsuit asserting this patent.

What I Searched

I ran multiple web searches targeting litigation databases and patent-litigation aggregators, including:

• 10502584 patent litigation
• "10502584" patent lawsuit defendant
• "10,502,584" OR "US10502584" infringement lawsuit Otto Aero
• Otto Aero patent litigation drone 10502584
• unifiedpatents.com litigation 10502584
• docketalarm patent 10502584 litigation
• "10502584" OR "10,502,584" AND (court OR case OR complaint)

Why the Results Are Negative (Not Just "No Hits")

Every hit returned for the number "10502584" fell into one of three non-litigation categories:

1. Wine/spirits product SKUs — e.g., a Carrefour Romania product list containing "10502584 CELLIER DES DAUPHINS ROSE 0.75." These are commercial catalog numbers, not the patent.
2. An unrelated patent, 10,925,844 ("small molecule and biologic drug patent litigation") — a different number (Avadel v. Jazz Pharmaceuticals), surfaced only because the digit string is similar. Per your strict rule, I did not treat this as the patent at issue.
3. The patent document itself (Google Patents, Justia, Golden) — bibliographic data only, no litigation field populated.

The Unified Patents litigation portal and CAFC/PACER-targeted searches returned only unrelated Unified Patents cases (e.g., IdeaHub Inc. v. Unified Patents, LLC, CAFC No. 2024-1684, re PGR2022-00044; Rotolight v. Videndum, re U.S. Pat. No. 10,845,044) — none citing 10,502,584.

Relevant Context on the Patent's Litigation Posture

The Google Patents record for US10502584B1 lists 11 "Cited By" references (e.g., IBM, Airbus, Rockwell Collins, Beta Air, Merlin Labs, Wing Aviation). These are forward citations — later patents that cite 10,502,584 as prior art. Forward citations are not litigation and should not be reported as such.

The patent is owned by Otto Aero Company (assignments recorded 2021-05-13 and 2026-04-22; inventors Sean Patrick Suiter and Richard Andrew Kruse). A search for Otto Aero enforcement actions likewise returned no infringement suits.

Caveats (Important — Do Not Overstate This)

• I was unable to directly query the Unified Patents litigation caselist or PACER's full docket database in this session; my coverage is limited to web search results returned. A patent that has never been asserted would still be expected to surface with these queries — and it did not — but I cannot rule out a recently filed (post-index) or sealed/quietly-docketed case.
• The absence of found results is not proof that the patent has never been litigated. For an authoritative confirmation, you should check directly:
  • Unified Patents Patent Litigation Portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation
  • USPTO Patent Center / PTAB: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov (look for any IPR/PGR/CBM tied to App. No. 16/217,715)
  • PACER / Docket Alarm by patent number and by assignee ("Otto Aero Company")
  • Lex Machina / RPX / Docket Navigator (subscription databases)

Recommended Answer Format

Status: No litigation involving US 10,502,584 was identified in my search. If you need a litigation-clear opinion or a validity/enforceability assessment tied to a specific transaction, I recommend a paid Docket Navigator or Lex Machina pull plus a direct PACER check before relying on this as a negative.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" indication against live sources before writing this up.

Initial searches returned no direct hits. Let me run more targeted queries against PTAB dockets and related family patents.

PTAB proceedings on US 10,502,584

Important threshold note on sourcing. The canonical structured list provided in this task ("PTAB proceedings on file") reports that the USPTO ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 10,502,584 as of the most recent ingest. I ran independent web searches against PTAB decisions, petition documents, and CAFC docket material to look for anything ODP had not yet indexed. My searches surfaced a large volume of unrelated aerial-vehicle PTAB activity (DJI/Autel PGR2019-00014, Textron v. DJI IPR2023-01287, various Synergy Drone and Sentient Sensors matters), but nothing naming US 10,502,584, Suiter, Kruse, or Otto Aero as patent owner. I was cut off mid-search and therefore cannot claim my search was exhaustive — but nothing affirmatively found contradicts the structured data, so I apply the instructed default.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 (zero) — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBM reviews, no derivation proceedings involving this patent. There is accordingly no breakdown by active / invalidated / sustained / settled / institution-denied status, and no bottom-line defensive posture in the plaintiff's favor: every one of claims 1–19 remains presumptively valid and untouched by the Board. A defendant today faces an un-narrowed, un-estopped patent — which cuts both ways. It means the full claim set is live, but it also means no petitioner has burned the prior art, no IPR estoppel attaches, and a defendant retains the entire universe of invalidity grounds (§ 102, § 103, § 112) for a first-filed IPR or a district court defense.

No proceedings to report

There are no proceeding entries to enumerate. Stating that plainly rather than padding a zero-item table:

• No institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, no adverse judgments, and no appealable claim-level dispositions exist.
• No claim of US 10,502,584 has been canceled, confirmed, or held unpatentable in any AIA trial.
• The absence of activity is itself the signal here, and it is a meaningful one — see below.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 19 claims are UNTESTED. Claim 1 is the sole independent claim. Claims 2–9 depend from claim 1; claim 10 depends from claim 1 and claim 11 depends from claim 10; claim 12 depends from claim 1; claims 14–19 depend from claim 13, which itself depends from claim 1. So there is exactly one independent claim and no claims have been canceled. That is a structurally significant fact for a defendant: there is a single point of failure. Any validity challenge worth bringing is a challenge to claim 1; if claim 1 falls, the remaining 18 claims contribute very little independent scope. Conversely, because nothing has been tested, you have no roadmap — no institution decision telling you which limitations the Board found thin, and no FWD explaining what the panel thought of the acoustic-profile limitation in claim 1(e) ("determine a current configuration of the aircraft based on the sensed acoustic profile"), which is the most unusual and arguably most vulnerable element of the claim.

Estoppel landscape: clean slate. IPR estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(1)–(2) is petitioner-specific and attaches only to a petitioner that obtains a final written decision. With zero petitioners, no estoppel of any kind attaches to anyone. A defendant is free to raise any ground, including art that was cited on the face of the patent but not applied by the examiner (the patent's front page lists Spinelli, Hunter, Guigne, Swope, Elahi, and others), art in the same family of references, and system/prior-use evidence. Note one nuance worth diligence: IPR may still be filed — the one-year § 315(b) bar runs from service of a district court complaint alleging infringement, so a defendant served with a demand letter but not yet sued is squarely within the window, and a defendant that has been sued must check the service date. PGR is no longer available: the grant date was 2019-12-10, and the § 321(c) nine-month PGR window closed 2020-09-10. CBM is unavailable on subject matter — these are aircraft flight-control and mission-management claims, not claims to a "financial product or service" under § 18(d)(1) of the AIA, and CBM has in any event sunset.

Pattern signals: none. No petitioner has filed multiple IPRs against this patent (no petitioner has filed one). The patent owner — Suiter and Kruse, with assignment recorded to Otto Aero Company on 2021-05-13 and again on 2026-04-22 per the structured data — has had no occasion to defend a PTAB appeal because no trial has ever been instituted. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, or similar) in the chain of title. The double assignment record to Otto Aero is worth noting for a defendant assessing who is actually driving enforcement, but it tells you nothing about invalidity. Also relevant to diligence: the patent's anticipated expiration is 2033-12-27, so roughly seven years of term remain as of today — enough residual value that a plaintiff has every incentive to assert, and enough term that an IPR is economically rational for a real defendant.

One priority-law flag for counsel, stated cautiously. The application was filed 2018-12-12 as a continuation of Ser. No. 15/243,752 (filed 2016-08-22), in a chain reaching provisional Ser. No. 61/747,051 filed 2012-12-28 — before the AIA's 2013-03-16 effective date. Whether pre-AIA §§ 102/103 or the AIA versions govern depends on whether any claim has an effective filing date on or after 2013-03-16, which turns on written-description support in the 2012–2013 provisional filings for limitations that appear only in later-filed matter. That question is not resolved by the structured data and I have not verified it; it materially affects which prior art qualifies (e.g., pre-AIA § 102(b) printed publication/on-sale art versus AIA § 102(a)(1)–(2)), so it should be the first thing validity counsel runs down. I am flagging it as an open issue, not as a finding.

Recommended next steps

There is no PTAB activity on this patent. Stated plainly: no petition, no institution decision, no FWD, no appeal, nothing to link to. The absence is real and it is a signal — well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs, and this one has not, despite (a) issuing in 2019, (b) having a live enforcement-oriented assignee, and (c) covering a commercially active field. Possible explanations a defendant should test, rather than assume: the patent may not yet have been asserted widely enough to make an IPR economically attractive; the asset may be held for licensing rather than litigation; or the claims may be perceived as hard to invalidate at the § 314(a) threshold. None of these is established by the data I retrieved.

Concrete steps:

1. Confirm the null result on the record. Search PTAB E2E by patent number at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ and check the FOIA-readable AIA trial docket. Also confirm whether any ex parte reexamination or reissue has been filed — the ODP block covers AIA trial proceedings only, and I did not verify reexamination or reissue status. A quiet reexamination could have narrowed claims without any PTAB proceeding.
2. Check the sibling patents before budgeting. US 9,310,222 (Ser. No. 14/741,283) and US 9,821,910 (Ser. No. 15/159,202), plus pre-grant publication US20140343765A1 (Ser. No. 14/142,390), share this specification and priority chain. I attempted to search for IPRs on US 9,310,222 and US 9,821,910 but was cut off before results returned, so I make no representation about their PTAB history. If an IPR exists on a sibling with overlapping claims, the art and the Board's claim-construction reasoning are directly transferable; if none exists, that reinforces the pattern signal above.
3. If you are within your § 315(b) window, move on a claim-1 IPR. Claim 1 is the whole patent. Focus the petition on the acoustic-profile-based configuration determination of limitation (e) and the "expected configuration corresponding to the current flight segment" limitation (d) — the two elements with the least conventional prior-art coverage in the cited references. Ground the petition with a POSITA declaration, and consider multiple petitions against claim 1 with distinct primary references rather than a single omnibus petition, given the absence of any prior Board guidance on these terms.
4. If you are already in district court and cannot file, lock in your defenses now. There is no estoppel against you, so preserve every theory: § 101 (the claims recite an abstract "compare expected to actual and generate an instruction" concept dressed in generic sensor and processor language), § 112(a) written-description attack on claim 1(e)'s acoustic-limitation support in the 2012–2013 priority filings, and § 102/§ 103 on the merits. The written-description angle ties directly to the priority-law flag above and is the most underexplored line of attack on this family.
5. Track the enforcement posture. The two assignments to Otto Aero Company (2021-05-13 and 2026-04-22) suggest an active owner. Monitor for a first-filed complaint; if one appears, the § 315(b) clock starts on service, and the absence of any pre-existing IPR means you would be the first petitioner and would capture the full § 315(e)(1) estoppel benefit for yourself going forward.

Fabrication disclosure: no proceeding numbers, judge panels, petition grounds, institution decisions, FWDs, settlement terms, or CAFC docket numbers are stated above because none exist on file for this patent, and I did not invent any. Every affirmative factual assertion about this patent's claims, dates, chain of title, and family relationships is drawn from the authoritative patent text and the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied in this prompt.

I'll start by pulling the public assignment/legal-event records for this patent from the sources I can reach.

Initial searches are not surfacing the assignment record. Let me probe the assignee, inventors, and litigation angle.

Assignment-chain analysis — US 10,502,584 B1

"Mission monitor and controller for autonomous unmanned vehicles"
Applicant: US 16/217,715 · filed 2018‑12‑12 · granted 2019‑12‑10 · priority 2012‑12‑28 (earliest provisional, US 61/747,051) · anticipated expiration 2033‑12‑27
Source of record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10502584/en (Google Patents legal events, which mirror the USPTO assignment feed)

Sourcing caveat up front. I was not able to open Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) directly — it is a dynamic search application, and the tools available to me could not return its result set for this patent. My assignment chain below is reconstructed from Google Patents' legal‑events table, which reproduces the same underlying USPTO assignment records, plus corroborating family data. I therefore do not have verified reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for the two recorded assignments, and I will not invent them. Treat the reel/frame slots below as an open verification item, not as a finding.

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Inventors

Unusual pattern — inverted from the usual tell. The classic red flag is all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, presaging a fire-sale. Nothing like that here. The inverse is true: both inventors remained named inventors and remained the assignors of record on filings thirteen years after the 2012 priority date (US 12,260,769 issued 2025‑03‑25; US 12,272,259 published 2025‑04‑08). There is no abandonment, no corporate employer to depart from, and no continuity break.

One genuinely notable pattern, which I flag with precision: the prosecuting firm of record on this same patent family — US 9,310,222, front page — is "Suiter Swantz pc llo." That is the firm founded by inventor Sean Patrick Suiter. In other words, the inventor of record is the attorney of record for the family he invented. This is not an NPE tell (self-representation by an inventor‑attorney is legitimate and common), but it does mean that a "same firm appears on every link of this chain" observation has an innocent explanation, and it also means the correspondent field on the assignment recordings is likely to name that same firm. Do not score it as signal #3 without confirming the correspondent field first.

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Original assignee

"Individual" — the patent issued to Suiter and Kruse as individuals, with no corporate assignee on the face of the patent. This is a self-funded, inventor-owned portfolio, not a corporate one.

• Product embodying the claims: Otto Aero Company is the current assignee of the entire family and positions the family as avionics/flight-assistant and emergency-landing-site software (see the family's own abstracts: "flight director," "autopilot system," "hierarchy of available emergency landing sites"). I could not independently verify a commercially shipped product practicing claim 1 (acoustic-profile-based configuration deviation detection). Treat product status as unverified.
• Primary line of business: Otto Aero Company, Omaha, NE — avionics / autonomous-vehicle flight assistance.
• Current status: Operating. Otto Aero continues to prosecute and receive patents on the same family through 2025 (US 12,073,731, US 12,260,769, US 12,272,259), which is inconsistent with a dissolved or wound-down shell.

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Assignment timeline

Two post-issuance assignment events are recorded. Both run from the individual inventors to Otto Aero Company — the same assignor/assignee pair twice, roughly five years apart.

• Execution date not retrievable / recorded 2021‑05‑13 — Reel not retrieved / Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment ("Assignment of Assignors' Interest — see document for details")
  • Assignor: Richard Andrew Kruse; Sean Patrick Suiter (individuals)
  • Assignee: OTTO AERO COMPANY
  • Correspondent: not retrievable from the sources available to me. If the recordings follow the prosecution pattern of the family, the correspondent will be Suiter Swantz pc llo (Suiter Swantz IP), Omaha NE — the inventor's own firm. Flag for verification: if any different firm recurs on the 2026 recording, that would be the first genuine repeat-correspondent signal in this chain.
  • Context: Internal consolidation — the individual inventors moving their self-funded portfolio into their own operating company. Occurred ~17 months post-issuance.

• Execution date not retrievable / recorded 2026‑04‑22 — Reel not retrieved / Frame not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment ("Assignment of Assignor's Interest")
  • Assignor: Richard Andrew Kruse; Sean Patrick Suiter (individuals)
  • Assignee: OTTO AERO COMPANY (same assignee as 2021)
  • Correspondent: not retrievable.
  • Context: Unclear — most likely confirmatory / corrective recordation or a clean-up covering additional family members, since assignor and assignee are byte-for-byte the same as the 2021 recording. It is not a change of ownership. I decline to characterise it further without the underlying instrument.

No other assignees appear anywhere in the chain. There is no LLC, no holding company, no licensing vehicle, no aggregator, and no security interest or release recorded against this patent in the sources I could reach.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10502584
    2012 : Priority date 28 Dec 2012
    2018 : Continuation filed by Suiter and Kruse as individuals
    2019 : Patent granted 10 Dec 2019
    2021 : Assigned to Otto Aero Company
    2026 : Second assignment to Otto Aero Company

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The only non-individual assignee is Otto Aero Company, recorded 2021‑05‑13 and again 2026‑04‑22. Otto Aero is the inventors' own operating company, headquartered in the same city as both inventors (Omaha, NE), and is the assignee on later-issuing family members (US 12,260,769, 2025‑03‑25; US 12,272,259, 2025‑04‑08). No "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" suffix, no registered-agent-service address in evidence, no single-purpose Delaware or Texas LLC. Transfer direction is individual → their own operating company, which is the opposite of the shell-entity pattern.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither assignee nor either inventor appears on the standard NPE rosters (Acacia, Marathon Patent Group, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities). I found no infringement litigation naming US 10,502,584 in any of the litigation/PTAB material my searches surfaced. Adjacent-family data point, offered only for completeness: Suiter appears as an inventor on a single application assigned to uAvionix Corporation (Palo Alto, CA), a real operating avionics company — not an NPE, and not part of this chain.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear (not scoreable as a finding). The signal requires the recording correspondent, which I could not retrieve for either the 2021‑05‑13 or 2026‑04‑22 entry. What I can document as recurring is the prosecution firm: Suiter Swantz pc llo is the attorney/agent of record on US 9,310,222 (same family, same two inventors). But that is the inventor's own firm, so recurrence is expected and carries no NPE inference. Action for the human analyst: pull reel/frame plus correspondent for both recordings in Assignment Center; the signal turns into a finding only if a firm other than Suiter Swantz appears, and only if it recurs elsewhere in the tracked portfolio.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. Two recorded transfers total, both to the same assignee, separated by ~59 months. No chained LLCs, no shared correspondent address across unrelated assignees, no common-principal layering.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming this patent was found, so there is no suit date to measure the 2021‑05‑13 assignment against. On the evidence, the assignment is unrelated to assertion.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding involving any assignor or assignee surfaced. Assignors are natural persons; there is no insolvency event in the record.

7. Privateering — not present. Privateering requires an operating company transferring to an NPE that asserts on its behalf. Here the inventors transferred to their own operating company and retained their roles as inventors on continuing family members through 2025. There is also no prior employer whose competitors could be the target.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain terminates at Otto Aero Company, an operating avionics company, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. Note that Unified Patents' public portal does profile this family (US‑11551564‑B2, US‑11699351‑B2, US‑12260769‑B1 list "Parent Company: Otto Aero Co"), but portal profiling is a monitoring/indexing function, not a transfer — it is not evidence of defensive neutralisation, and I am not treating it as such.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — on assertion behaviour specifically, not because the chain is missing, but because there is no evidence either way that Otto Aero asserts this patent. The ownership chain itself is fully reconstructed and is affirmatively not an NPE chain: individuals Sean Patrick Suiter and Richard Andrew Kruse filed US 16/217,715 on 2018‑12‑12, it issued to them as individuals on 2019‑12‑10, and both antedated assignments (recorded 2021‑05‑13 and 2026‑04‑22) run to Otto Aero Company — their own Omaha operating company, which remains active on the family through 2025 grants. None of the eight signals scores present; the only live item is signal #3, which is unresolved solely because I could not retrieve reel/frame and correspondent of record.

Verification links:

• Assignment Center, search "10502584": https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Assignment Search (mirror): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10502584/en

Two items to close before this is final: (a) confirm the 2026‑04‑22 recording is confirmatory/corrective rather than a new transfer to a differently-named successor; (b) capture the correspondent of record on both recordings — a different firm appearing on both the 2021 and 2026 entries, and on other patents in the portfolio, is the one thing that could upgrade signal #3 from unclear to present.

I'll research the specific patent and its cited prior art references. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me get the full cited-references list and look at the references most relevant to the acoustic-detection claim.

Let me pull the remaining cited references and get details on the key examiner-cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 10,502,584 B1

Source of record: Google Patents, US10502584B1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US10502584B1/en) and the granted-PDF front page (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9e/ee/bd/a9dee4f3d868c8/US10502584.pdf), plus the Justia "Referenced Cited" table (https://patents.justia.com/patent/10502584).

Cross-reference flags (per your instruction to flag contradictions):

1. Date inconsistency. The prior section's header runs on a "today = 2026‑09‑29" basis, while this task states "Current Date: April 26, 2026." I have used the patent's own dates throughout; I flag the discrepancy rather than silently reconciling it.
2. Search-budget limit reached. I was cut off before I could individually verify every one of the 108 backward citations. Descriptions below are grounded in the front-page/Justia citation data I retrieved; where a reference's substance is not confirmed from a primary document, I say so explicitly.

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1. How the citation set breaks down

The 108 backward citations span three families of subject matter:

1. Landing-site / glide-range / emergency-diversion systems (the bulk).
2. Aircraft data-link, condition-monitoring and communication systems.
3. Traffic/terrain/weather situational-awareness and display systems.

Critical observation for your § 102 question: none of the cited references appears to disclose the acoustic sensor sensing an acoustic profile of the aircraft that is the characterizing element of claim 1. Because every claim (2–19) depends directly or indirectly from claim 1, strict § 102 anticipation of any claim would require the reference to disclose the acoustic-based configuration determination of claim 1 — and no cited reference does. The citations are therefore best treated as § 102 art against individual claim elements and as § 103 combination art, not as anticipatory art against the claims as a whole. I state this as an analytical observation, not a legal conclusion.

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2. Most relevant cited references

A. References cited by the examiner (front-page asterisked) — highest presumptive materiality

B. Other substantive cited references

(This is the substantive subset. The remaining citations include aircraft-relay/electrical/cabin-network and non-analogous references — e.g., US 4,438,475 to Haley (Westinghouse, a protective-relay patent), US 2010/0095084 (solid-state-storage translation layer), US 2011/0298618 (Apple remote user-status indicators) — whose relevance appears peripheral.)

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3. Grouping by claim element — where the real § 102/§ 103 exposure is

Bottom line for § 102: the strongest candidate anticipatory art in this set addresses the dependent-claim subject matter (energy/range, landing-site selection, data links, traffic/terrain), but the record as retrieved does not show any single cited reference disclosing all elements of claim 1 — chiefly because of the acoustic-sensor limitation. References like US 7,689,328, US 2011/0264312, US 6,804,585 and US 7,786,900 are the ones I would examine first for § 103 challenges (e.g., landing-site/energy art in view of an acoustic or vibration health-monitoring reference).

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4. Caveats you should not gloss over

• Priority-date exposure of the later citations. The earliest priority is 2012‑12‑28 (US 61/747,051). Many cited documents publish 2014–2017 (e.g., US 2014/0222248; US 2015/0081301; US 2016/0027310; US 2017/0229024). On their face these post-date the priority date and would not be prior art unless the priority chain is broken; their presence in the citation list may reflect the examiner citing them against the 2018‑12‑12 filing or against parent applications. Treat their § 102 status as date-dependent and unverified.
• I could not confirm abstracts/spec content for every reference — several descriptions above are derived from the front-page titles and citation data (which I retrieved) rather than from the full documents, because I reached my search-step limit. Titles are quoted literally; do not treat my one-line descriptions as a substitute for reading the reference.
• Forward citations are not prior art. The 11 "Cited By" documents (IBM, Airbus, Rockwell Collins, Beta Air, Merlin Labs, Wing Aviation, etc.) illustrate the patent's later technological neighborhood; they are not § 102 art against it.
• No CAFC 2026 activity consistent with the earlier litigation section was found in this pass either; that finding remains "not found," not "confirmed none."
• For a filing-grade validity opinion, pull and read the full text of at least: US 7,689,328 B2; US 2011/0264312 A1; US 6,804,585 B2; US 7,786,900 B2; US 6,573,841 B2; US 5,142,480 A; US 8,244,455 B2; US 8,356,776 B2; US 7,489,992 B2; US 6,278,965 B1 and confirm each against the claim-1 acoustic limitation.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the prior-art record for US 10,502,584 — both the cited references in the "Citations (108)" list and the "Prior art keywords" field — and supplement with targeted searches on the key references so I don't mischaracterize them.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,502,584 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the identification, abstract, claim overview, and litigation sections above. I do not repeat them; where the record contradicts itself I flag it.

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0. Scope, and a date discrepancy to flag up front

Two different "today" dates appear in this workflow: the session header says 2026-09-29, while the task block says "Current Date: April 26, 2026." Nothing in this analysis turns on the difference, but the reader should know the record is internally inconsistent on the date, and I am not silently picking one.

The operative analytical date is not today; it is the prior-art cut-off, which the Google Patents front page states as Prior art date 2012-12-28 (the earliest provisional, US 61/747,051). The patent issued from App. 16/217,715 (filed 2018-12-12) but claims a continuous continuation chain back to 2012. That matters: if every claim is entitled to 2012-12-28, the AIA's first-inventor-to-file regime (applications filed on/after 2013-03-16) may not govern, and pre-AIA § 102/§ 103 apply. I cannot resolve that entitlement question from the record alone, so I analyze under both and note where the answer differs.

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1. What the "Prior Art section of this page" actually supplies

Three distinct things are conflated under "Prior Art" on the Google Patents page, and they have very different evidentiary weight:

Two structural cautions:

1. The family must be excluded. US 2014/0343765 A1, US 9,310,222, US 9,821,910, and app. 15/243,752 are the applicant's own priority chain with the same inventive entity (Suiter/Kruse). They are not § 102/§ 103 prior art against 10,502,584 absent a distinct inventive entity or a § 102(b)/§ 103(c)-era common-ownership complication. Any obviousness theory built on them is a non-starter.
2. The visible citation list is truncated at ~70 of 108 entries (the record here stops at US 2013/0131970 A1). My mapping below uses the references visible in the record plus the ones I was able to pull and confirm by search; I mark unverified items.

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2. Claim 1, decomposed into limitations L1–L9

The spec's own construction of "configuration and configured" — (1) position vs. expected position, (2) attitude vs. expected attitude, (3) position of controllable members/settings vs. expected settings — is the key to L5/L6 and makes the claim broader than it first looks.

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3. Pre-2012 antecedent check on the cited art (the references I could verify)

Supplemental art I located and date-checked (pre-2012, flagged as not appearing in the visible citation list):

• US 2004/0143398 A1 (Nelson) — vibration/acoustic monitoring of jet engines, bearings, and aircraft structures, using pattern recognition and anomaly detection; explicitly notes acoustic monitoring's "specificity and sensitivity to early stage and transient failure conditions."
• DE 69010193 T2 (priority GB 8902645, 1989-02-07) — monitoring an engine via its acoustic spectra, learning a normal model, and alarming on deviation beyond a threshold, with stated applicability to vibrations through solid structures and to aircraft frames.

Together these two independently establish L1 (acoustic sensing of an aircraft) and materially support L7 (deviation/threshold alarm) as of well before 2012.

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4. Primary combination A — claim 1

A = US 7,489,992 B2 (Sagem ACMS) in view of US 6,553,333 B1 (aero-performance/configuration) further in view of acoustic health-monitoring art (US 2004/0143398 / DE 69010193 T2), and US 2007/0018052 A1 (Saab) for the control-system hand-off.

Mapping:

• L1/L6 ← the acoustic monitoring references: sensed acoustic profile of the aircraft, compared to a learned/reference model to identify operating state and deviations. Note the burden shift: the acoustic references derive health/operating state, and the patent derives configuration; because the spec defines configuration to include "position of controllable members and settings," these overlap heavily. An acoustic spectrum that shifts with RPM, load, blade passage, and wind noise is, by the patent's own admission, probative of settings/loading.
• L2/L3 ← Sagem (on-aircraft condition monitoring, bus-coupled avionics) and Teledyne.
• L4 ← routine flight-phase determination from position/altitude; the art of record is saturated with this (Garmin US 8,035,547; Rockwell Collins US 8,234,068; Chelton).
• L5 ← US 6,553,333 B1 literally computes and compares aerodynamic performance for a configuration including vehicle settings — the "expected configuration" concept.
• L7 ← Sagem's "exclusive conditions fulfilled" reporting + the acoustic references' threshold alarms.
• L8/L9 ← Saab's on-board flight control system executing mission/contingency actions from stored plans; also Humbard and Thales for the emergency-output species.

Why combine (KSR): All elements are in the same field (aircraft avionics/health monitoring), address the same problem (keeping an aircraft inside an expected envelope and reacting when it is not), and the combination yields nothing more than the predictable aggregation of known sensing + known comparison + known alarm + known control hand-off. KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (predictable use of prior-art elements; "familiar elements according to known methods"). No reference teaches away; if anything, the field was under affirmative design pressure toward more sensing channels to reduce false negatives in condition monitoring.

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5. Backup combinations B and C

Combination B (environment-aware detection, claims 13–19): Combination A + US 2010/0085236 A1 (Honeywell) + US 2012/0143482 A1 (Honeywell) + ADS-B/NextGen-environment references of record. The dependent claims' environment taxonomy is essentially a checklist of 1990s–2000s avionics databases: terrain (US 8,244,455 B2, Honeywell, vehicle position w.r.t. terrain → DTED, claim 16), weather/hazards (US 8,131,407 B1, Aerotech Research, vehicle-specific environmental conditions via ground station → claim 18), airport/rescue data (airport-directory content described in the specification itself → claim 17), traffic (US 2005/0156777 A1, Honeywell, integrated traffic surveillance; ADS-B → claim 15).

Combination C (energy/reachability, claims 8–11, 14): US 5,142,480 A + US 6,573,841 B2 + US 2011/0264312 A1 / US 2008/0154447 A1 (Spinelli) + US 7,786,900 B2 (Thales) + US 6,804,585 B2 (Humbard). The energy-state range (claim 8), reachable-range ellipse and landing-site selection (claims 9–10), and the three-level emergency hierarchy land immediately / as soon as possible / as soon as practicable (claim 10) are each squarely anticipated in this cluster; the specification's three-level hierarchy is recited almost verbatim in US 7,786,900 (Thales) and in Humbard's emergency-landing FMS.

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6. Motivation to combine — the KSR factors, applied

1. Same field, same problem. Every reference is aircraft avionics addressing conformance-to-expectation and/or reaction to off-nominal state.
2. Predictable results. Sensing + comparing to a segment-specific expectation + threshold + instruction output is the archetypal automation pipeline; the acoustic channel merely substitutes one known diagnostic sensor for another.
3. Recognized need. The field's own literature (Nelson 2004) argues acoustic monitoring is preferred for sensitivity to early-stage failure — a direct motivation to add acoustics to a condition-monitoring suite like Sagem's.
4. Design incentive / market pressure. The COTS avionics lineage (Teledyne, Sagem, Honeywell, Rockwell Collins) and the then-emerging UAS integration problem supply the "reason to combine" beyond the references themselves.
5. Teaching away — absent. I found no reference disparaging acoustic-derived configuration inference.

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7. Dependent claims 2–19, grouped

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8. Where the § 103 case is weakest — be honest about this

The single hardest limitation is L6: determining the aircraft's configuration (not merely a fault) from an acoustic profile, and thresholding it against a segment-specific expected configuration.

• The verified pre-2012 art establishes acoustic health/fault detection and acoustic operating-state monitoring, and separately establishes expected-configuration performance models (US 6,553,333) — but I did not locate, within the visible citation record, a single reference that closes the loop by using acoustics as the input variable to a segment-conditioned configuration comparison that then drives a control instruction. A patentee will argue this is exactly where non-obviousness lies, and it is the strongest argument available.
• The counter is twofold: (i) the spec's own definition of "configuration" (settings, controllable members) collapses the gap, because acoustic signature is a well-known proxy for RPM/prop/load; and (ii) the claim is drafted at a result-oriented level of generality ("determine a current configuration … based on the sensed acoustic profile") that invites a § 112(a) written-description/enablement cross-attack on the full breadth, which in turn narrows the non-obviousness story.
• The acoustic-sensing hardware limitations (microphone, seismometer, "motor (engine) instrumentation") are generic and do not add patentable weight.

I would put the realistic invalidity risk on claim 1 as moderate — driven mainly by whether the acoustic-configuration-inference teaching can be shown in art of record or in analogous non-avionics acoustic-state-inference art.

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9. Secondary considerations

The record contains no evidence of commercial success, long-felt need, failure of others, copying, or industry praise tied to the claimed subject matter, and no licensing/enforcement activity (consistent with the negative litigation finding in the section above). Without a nexus between any such evidence and the claimed "acoustic → configuration → threshold → instruction" sequence, secondary considerations cannot rebut a prima facie case. Note the assignment to Otto Aero Company and the later family members (US 11,699,351; US 11,657,721; US 12,073,731; US 12,260,769) — continued filing in the family is not objective evidence of non-obviousness.

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10. Flagged inconsistencies and verification gaps

1. Date conflict between the session header (2026-09-29) and the task block (2026-04-26). Unresolved.
2. Pre-AIA vs. AIA status depends on priority entitlement I cannot verify from the record; the analysis holds either way, but the applicable § 103(c)/§ 102(b) exceptions and the treatment of the applicant's own family differ.
3. Truncation of the record. Only ~70 of 108 citations are visible. My mapping therefore under-claims; an examiner or challenger working the full list will have more ammunition, not less.
4. Two of my acoustic references (US 2004/0143398; DE 69010193 T2) are NOT in the visible citation list — I retrieved them by search and date-checked them against 2012-12-28. They should be confirmed against the full record before being relied on in any filing.
5. The Honeywell US 2010/0085236 verification search did not complete (tool limit). I relied on its title/date as printed in the record and did not confirm its disclosure; treat that mapping as provisional.
6. The § 112(b) antecedent-basis issue in claim 10 (flagged in the earlier section) is independent of this § 103 analysis and, if triggered, only narrows what must be invalidated.

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Bottom line

Claim 1 is likely invalid as obvious over a three-way combination of (i) aircraft condition-monitoring/flight-performance art of record (US 7,489,992 B2; US 6,181,990 B1), (ii) a configuration/performance-expectation model (US 6,553,333 B1), and (iii) pre-2012 acoustic monitoring-and-threshold art (US 2004/0143398 A1; DE 69010193 T2), with US 2007/0018052 A1 supplying the on-board flight-control hand-off — with motivation grounded in KSR's predictable-combination principles. Dependent claims 4, 5, and 15–19 are weaker still and largely read on standard avionics data fields. The genuinely contestable limitation is the acoustic derivation of flight configuration compared against a segment-conditioned expectation; that is where I would expect validity to be defended and where a fuller record (the remaining ~38 citations, plus any art outside the citation list) would need to be examined.