 It is noon on Thursday folks, Ted Rawson here in the Think Tech studios downtown Honolulu. We have George Purdy, one of our frequent flyers far across, far, far across the Kahiki Channel on the island of Lanai, in Lanai City, enjoying a day, taking care of the kids. Anyway, George, welcome on board again, our show, Where the Drone Leads. Hello, House Data Hawaii. Hey, right on. Glad to have you back, George. No, this is one of the first, the few times we've not had actually a drone on the table here at the show, and the reason is we've got a picture of one, which is even farther away. It's a picture of the University of Hawaii VIP team in their EUVSI drone competition dealing with search and rescue, presently in Patuxent River, Maryland. And there they are. There the guys are on the runway this morning at the Pax River Airport, getting ready to go off and do a competition. We've got a twin engine search and rescue aircraft that also drops a water bottle on the fallen victim, and they're all ready to go out and take no prisoners on that one. Anyway, I hope we'll hear later today how they did in the competition. It's a competition among about 20 or 30 universities around the world, frankly, who show up for this competition. Second year UH has been there. Wish them the best. We'll have them on the show when they get back. Anyway, George, so that's our UAS picture of the day and standing in for an actual model. But tell us how things are going on the other end of that chain in Lanai. How are things going with drone services in Hawaii and your efforts in education and promoting UAS interests with airport fire and with public safety and such on the island? Recently, we've been getting ready for hurricane season, so we've been preparing drone operators on the island and things that they can do to help in case we reach that disaster level. So this summer, we're putting together a couple weekends that all us drone operators get together, invite the kids, other families come to the park and put some hours under our belt and just go flying around the city and open pasture land. So you're kind of getting ready for the hurricane season. In fact, it's interesting, George, you and I first met at Makani Pahili probably this same week about four years ago on this same subject, UAS or drones in the service of public safety in this regard to the disaster management disaster operation. So it's kind of cool you're on the show at that same time this year. But tell us about what you've done. So you're organizing work teams or task forces or something in readiness for operations, actual operations with law enforcement, with public safety? Yes. So we're actually going over all the current rules and regulations. We're making face-to-face contact with our first responders and community members. Because we live on a small island and our population is who we got once the storm hits. Our ports are shut down. Our harbors are shut down. So we really want to make first contact with our citizens here in our community with drones so that way we know we have resources available during that time of need. So instead of us just finally meeting during the disaster, we want to make that visit earlier where we know each other, we actually go out and train. We see how each other works. We know everybody's weaknesses and positive points, what type of aircraft they got. So when the weather comes up, we know who's got what and what can fly in what area and what time of day. That is a really incredible model. And like you say, you've got a contained environment, a contained population of about 2,500 people. And within there are 10, 20 drones, something like that within the total community and a compelling need to go forward in a way that doesn't allow agendas to occur. So this is a really good model for a lot of them. I'm thinking that folks who had on from Texas and Virginia last two weeks on the show would benefit from hearing more about this. Let me ask you a couple of more detailed questions about what you're doing, George. If you think of the incident command system and which of course the fire organizations have originated. How do you see the public unit use of UAS? How do you see that fitting in with the ICS? It comes down to communication. We need to give them a staging point, a place to check in. That way they understand the situation and they get updated on what's going on. And it's basically coming down just being able to communicate with who's got what equipment. So you're plugging them in on the situation side of the ICS chain or the planning side, more so than the air ops side? Yes. So we looking at to entry level for folks that are not first responder mind but able to collect that video data that our incident commander and planning folks could use to create that 12-hour incident action plan of what we're going to do next. George. So I really want to keep it very simple and they go out, collect pictures and you let the professionals take that data, chew at it, create a plan and then send it out to get resources that we need here. That's exactly what Helen Nakano has asked for on this island. She runs a lot of things up in Manoa and she's asked for a citizens action team that can be ready at times of need that can go in and get the information and assist in some way. So we need to have you hook up with Helen, actually you probably know Greg Nakano I think from the show more than one time and Helen is half responsible for Greg. That's how it works. But you've outlined a really typical George Purdy idea. It's a grand idea, George. And in its executability it's uncomplicated but it's effective and I got to tell you, you're getting imagery and I'm just going to repeat it so I make sure I got it right and our viewers get it right but you're basically using people in the drone community in conjunction with but not part of the first responder formal incident command system to produce information as they can and as they see fit and as they're capable and feed it in to the system and let the system digest it and use it as it wants to. Exactly and that's as simple as the introductory and as we use drones more and our operators get more experience and as these hurricane seasons pass it'll grow and it can be used at any type of event needed. Then as time moves on as experience builds you could begin introducing the issues we have to deal with such as privacy and rights protection and proprietary information. All the things that are associated with observations made through UAS and cameras and such, you can begin to see how to manage that and the people who are actually doing the collecting can be part of that developing management scheme. That's it. And what will help with that is perpetuating every generation that comes on board. We've got now a place within the incident command system to introduce new folks to help as more folks get experience under the belt that move up in the chain during various different more extreme duties as necessary. That's great because you have a feed path into the incident command system into the first responder technology and professional training and such. We also have something I think that would be a great way to bring the kids in schools, their parents and teachers together because there's a real clear objective here to their work. It isn't just going out and having fun. Exactly and it'll give them an inspiration of what career path they actually want to do. It'll take current educational, what is it, learning habits that are new since when I went to school and what's changing now it'll slowly introduce it into our community emergency plan a lot quicker than waiting for them to graduate and showing up in the future. We can actually start now. And if I can offer an opinion on that as well, I think that that experience taken together would also be extremely valuable for the NFPA for example as they're going through their methods to come up with end state user requirements in the fire domain and I think they're going to watch over the rest of public safety. They could use you as a model example and as a place to get valid field tested issues that current drones don't satisfy. If we need more flight time, we need more wind tolerance and turbulence tolerance. If we need the ability to handle low light conditions and things like this, this would be coming out of your experience. Yes and then the other part too is that these younger folks are learning from the experience of older folks and now we can also pass down that knowledge to increase our future response much better. That's George, you're allowed three bright ideas on this one half hour show. I think you already hit all three of them. So we have to ask you to no more bright ideas. We've got to develop these that are going. But I can't thank you enough for those cool ideas because my mind is still thinking about how to take that over here to Oahu. We have connections with HPD, HFD and such and having them kind of follow what you're doing would be a great opportunity to put that into our environment on this island as well. Oh absolutely and then having some sort of competition, even at the schools. Having students who may be looking into these careers or even taking their movie experience with drone just image collecting and being able to send it to an emergency scenario what happened in that area let the first responders analyze that video and come up with their response plan. It can be that simple in a round table environment. And we could even add to that the other functions that drones can provide. For example, acting as a radio relay or acting as a collector of chemical information for example if there's a fire of some kind and rather than putting a fireman at risk to go in and figure out what the components burning are send a drone and with sensors on it. And the kids could figure this out probably faster than certain people at this table who might be really old. So you've once again set a really interesting path for the rest of us to follow George. And I think I want to take this very the video coming from the show right to our friends at HPD and HFD and see if we can come up with something similar here. I'll be happy to fly up, come down, sit down, have coffee and donuts and create something. I think we're at that point that the community and the public is educated enough that they'll support us. And I like that point you made about the community and the public. Especially after this hurricane. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. I got you off. Go. Oh. George can you repeat that last paragraph? Yeah. So the point is for me is that I think the community and the public they're educated enough that we as first responders come in with these ideas now that we can show them especially this hurricane season. You know, I got a feeling something the next is going to happen. But if we come up with what I'm trying to do here and show the examples of what good can come out of it, in the future, we can grow this event training exercise program as a community based with fire department, police department, schools and community members that flow by drone to get together and support anything that we need to do. That's great. That could apply to way beyond the hurricane season, rescue at sea for example, even coastal erosion issues that are slow speed disasters rather than fast disasters, still the same things needed. Let's pick that up and develop how we might take the next step over on this island after our one minute break here. 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. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, Hawaii's leading digital media platform for civic engagement, raising public awareness on tech, energy, diversification and globalism. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. It is Thursday folks, lunchtime on Thursday and we are here with your show where the drone leads on Think Tech Hawaii. Ted Rawlsson here hosting in Honolulu and we have across the Kealaka Hiki channel, we have George Purdy standing by in Linai City and once again blowing us away with the bright ideas that come off of that island or at least out of George's house on that island. And George, once again thanks for joining us on your lunch hour. The discussion we had before a break was this wildly creative idea of having citizens groups that are performing drone based collection of information in conjunction with formal and professional public safety people but still separate from them so they're not entangled in the professionalism aspects but are on the developing edge and feeding information in by drone into the public safety circle of operation. And George has, just kind of filling in what you said George or interpreting it, you've created a way that the citizens, the kids, the schools, the public can be part of that larger picture with their drones assisting in the collective information but yet protecting the people from any kind of risk situation that first responders get paid to go take. So that's a really interesting structure and you've already talked about how it fits in the planning side of the incident command system and that's an important piece to think about as well. And I'm just thinking how, on this island, how or other places that might be developed. I wonder if kind of an organization or structure would turn to put this together like maybe the CERT, the Community Emergency Reaction Teams, maybe in conjunction with the National Guard as some kind of a citizen adjunct unit to them. Thoughts about that for our environment here on Oahu with George that we might plant that seed in. Okay, you broke up on that last part, I couldn't hear anything. What I was suggesting was that we have the formal structures, we have the police, the fire, we have the National Guard, we have disaster and emergency management departments and such. There tend to be, collect, they tend to put a barrier on themselves. They are the professionals that are within their bond. How would you think we can take your idea and push it forward on this island in terms of providing this citizens adjunct to the to the professional responder teams? How would the responder teams take that? How would we find a place that they would find it comfortable to have us do that? For an example would be, say like the National Guard, what resources do they have to do this event? So like for me on the nine, our resources in our department, once 911 or we're activated initially for a big event, our resources are used up right at that phone call. So I need my resources to be my community member is something that I have on island before I get professional help and professional resources from another island. So for Oahu in each department, it'll go down to what is their resource capability and once they exhaust it, now that's where the component of bringing in your community members to fill that gap that they need help. Where is their limit? Where is their cut off? Once you can understand and identify where their resources are maxed out, that's when these public and private citizens come into play and you need the game plan on how you want them to come in to fill your needs. So you need a game plan, you need a roster, you need some form of certification perhaps or some acknowledgement that the person's been through some training and is safe and isn't going to get into harm's way in the process and you need some notification scheme to alert them that the need is on and see if they can respond. Kind of an informal, formal structure. Yes and it comes down to like you know for HFD what is their capability? Where do they exhaust all resources as possible and then from that point create that link in exactly what you just said with that roster that and that's where all these little programs and school activities and public events can come into play. We can slowly educate the community in that sense and having it being fun and having first responders and these resource groups understand what they have in their community and that comes down to people that work in these departments, knowing their neighborhoods, knowing who's there. That's interesting. Are you taking this all the way to everybody getting a 1-0-4-1-0-7 certificate or in your training program you get some kind of a some kind of a hunter's equivalent of a hunter's license that kind of a thing? That's where I'm thinking is more that hunter safety because we look at that something that if these major professional organizations run out of resources can we educate the community enough to actually come out and help us and I believe we can with a simple UAS air safety card. If we are able to carry firearms in Hawaii at 10 years old to go and get your license to go hunting we can do the same with drones because you will reach that level of need unless you exhaust all your resources. At that point it's too late if you didn't plan for it now. So should we collectively think of like a one-day training course that's held on the weekend or maybe three of them that are constitute a reasonable period of exposure to the to the to the to the formality of interacting with the first responders and and some kind of a base training program people would go through to get that equivalent of the hunter safety card for UAS. Yeah I believe so I believe a nice little one or two-day program is pretty much all you would need and you know how these are very responsible people on their own understanding the current FAA section 336 rules so they've got a good understanding. Now our program would be identifying and help them to understand how we need their help and what steps and procedures you need to do to come out and help us and have that two-way communication. That would be a brilliant stroke in terms of getting the public to come forward to assist the the professional responder organizations. So I think the outline you've created and the hunter safety card concept what we should do is maybe get together off line somehow and sketch out what that three-day program might look like or three successive weekends or something like that to generate the training and what the training content is. Obviously we just have to make sure that people that we are asking people to put themselves at risk. Yes and it'll come down to basically the incident command itself to verify and accept that acceptable risk or just say no thank you for your time or you know you put them in an area where they're there to help if needed and a lot of the community members just want to be there in case they need their assistance. That's what I found with my community if you get them in an area where they're prepared and ready to help you may not need them but you had them show up and the other part of that too is you actually control the airspace because they're there ready they're not out there doing John Wayne and doing their own thing. You can actually use them efficiently. I think that's an interesting part of the training program is teaching them the efficiencies of not wasting anybody's time not wasting resources. You're there ready to go. Here's your assignment. Can you do it? Go do it. Bring me back the information. Thank you very much. And what you just also implied here is that by this process we would generate a greater public awareness of the incident command system how it works and what the expectations can be when there's one a disaster might apply to them. I think I can speak for our community of Waimanalo would be very interested in this. We have Bobby Kahana in the police department down there and we have Rufino, you know Rufino already and some other guys who would probably maybe want to think of Waimanalo as a prototype. I can't speak for them but I would say Waimanalo could stand up and take this on with the half a dozen drone operators that are in the town today and learn through experience what this might actually turn into. I totally agree and that's how it should start in communities like yours and then now you can use that as a model for other communities because if you cut off that roads entering into Waimanalo you're just like Lanaya on Oahu. You're isolated. Yeah that's exactly right. Yeah and then comes in the really interesting undercurrents here and there are always issues of of cybersecurity and people who want to penetrate your system for their own gain or for malicious effects of some kind. So we can actually use this as part of the training and awareness for cybersecurity and drones are basically a piece of the cyber community and the information they collect enters into the cyber domain in some way and information can be used and can be misused. People can be valid people or they can be malicious. So there's always that side we need to think about and getting all of our people exposed to those issues and thinking about them in advance works for more than just disaster operations of the type we're thinking of. It works in the whole world of cybersecurity. Oh yes and that's what a lot of these training events do for even us professionals is that we start finding the flaws and then we start addressing the flaws to figure out what went wrong and how can we fix it. So adding cybersecurity to this and exactly what you said it's a win-win and then during a disaster of necessity that's the greatest payoff is how do we help our community to the best ability and resources available at that time. And all of this that all of what we're talking about here could be considered a dynamic and ongoing real time development of response back to the FAA on the one side for UAS cert to the ANSI organizations for the technical standards and means of certification and to NFPA and organizations like that on how UAS functionality and the people associated with it should be thought of in regard to fire safety and the technology that's needed to enhance that. It would be really cool for an organization like I or Waimanalo to say hey here's what we got today here's these various UAS here's what they do and here's what they don't do. So Mr. manufacturer if you want to be really successful in this domain you need to do the following. You need to improve the resilience of the system. You need to make it work in the rain. You need to make it work when someone's hands are saltwater wet and change the batteries. There's a lot of things that we would discover along the way that would be quite useful I think fed back into the manufacturing community. Oh yes and it could also open up some sort of new R&D manufacturing for a while. Yeah absolutely. Exactly that's where one of my focus in expanding my company is to get to that level. Okay and how is the company working these days? How are you guys doing? You have a couple of thousand square feet of shop area I recall and is that starting to work? Oh it's it's work we can't keep up. Tell us about it. It's nice it's nice to be at that point where we're not worrying about being pushed out. We've set the tone and followed regulations correctly that you know a lot of financial folks and a lot of politicians said that we would fail but we stuck to our guns we stuck to regulations we helped adjust and create regulations to fit the need trying to support our community in first responders education and private citizens and okay well George Purdy we're just a company in our third year and okay we I think we've managed to run ourselves right out of time here just about the time the Skype is breaking down but George is so cool to have you back on again thanks so much for coming on and once again thanks to the the brilliance of the ideas and a leadership you provide in the fought leadership area as well as operational leadership I think we're going to take your ideas and try to copy them in Wamanalo and other places on Oahu here and we'll keep you in the loop and support each other so once again George thanks so much for coming on and we'll see you all next Thursday folks