 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. It's new on Thursday folks. Ted Ralston here at our Think Tech show where the drone leads temporarily transposed to the sub-arctic region of Anchorage, Alaska from our usual location, which is somewhere in Hawaii, N.A. Anyway, with me here in Alaska are, first of all, George Purdy from Lanai. I'm on a Lanai, George. Thanks for coming on board. And we have a newcomer to our show, Lawrence Moritz from Unifly, the U.S. regional manager, general manager of Unifly. And we're all here in the sunny subtropical areas of Alaska on the business of UAS. Why are we here in Alaska on UAS? Actually, you can see some in the background here, I hope, everyone. But what's most amazing is the confidence that takes place every year in Alaska in this time period, put on by the University of Alaska Fairbanks under the title Aquasi, which is the center for UAS integration up here in Alaska. And Hawaii and Alaska are together on a lot of projects and one of them is this one. And we're fortunate in having Lawrence here with us because a program called the Unmanned Pilot Program is coming around and you're in on that program and so are we. So let's hear a little bit, Lawrence, about your company, what you guys do. How you got here? Yeah, sure. So Unifly started somewhere in 2012. The founders were former air traffic controllers, both from the military background. Really? So real controllers, not academic guys? Real controllers. Absolutely, the guys in the tower. That's great. Absolutely. And they were dealing with that every day with manned aviation, of course. And at that time, 2012, they realized that there were more and more UAS coming into the sky. And the traditional solutions to manage traffic control at that time would not be able to integrate so many UAS because already today there are way more UAS in the sky, as you know, than manned aircrafts, right? And the curve is going to be exponential for the next years with the commercial UAS that we'll be playing. So very quickly they realized that the legacy air traffic management solution would not be able to do that. Having the human in the loop, the air traffic controller himself, it's kind of an issue that would need to be solved. And that's how they came with the concept of UTM, which is UAS traffic management. So how to automate the process and somehow remove the air traffic controller from the equation to make sure that you can manage so many UAS in the sky. Doesn't mean that the job for air traffic controllers will be removed on the longer term, but definitely there is a need to automate certain processes when it comes to UAS. What's interesting is unpacking your message is a couple of key things. 2012, you started. Most companies in the UAS business aren't much older than that. That's what UAS business is all about. Recent startups, innovative startups. In your particular case, you brought forward air traffic controllers who deal with air traffic management in the standard man's system, and they know that very well, and all the issues and protocols and procedures. And that's where they started from. So they started from that operational knowledge base and brought it forward to the unmanned area, rather than having folks who deal with the unmanned system try to find a way to integrate and mention with the man's system. That's a really unique marker, and I did not know that. I appreciate you bringing it up. And we have George. George, everybody knows George from the show many times. We've had to bring George all the way to Alaska to actually get him on the show, as if we're in the studio here. Because normally you're coming on by Skype from the sunny island of Lanai. That's great. And thanks for coming on, George. But Lanai represents a great opportunity to integrate this particular technology you're speaking of into an operating air structure system. Because we have the structure, but it's not heavily taxed. So it's a good combination. Plus we have a very interested and knowledgeable island ready to go forward in this domain as educated by George over the last couple of years. So George, tell us how the notion of integrating air traffic management on Lanai could execute? For one thing, this next coming year, we're actually preparing our annual, three-year annual airport disaster plan where we go out and actually do a scenario of a plane crash. And we have to manage also the air traffic and multiple agencies that will be flying a drone as part of the scenario. And one thing that you mentioned is on Lanai, we have no air traffic tower. So we actually have us, firemen or airport maintenance, trying to maintain control of the air traffic. So I see benefits right now just listening. Again, what you said that I see an implementation of how we can help me manage this whole scenario and make it less stressful. So we can actually use the coming exercise, incorporate your software in that exercise, and that would bring in automatically CTAP, the common tower advisory, if we could see which is the means by which air traffic is managed by the pilots and such at the airport. We could also use that to connect in HCF, the Hollywood Control Facility, which is the big air traffic management structure. They could all be part of this. And so we learn as we incorporate and we do it as an exercise, which is a safe way to do it. Plus, we are all part of the, one of the winning programs in IPP under Alaska, which is the FAA's integrating pilot program for integrating operations in the airspace so we can learn from what's going on here in Alaska, I suppose that. Furthermore, wow, there's a lot of things here. Furthermore, we're also part of the unmanned pilot program, which if we prevail and succeed in that competition, we'll actually have a Lanai exercise to execute with more than just of the airport. We'll have six locations on the island that are all dealing with UAS operations. So what's most interesting is that we came to Alaska to find out how this all comes together in Hawaii on the island of Lanai, which is the center of all our attention these days. So, Lauren, how did you guys, I mean, your access, obviously in the games you weren't born in the U.S., you're born in something that's probably called Europe. And that brings the whole continental picture into the game. So you represent not just air traffic management, but also a European version. So we can actually capitalize on what's going on in Europe and blend this whole thing together in a small microcosm, a macrocosm and go forward. And that's a very good point you raised, that indeed the company has been founded in Belgium. We're now operating globally. We have some projects in Asia as well, so outside Europe, in the U.S., obviously, in Africa as well. We've been working with UNICEF recently to manage the drone corridor. They have a humanitarian drone corridor over there. Very nice use case of blood samples that will be transported from the local dispensaries to the main hospital. But to come back to your point indeed, we believe that on the longer term, even though every country is taking a lot of decisions with regards to rulemaking or how to integrate UAS into the national airspace, in the end you would need to harmonize the regulation. And that's something we have been heavily advocating for, being part of the different international organizations, both at European level, North America as well, and there are some global organizations, like IKO for instance, where the civil aviation authorities worldwide are gathering from time to time to look at those topics as well. That's just really interesting and useful because having the Unifly involved ensures that we have this recognition of what is happening globally and is in compliance with the emerging standards. In fact, I brought that up the other day at the conference and said we got all these individual initiatives going. At some point in time, we have to kind of herd the cats and get them all paying attention to the way standards are being developed. The standards are coming out of... In fact, I wonder where the standards are going to come from. Either ASTM or RTCA will be where the standards come from here, I would think. That's a very good point. There are many organizations looking at the definition of standouts at the moment. Absolutely. One of them was ANSI. Basically, it usually was focusing on the U.S. But in this specific case, ANSI is not... Let's say it's not looking at defining our standards themselves, but what they plan to come up with is a roadmap identifying all the initiatives that took place and where we should be and the gaps in between. I think we should be looking at the formative recommendations and be looking at the monetization. So managing the overall standards process, not necessarily the standards themselves, ANSI isn't going to tell ASTM what to do. It's a broader overview. I've noticed that Jim McCabe has been publishing a lot lately as it's starting to happen. So through your efforts once again, we in Hawaii and Alaska here can be connected in and make sure that we stay in sight... with the way the regs are coming forward, which are going to come out of the standards. So this is the most interesting time to be involved in any aspect of drones because we have all this evolution of technology, materials, performance, mission, and now air traffic management. So George, I've got a question for you. Yes. We have in our disaster management and emergency operations systems. We have a well-structured system called the instant command system, and we have NIMS behind that, guiding what ICS does. So as we get into use of UAS in disaster operations, we'll have to find fit with the way the ICS is structured and the way instant commanders think and operate. So I think this is a great opportunity to take the structured aspect of UAS or drone flight management and associate it right up front with the structure that will work best with ICS. That's what I plan to do with this disaster drill coming up with Unifly. For the night, it really fits because we have very minimal manning and any type of software or technology we've always took in the first step in using it. And I have a pretty good idea of how your system works. I'm very excited to actually get it implemented and start playing around with it and working out how and when I'll apply it. Michael, what you just said there, how I'm going to apply it. We're talking about the social acceptance of new technology and new training protocols and new operational needs that our instant command people are going to have to align with in order to capitalize on this. So we could use this, I think it's another test case for how the instant command system if it's complicated to use then I can see we're going to get kicked back. But if I can figure out a way and working with you to simplify it to make it real easy in a stressful environment and helping manage your space and maintaining safety where we don't cause more accidents and we can actually finish our rescue operation then it's a win-win. And I see really two major benefits with that kind of exercise and you covered both actually. The first one is really reaching out to new airspace users with limited aviation background with a tool that gives them very quickly, easy to read information how to grasp where you can or can't fly how is the airspace actually regulated. Those are the kind of functionalities that UTM brings as well because what you just mentioned coordinating different entities that are in a stressful situation but even though we need to share the same airspace at the same time and it could be a combination of manned aircraft like helicopters and UAS since UAS is increasingly used in that kind of situation. So that's really what UTM is focusing on as well how to decomplete manned and unmanned aircrafts in the same airspace at the same time. But you know we just hit upon in the conversation you just went through we just hit upon one of the figures of merit that we can look at and that is the reduction in stress. That's certainly the lack of increase in stress. In fact that correlates beautifully with some work we're doing with a company which I so greatly call Sierra Nevada Corporation out there in the ether space that's dealing with special forces operations and this sort of thing. They have the same issue. And the more we add technology to what they do or add another drop-down menu you've got to check off or another software load you have to do that increases the stress in the decision makers and the people who are feeding decision makers information. So if we could collectively take on the obligation to reduce that stress and increase mission functionality at the same time that's the absolute win. So the more I see what the three of us are sitting here doing all the time so that's what we use this show for. We try to create real solutions for problems and make them go forward. So George I'm going to be summarizing a lot throughout this short time here because as these ideas are coming up we have to catch them. But what we're doing is meeting on you to enter the disaster planning drill for next year with this new initiative right up front. That's what I plan to do and since we're talking about stress when I was able to fly that drone at our disaster drill two years ago it did eliminate a lot of stress. It made our event run more quickly, smoothly and more efficient. So by adding Unifly as a management system I actually free up one person to actually do human work instead of helping me manage their space. Let me interpret that for Lawrence's benefit because he wasn't at that drill but basically the drill was a simulated airplane crash right off the airport and all the other reactors the first response people have to find it first of all and they have to get to it. So you got access issues you got location issues you got fence lines you have to think about there's the usual things that impede access. But then the central command is off the island of Mali across the channel and the need is for the people in the central command station to observe the circumstances and allocate resources to be provided in. But instead of a guy on the radio saying I got trucks over here I got a good load over here I need to change it all here the people in the command center can see it directly they can see where the equipment is being allocated being located they can see the line of sight folks had they got the picture so that took the man out of the loop who would otherwise have to be the sportscaster interpreting what's going on. I could actually go and do my job and that saved us at least 12 to 15 minutes of just work. And that's a very good point indeed for many first responders playing UAH it's a tool but it's not the core business and the way you put those tools available to those guys should help them to really focus on the core business. And that is such a mature attitude towards something like this it isn't technology but the sake of technology it's I had a situation as a general manager of an airplane program transitioning from what you might call mechanical or manual airplanes to computer-driven airplanes and had some young computer engineers who were thinking of what they can do with all the information they can now display in their cockpit I had a dinner one night with the chief pilot who was architecting their cockpit with these young engineers and got a conversation going between them and it was perfect the pilot was saying what he needs and the engineers were not understanding it and they got that wider and finally one of the young engineers said hey Jim what exactly is it that you want to display in a cockpit I can display anything in that cockpit you want in any form you want Jim said I want to know two things are the houses getting bigger or as I'm approaching something or the houses getting smaller he just wanted he didn't want all that individual data he wanted his job stress reduced by knowing am I heading in the right direction so if we can incorporate that through George's team on the island and then spread that to Maui spread it to the big island spread it to Oahu and then go we'll do something really good here for a lot of people but I can see this software helping a lot of the rural areas where minimal manning is a key issue that's where we can focus and once we show the benefits in that the larger stations can actually now look at it and maybe make their scenario more efficient so perhaps George along the way as this develops on for your exercise we could informally let the other counties know what's going on let them see what's going on let them contribute to the thought process that brings ideas in that are part of that overall stress reduction that's my plan we got two figures of merit overall stress reduction and faster response something like that is the two things that matter here so Lauren, again going back to the formation of the company how you guys got the idea to do this how you got people together who were thinking along the same line how did you manage to pull that together so indeed it started in 2012 but it took us for founders a few years to really come up with a first architecture and product itself it has been tested in Europe in a very large competition organized I think it was 2014 in Europe hope it's the right year where there were 81 participants and Unifly ended up second right behind a very big company so it was very interesting as a result of the concept was that an academic exercise at that time and were you guys out of graduate school or something like that no it was really organized for industry so it was really a very large competition at European level we thought okay finishing second of that competition it's a signal that we have something here absolutely and also it gave visibility so the year after the company was really founded and incorporated and it all started from there having some funding from Belgian organizations and support from the technology point of view put a team together and here we are three years after with some nice successes first in Europe actually we are providing the technology to the equivalent of the FAA in four countries in Europe Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Austria and the national authorities in those countries are really deploying the system at national scale to support all the stakeholders not only the pilots but also when you look at some of those countries they are involving the local law enforcement authorities they are involving airports and they are looking at exchanging data between UTM so UAS traffic management and ATM standard solutions for man aviation so it's really interesting how things evolve and it will be interesting taking that thought one step further if developments that are developed here in support of UAS can occur and are really positive is there a reason they can't work themselves to work their way backwards into general air traffic management are there not benefits that you can see in manned aviation management that would stem from what's developed here and that's a very good point as I mentioned before one of the main let's say characteristics of UTM automating a process that comes from manned aviation so once the concept is proven for UAS obviously at the long term there will be a lot of features and functionalities offered by UTM that could be applicable for manned aviation within ATM systems as well and we've been looking at that for sure one last question along the line of where you came from and how this is all going there must be some secret thoughts on preparatory thinking some core kernel of congratulating software that is the discriminator between what you do and what others are doing what can you say about that well not easy to reveal the secret source of course I don't want you to keep the secret to what your mother wants but there are a couple of aspects one important one is the one we started with safety and air traffic control background is at the core of what we are doing Unifly is not just a bunch of software developers in a garage that happen to produce an aviation software now it comes from the aviation background safety and those well established processes that exist within manned aviation are the ones we started from to build the application and to solve the specific issue it happens that we provide software but we're not a pure software company it's really an aviation company that's one key element and the other one is indeed behind the displays and the user interface there are a lot of functionalities that are based on research projects we're involved in a lot of them and that's covering many different topics ranging from how do you fuse data a lot of ways to identify and monitor and track UAS or manned aviation in real time so how do you fuse tracking data and how do you display that also related to cybersecurity for instance obviously having a software system at the core of your solution can be can offer a lot of threats from the cybersecurity point of view so there are a lot of elements we are looking at to make sure that the end-to-end solution is bullet proof from the cybersecurity point of view so the bullet proofness and therefore the reliability and the safety that goes with that some of the software developments that you're implying here and discussing are fairly abstract and probably hard for people to visualize so the comparison of this system versus some other would really be in the mind of the beholder and that's going to be defined by the screening basically and the ease of interaction with the human factors developments that you guys have gotten into as well in terms of screen integration integration between the existing air traffic management systems and this one so it will just plug and play in some way. That's a very good point indeed you may have different software functionalities running in the background but the way you interact with the system is very different from stakeholder to stakeholder the way we've been looking at GiniFly is having a kind of central platform with different interface and the interface serves the needs of a different stakeholder so the interface for the UAS pilot commercial or regression user will definitely not be the same as the interface you would present to the air traffic controller if he wants to see UAS flying nearby the airport that will be very different screens and indeed those are aspects we've explored quite a lot and here comes the solution of different interfaces making sure that it's tailor made for your own needs and the information that you want to see and I think it comes back to an element you mentioned before that it's not the objective to overload the user with that many information that you would be able to send but really to put available the information that are required to that and then the other thing that comes to mind is go back to onii which is where we start and everything and we aren't coming to the end of our time here George, this is the first thing we've really seen that can get us outside the rotorcraft itself or the UAV itself and get us into the educational theme and the mathematical development and software and stuff so this is a perfect connection into the school system on the island I would think because we're not talking just about the flying component of the drone we're talking about how to manage it and so getting the kids interested in this and this then leads to the math as you and I were speaking yesterday there is some high level of abstraction we have to get to here there's some mathematical basis for what we're talking about here which we haven't quite applied yet but everybody should think of onii diagrams as a way to think about collision avoidance because we're talking about collision avoidance as an example but once again inspiration in the school system for taking a look at something they can look at on a laptop and the simulation behind it they can run exercises themselves so George we got to bring this into the school system so I will because a lot of the school children are actually our participants so they will see firsthand how the system works pretending to save their lives so that's how we're going to gain more respect that way so our efficiency speed and safety number one and all measured by lower stress and higher productivity on the heart of the operator so we have come to the end of our time here for our think tech show where we bring up subjects like this to the public and Lauren first time on this show hope you increase the flyer thanks for inviting me of course from Unifly out of a global company basically changing the way that UASs are operated and finally getting into the operations side of this George, first time actually on the show in the studio the studio had to be moved to the other circle second time second time okay folks, we'll see you in two weeks