In 2022 Dale Porter brought the Porter family back to southeastern Pennsylvania. The family lived in Philadelphia and Jenkintown from the mid-1800s. His great-grandfather worked as a chauffeur in the area from 1912, and his grandfather went to elementary school in Jenkintown in 1920.
Once he settled in Montgomery County, Dale followed the local reports on deer hunts and deer counts. He kept asking one question: how many deer are actually here? The answer was always “too many,” and the only evidence anyone could point to was how many cars were hitting deer. When he looked for a company that counted deer from the air, he couldn't find one. So he started Frontier.
Soldier. Dale is a Cold War U.S. Army veteran. From 1985 to 1989 he served in West Germany as a track vehicle mechanic with the 22nd Maintenance Company in Heilbronn. He was on an eight-person contact team that kept the 237th Combat Engineer Battalion's vehicles mission-ready, repairing them in the field at training areas like Grafenwöhr and Hohenfels. He earned the Army Achievement Medal for outstanding support during REFORGER '86. That's where he learned that equipment is only as reliable as the checks behind it, and the same discipline is behind every Frontier pre-flight checklist and flight log.
Animal officer. After the Army, Dale was sworn in as a California Humane Officer and investigated animal cruelty and abuse cases. In 1991 he became Chief of Animal Control for the City of Moreno Valley, a city of about 125,000. He ran shelter and field operations with a staff of 16. He worked closely with the California Department of Fish and Game, cared for injured wildlife in the shelter's holding facilities, and investigated people illegally keeping mountain lions, tigers, and primates.
One case has stayed with him
A new neighbor complained that an elderly man was keeping primates in his backyard. Dale investigated and found the man had cared for them for more than 20 years without a single problem, starting before California banned them. Dale took those facts to his game warden contact at Fish and Game, and the man was allowed to keep his animals under the old rules. When Dale handed him the permits, the man broke down. The animals were like his children.
The lesson Dale took from it is the one Frontier runs on: find the facts first, then decide.
Manager. Dale then spent more than 20 years in information technology. At a major automaker's North American IT company (2006–2015), he rose to manage two departments, client device services and asset management. That meant 35 people across 13 locations and a $3.2 million annual budget. Asset management is the job of knowing exactly what you have and where it is, which is what a deer survey does for a property.
Frontier is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. Dale plans, flies, and reports every survey himself, from the first call to the board presentation.
