 It is Thursday afternoon, folks. Ted Rawson here in our downtown Honolulu Studios of ThinkTek-O-Ii, overlooking a gorgeous downtown Honolulu. We have, on the other end of the continent, here, 6,000 digital miles away. We have Jim Williams joining us for the second time on this show. Jim, boy, you look bright and blue there, Jim, and welcome aboard our show again. Well, I've seen your shirt. I wish I'd wore the Hawaiian shirt I bought the last time I was with you. You bought it right down the street from here last time when you were addressing the U.S. District Court and you were properly dressed in an aloha shirt. I was expecting you to do the same. You could actually use that furniture behind you. It looks kind of like an aloha shirt and you could presume that. That's a stand-in for you. Hey, Jim, it's good to see you. I decided to wear my shirt with my new logo on it. It's a shameless ad for my new company. That's great. Let's talk about your new company. We are shameless on this show. The whole idea is to promote people who are doing the right thing and doing good things. Obviously, in the middle of that, having come from the lineage with aerospace industry and the FAA and then the business and legal industry and now on your own. I was very fortunate to be able to become a consultant working for Dentons. They were very good to me and helped me teach me how to be a consultant. But the time came where it was just a better fit for me to be on my own. So now I'm an independent consultant into my really pleasant surprise that I actually have more business now than I did with Dentons and so I'm working as hard as I can to help everybody out who wants me to help them out. And that's in the world of drones or unmanned air systems or remotely piloted aircraft or the software that goes with them or the insurance required to make them into a business, all of the above. Yes, and I don't limit myself to just unmanned aircraft, but that's where there's the most need right now for people with my knowledge about how the FAA works, about how the national airspace system works, about how the infrastructure that makes it capable of working, how all that works and then how the drones are going to fit into that infrastructure to become part of the routine day-to-day operations. So it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of stuff going on. There's a compelling need for clear and concise educational information that can advise the public, advise legislators, advise our business leaders and our our government people in what this is all about. It's so, the information is so scattered and it's so hard to interpret that it results in a lot of confusion, Jim, these days. And so anything we can collectively do to improve that would be great. We had this experience this year. We had what, 25 bills in the Hawaii Senate, our legislature, I should say that dealt with UAS in some way. About eight had a lot of content UAS-oriented and actually one of them was positive. The others were very misstructured or confused and none of them, even the one that was positive, got past the various authorization steps. So what did we do wrong? We had a lapse of education coming in the front end, letting people be prepared for making good decisions in this regard. You must see that all over. I do. And I've actually been asked to join the drone advisory committee to help with those very issues. The drone advisory committee was formed by the FAA. It's a very high-level advisory body to the FAA. It's chaired by Mr. Krasanik, who's the head of Intel, and co-chaired by the deputy administrator of the FAA. And the folks who are actually members of the drone advisory committee are very high levels in their company. The real work is getting done by a subcommittee that's looking at three main areas right now. One of them is how to fund the FAA, which is very interesting to do the drone work, because the FAA is currently funded two ways. One through taxes on fuel for the general aviation community, and the other is on is taxes on plane tickets that we all buy and pay. And that's how it's funded. Well, drones aren't going to pay either of those, for the most part. Maybe a few of them will pay a little bit of tax on fuel. But so the bottom line is there's a huge need for work to be done by the federal government, and especially the FAA, that they're not getting any additional funding to do that additional work. And all of the old work is still there. None of that's gone away. So they're looking at maybe how to figure that out. The second group is looking on, you know, sort of the fundamental issues about getting access to the airspace, things like flying beyond there's a line of sight and helping to figure out ways to break those barriers down. But the third committee, the one that I've worked, the subcommittee that I've been asked to work on is addressing exactly what you're talking about Ted, which is how, where do you draw the line between state and federal responsibilities when it comes to managing drones? And it really is a fascinating area that I spent a lot of my time while I was at the FAA dealing with. What the federal authority is quite clear and quite comprehensive when it comes to aircraft. And Congress has declared unmanned aircraft to be aircraft, so therefore all of the rules and legal findings that apply to aircraft apply to the, apply to unmanned aircraft. But what traditionally has been a state responsibility is dealing with legal issues between individuals. So if I'm flying my drone over my neighbor's yard, I'm now interfering with his freedoms and his ability to, to live his life. And that traditionally has not been a federal role. That's been a state and local role. So you have this conflict between the traditional role of the state and the traditional role of the federal government. And so this group is trying to come up with recommendations to go back to the FAA and potentially even to Congress to say, Hey, we need to change things so that this delineation can be clear so that those issues between individuals can be resolved at the level they need to be resolved. Because obviously the FAA, you can't pick up the phone and dial 911 and get the FAA, you're going to get your local police department. So fascinating stuff. And I'm looking forward to participating in that. The chairman is, they're having difficulty of communication. And the chairman has asked me to come in and use my ability to sort of communicate this stuff in ways that both sides can understand. You know, as I hear about that, the drone advisory committee, there's a couple of things, many things come to mind. But we've had on this show in the last couple of weeks, we've had Charles Werner from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, who's acting on behalf of NFPA to pull together end user needs from all public safety and law enforcement and public PAO basic usage of drones to represent that into the standards committee that ANSI is structuring. We have F38 committee and ASTM working on technical standards for chips and for flight performance and things like that. We have RTCA, which in its most recent meeting, I believe, talked about the same things you're speaking of, that is the rights and issues associated with. Yeah, the RTCA runs the drone advisory committee. So that's exactly where I'm talking. Okay, that's what it ties together. And then we have half a dozen other 501s or forms of organization that have been put in place to collect and try to manage this old future. If you look from a God's eye from on top somehow, it must still look a little bit confused because there are just so many pots boiling and they're all boiling the same stuff more or less. Some have more water in and some have less. Some might be using salt water and some using glycerin, but they're all boiling something and they're distilling something out of it. So, and then we see a lot of that working with our local police and fire and the federal agencies out here as well. And then within the test ranges, our task is to go test these things and find where the points of failure are and find where the regulations and the technology has to be improved. So if you were to call together a group of all the people in the country who think they're involved in this and are coming up with standards, you'd probably get 10,000 people to show up. Yeah, we need a good sized football stadium to hold them all. Exactly. And so it becomes a fascinating problem and you're at the center of it and I'd like to offer from the perspective of our test ranges that I think we have something to offer here in this domain as well. I'm not sure what it is yet. So I offer it to you Jim. I'm prejudiced because I'm the one who helped set those test ranges up when I was at the FAA and I think they're extremely valuable and encourage anybody in the industry who's looking to do any sort of testing to reach out to the one nearest to them or who gives them the best deal. Because now all the all six test ranges are allowed to go anywhere in the country to do their work and they're not constrained anymore by the state boundaries of where they started out. And so there's an opportunity there for a lot of learning that actually may occur at a level below what the conference room will see. I mean what you learn in the field doesn't match what you thought up in the conference room a lot is you know from your past and mine and everybody else's. So we just have so much to learn together. So do you think the drone advisory committee is sort of at the top of this hierarchy of finding things out? Yeah, I think so. From the standpoint of the highest level of interaction that is tackling the big policy issues. But like you said there's a lot of other bodies that are dealing with different issues that are sort of layers down beneath what they're doing. So it's you know each activity for the most part I mean there are a few that I find fairly superfluous but for the most part everybody's got their little niche and they're working toward building solutions that will help with the overall integration and moving things forward. Well you know it really got to take your hat off to guys like David Place and Robin Alexander and Jonathan Ruebrich and people like that who have the energy and the capability of pulling together like news summaries of what's going on and pass them around to all of us. It's we need a USA Today version of droneism Jim. Well you can you for a while I had these Google you can set up on your Google account a daily email and you put in the keywords you wanted to search for and it'll find every article out there that matches those keywords. Well if you do that for drone you wind up with pages and pages and pages of articles every day and it just got to be where it was taking too much time just to wade through them to try to ferret out the the new information it's it's just it's exploding. Right you don't have enough time to delete them all. Let's pick up this whole subject of educational and getting information out to the public that may be a very serious issue and all of our legislative sessions begin in about six months and right after our break. Well education. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii 25 talk shows by 25 dedicated hosts every week helping us to explore and understand the issues and events in and affecting our state great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan but that doesn't explain all this. He planned this party, planned the snacks, even planned to coordinate colored shirts but he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house so don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. Yeah that's a cool way to start the second half of our show here Jim. Education is the key. That's kind of where we ended the first part and then during the break talked about it some more so that's again and I think in the educational domain which I am in today at University of Hawaii as are many of the test ranges run by the universities we have that obligation in that role and we see it we could spend a hundred percent of our time on that and probably never exhausted. In fact I'll send you a brief we gave recently to the Geological Society of America of all people the geologists they want to use drones and UAS and various forms and they have no they have no idea where to turn to establish their requirements and put forth what their needs are so they don't get lost or get left behind in terms of people coming up with systems to solve problems. By the way there is fun in this game too there's all the heavy lifting we all do and the mind-boggling issues of education but there is fun I just want to bring up the fact that this is a show about drones we always have to have one on the table and we have one here and you'll be very happy to see Jim that bearing on its underside here it's got some registration numbers that probably came from a place you know very well and I use the thing is so symmetrical I use the registration numbers to tell Bob from Stern when airborne I put them on the bottom but anyway we've got an activity going with the ONR right now to use unmanned air systems or drones as part of a man overboard situation off naval vessels it's sort of an automatic station keeping searching and tracking and performing a beacon function over the over the man overboard and then when the batteries expire let it go in the ocean don't even bother recovering it its job is to seek and identify and then station keep on that guy so sometimes this we do get a get a chance to get our hands in and solder wires together and and make things happen as well but once again back to the hard thing education we even have a request here from in the in the Honolulu community to find some way to sort of like the civil air patrol does manage the drone users who some of them may be the clueless or some may be the the uninformed as such but get them informed get them to a standard level of appreciation for what they can do in an emergency situation have them remain forever outside the yellow caution tape but have them provide information into that system let that system digest it and use it as it wishes sort of a citizen's drone patrol so we will be exploring how to go forward in that regard but the nice thing about that is it does give us a reason to generate a basic level of training a basic level of safety awareness and rules of the road and things like this which will go against the grain of the of the nuisance factor that we all are are seeing all over the place in fact you know a question that it comes to my mind a lot also is the manufacturers who the big manufacturers dji and that sort of thing what are they taking any overt action in the role of the nuisance control nuisance management or are they just standing by and letting it happen well dji i think has been very aggressive in their attempts to try to prevent people from behaving cluelessly their systems come the newer ones with gps come with geo fencing built in they they basically look at all of the airports in the country they look at all of the airspace in the country and they have that all in the database that's stored in the drone and if you're close to it it'll let it limits the height and won't let you go too high and it won't let you enter if you're actually in one of these spaces where you're absolutely not supposed to be flying it won't even start up it'll give you an error message so they've been very aggressive about that but given that they also do commercial drones that people buy their drones and use them commercially they have built in a way to override it but in order to do that you've got to go on to their website and acknowledge sign up basically sign something stating that you're operating where you shouldn't be unless you have a waiver from the f a to do so so there i i think that's a great compromise between because otherwise they you wouldn't be able to do commercial operations with one of their drones inside of the airspace where you could have authorization to do so that's good that's like a two-level encryption if you will that is you you're you have to take an overt action to override that limitation built in that's good we have here in in this state and i'm sure most states do beyond the five mile airport rule or the three mile and two mile heliport rules we have a lot of state parks and city parks which have actually a somewhat ambiguous rule set right now and the same issue applies you have to get a waiver or some other means of permission to get into those areas but it doesn't have the formality of a website that you can go to to get your get the airspace released we're going to have to get to that at some point in time i guess and that's just what it'll take i mean cars only drive on the road right in general if you drive your car off the road you get noticed pretty quick so some means of having that similar behavior control will have to occur here but i there is the other piece coming there's going to be an automatic identification uh some kind of an electronic thumbprint coming out which drones in the future are going to have to step up to and then as i get at law enforcement in some form we'll be able to recover that information and determine what's going on in the air around them is that yeah this is one of the biggest things going on from both the technical standpoint and a policy standpoint right now last week as a matter of fact the fa finally got its task force or it's called an aviation rulemaking committee where they invited a group of industry experts and to come up with a proposal for what those rules would look like and and what approach should be used to establish remote identification requirements this is important for a couple of reasons the fa was actually ready last year to put out a rule for flight over people but they couldn't do it because they couldn't clear the interagency coordination process to allow them to release the rule for comment because of this remote identification issue was raised by the law enforcement folks inside the federal government essentially saying look if you authorize people to fly legitimately over crowds how would we know the ones that are authorized from the ones that aren't and so the fa had to take a step back and say all right well we're going to have to have a means of remote identification that law enforcement can activate in order to tell okay that drone over there that one is legal but that one over there isn't and so we need to do something about the one over there and and that's what spurred this whole effort that's now ongoing and i believe there's their target is to be done with their recommendations by the fall so that the fa can can update their rule and get it out for comment either by the end of this year or early next year so that's a huge step forward for the fa and i think for the industry now note that this would only be for commercial drones not for the hobbyists as of now unless the legislation changes the fa is prohibited from putting out new rules for hobbyists and and they were previously prohibited from doing that when they put out the registration rule that was overturned by a federal court earlier this month so uh they they've learned their lesson i guess and that you won't be seeing any more regulations coming out on hobby aircraft until such time as congress either changes the law or they figure something out you know that those evolving pieces of information that that whole concept of a thumbprint that comes forth electronically from the system is something that really changes how the legality aspects and the legal operation versus the illegal operation applies and that one change could change how our legislative rules come forth and so that's another example of something we have to embed into the information we provide for our legislature before the next session begins so they can see these things that are coming and it made me think also i mentioned that we have these requests around here from our law enforcement community and our citizens emergency response teams in the various towns to find a way to organize the local drone fleets to support disasters as the case may be we could come up with our own little identifier chip of some kind it can't cost much i mean we have them on our i have them on my keys so i don't lose them we have them on our dogs my wife has one on me so she don't lose me and uh we can get you know these tags are not much at all and uh there's no reason in executing this local community team we couldn't do that and if you haven't got a tag you're not here and uh to get the tag you have to go through training you have to have a permit what a what a great idea we'll see if some smart people under 15 can figure it out i can tell you people over 70 can't testify on that one for sure so well that's one of the great things that you know university could do uh that had engineering and drone programs is they could look at solutions for this this problem and come up with something that was both inexpensive and easily uh accessible yeah one of the issues that's cropped up in this whole agenda is well wait a minute if i'm a commercial operator and i'm doing uh filming is something sensitive uh i don't necessarily want any tom dick or harry to be able to interrogate my aircraft and find out that that's me uh just like license plates you as a citizen can't go query the database and find out where somebody lives just by looking at their license plate so you know one of the complications that they're dealing with in this remote education arc is well how do you make the information available to law enforcement without making it available to the uh the very you know just john q public well and and that certainly leads to the question of who needs information what latency there is on the information how it's going to be archived and how long you're going to keep it all the things associated with evidence sort of fit into the picture that you're describing here but it makes me go back to one of our sessions in the legislature this year where we had i think uh a lot of the conservation people interested in some of the rules that were being proposed for setbacks from uh from ecologically threatened areas some ecologists want to get in really close because they have to count the bird eggs in the nest and they have to identify the shape of the leaf to tell if the thing is invasive or not the other people on the other side of the conservation equation want the drones kept back 500 feet so that nobody bothers any of those environments so the same organizations have in some cases quite opposing needs so the sooner we can pull those needs together uh through educational programs and feedback from them the better we can craft ways to use the technical things such as the electronic thumbprint and manage the whole operation so it's a big picture and it's a big challenge and it's kind of fun to be in it and uh one last question for you jim knowing that what we went through last year in the legislature here and i'm sure everywhere else what should we be doing now to get ready for six months from now when we will face even more questions and probably diverse opinions on this whole subject area at legislation season well if they'll talk to you i would reach out to the you know the leaders in the various committees who have jurisdiction over technology like unmanned aircraft and and literally say hey we'd like to come in and talk to you about what's going on what the issues are how the state can get involved you know make them aware of things that are going on like the drone advisory committee and the work they're doing to fair it out the right way to break up the responsibilities between state and local i mean that yeah that would be my recommendation that if you have the access take advantage of it uh you're right they're not a lulu i assume a lot of them will be around that you could reach out to uh but if not yeah skype or whatever if they're you know if they're truly interested you know which committees that that these bills went through in the last legislative session so you know who the leadership is that's going to be dealing with them come the next one so educating the leadership's a good good place to start you know that's a great thought and and the question is what do we use as an artifact of that education i would like to think of putting together a one page or two page flyer of some kind that's straightforward run it back through you see if you agree and include in it the various national activities that are underway and what they might produce as let people conclude there's going to be some benefit coming from that and start by maybe it's a three phase thing here's what the environment is here's where the uh technology is going and here's where the national standards are starting to occur get that seed planted and then start looking at how this might apply to use in law enforcement public safety on the 107 side as well as the public aircraft side and maybe a third thing suggesting legislation that would be useful in our case to hawaii and uh include you in on the on the buildup of that recognizing of course that you only have uh 24 hours in a day well my you know i want to make a living but i'm also a big proponent of this technology and and one of the reasons that i got out of the f a a uh retire was to be able to work on the industry side to help move things forward and and find uh solutions to some of these big problems it's it's difficult to do from from inside everything that needs to be done so i'm very much involved in so like the work that i would do assuming i get approved to do it with the drone advisory committee that would all be pro bono just on my own on time so happy to help with that especially if i get involved in that committee then uh it'll be directly applicable to what you're talking about if we could do a flyer and have a drone advisory committee sanction it or something put their stamp on it what a way to author to uh validate what this is what you can count on so i will take that on on this engine to write something up to start the ball rolling to see what we can do yeah and i'll take the uh action to talk to the the co-chair of the subcommittee about the idea of maybe putting something together and not just hawaii can use but but all everybody yeah everybody can use yeah okay that's what we do on this show we talk about things make plans and then go try to follow up as you know from the last time you were here so we've come to the end of our half hour jim uh thanks so much jim williams of uh j l h unmanned jhw jhw unmanned solutions and uh uh all the uh hope and joy for the future of your great success and your individual effort and i know that there's a lot of people around the country who are watching what you're doing and and following as best they can so jim thanks for coming on on the show again and i appreciate you inviting me i it's it's almost as much fun as being there but you can never have as much fun outside of hawaii as you can inside of hawaii so uh aloha and thanks again and we're going over to gordon birch and i'll buy you a beer okay thanks jim and we'll see you all next dessert day folks