 Friday afternoon folks almost it's 12.01 so therefore it is Friday afternoon actually Thursday afternoon and I'm a little sorry for the confusion we just changed the time on this show from four o'clock on Friday to 12 o'clock on Thursday versus the standard time so those who are are trusted and faithful viewers please adjust your calendars your watches your clocks and everything else and your financial statements so that you can attend to us at 12 o'clock on Thursday anyway Ted Ralston here again I think that Kauai where the drone leads joining me in the studio here is Josh Levy Josh thanks for coming on again except Josh is the coordinator of UAS programs at University of Hawaii Applied Research Lab right and from far across the sea we have with us Hank Lawson from a lot of things Marine Corps, TICS, Texas A&M and whatever else Hank might have in his background Hank thanks for joining us the first time we're here on the show. Bye Skye. Good to be here. Good we see you all dressed up in your appropriate I mean we can't miss the fact that you're from Texas A&M it's right there it's just screaming out at us so hey thanks for coming on you were here last week in person at the Primo conference and it was really great to have folks from not just the Pacific but also that part of the Pacific called Texas here at Primo and the discussions we had and the field exercise out on Mokalea and such all great discussions and opportunities for discussions and developing ideas so thanks so much for coming on the show because what we really like about what you've done in Texas you guys have really put together a well-structured UAS FAA test range program which is well ahead of us here in Hawaii that's where we're starting on that path and we can learn a lot from you and we certainly thank you and welcome Frigga learning from you and I want to thank you for also helping us the legislature last week talking about some issues associated with getting common understanding and common appreciation of what the rules are and how legislation needs to move forward to enable and authorize unmanned assistant operation so that's a whole long introduction but Hank tell us a little bit about the whole laid out lay down there between Texas A&M and Lone Star state test range and how is that all hanging together? Oh pretty good Ted I talked to you a little bit about last week but generally speaking we're all part of the Texas A&M University system and my center the National Emergency Response and Rescue Training Center alone with the Lone Star unmanned aircraft systems center of innovation and excellence we are all a part of the engineering department under the deputy chancellor for engineering the Lone Star site came into existence about three or four years ago as a test range and since then we basically partnered they do the all of the unmanned aircraft system stuff everything from research to testing to working with state agencies and if I fail to mention it we're part of the Texas A&M system which is a state the university system and my agency Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service is a state agency the Lone Star Center is a part of Texas A&M University Corpus Christi which is one of the 11 universities within our system so our our partnership from my standpoint was sort of a very good partnership because my center caters to first responders in the 50 states US territories we essentially train them under a cooperative agreement with the Department of Homeland Security and we roughly trained about 60 to 61,000 folks a year in the 50 states DC and the US territories 61,000 people a year goes through your training operation that's absolutely correct we do in most of its mobile training we have one resident course which we run approximately once a month we bring 55 people in there each month the others the other 57 courses we have we actually go to the location so our folks spend a lot of time traveling from state to state doing deliveries of the 58 courses that we have 58 courses 61,000 people and hitting most of the states including Hawaii you guys are out here in Hawaii training from time to time oh yeah we come to Hawaii and we go to territories go on that's a really interesting business model I think is Josh we got a Josh is responsible for making that happen here okay that's why he's on the show that's why we now have it on TV Josh that's what your job looks like now it's official and now yeah I have to you have to pick your brain but this this structure you've got through the the broad ranging university through the engineering department and then through the state agencies and such with multiple streams of business if you will not just uas but all these things are kind of tied together and they somehow reflect on each other and somehow cooperate and support each other so of those 61,000 Hank what what proportion or percentage is uas the uas training itself turning into where do you think that's going to go well the uas training we really just started that is a the training we do we're part of a national domestic preparedness consortium that was set up by Congress back in 1998 after Oklahoma City bombing there are seven members in the consortium to include the University of Hawaii which does natural disaster training some of the other members do radiological and nuclear explosives as well as a live agents chemical and biological agents so we try to cover all of them I guess what we call the C burning chemical biological radiological and nuclear threats that are potentially out there the unmanned aircraft systems we really just started getting into the game in terms of that training and as a right now we have one certified course out of about 173 courses that we have among the seven members and they they do the courses themselves you probably know more about this than I do Ted but at the moment the training that's done through the consortium is is done by the University of Hawaii our training we're incorporating modules on uas into the training that we do and some of the ones that we're putting it in we do sports and special events training so we're looking at incorporating uas is in that app and that training is potentially basically focused on division one universities as well as all the major sports venues pro football pro basketball all of the the venues throughout the country and the the sports themselves NASCAR those those folks have a big concern about uas's I think they saw a couple of videos where I'm out on YouTube where somebody hooked weapons machine guns on to a uas and did a couple demonstrations and then the ideal of explosives or other dangerous chemicals being dropped from uas is there is another concern so we're looking at that additionally we do a couple of courses that involve the incident response bombing related courses and threaten risk assessments and we're building the uas piece in the does as far as numbers go typically I'm making an oz arena we're probably the first year or so I'm thinking we're probably going to touch somewhere in the range of two to three thousand folks and as we spread it across the classes we're essentially hoping to grow those numbers that's a really good indication because that's a proof of the reality of the emerging aspects of uas in all these public safety domains first year in training in 2000 students pushing through it Josh yeah it's pretty impressive the expectations are increasing every every statement Hank makes to us I know I almost wanted to get off in case they can dig my hole too deep here so we've got to we got to sort of learn from you Hank and and there's enough business for all of us I think there's all there's seven of these state test ranges and they're all gonna do something a little bit different it would be really interesting wouldn't it if they could get together and develop these ideas in common and have you seen that occur where the seven states get together other than that then when the FAA calls the standard coordination meeting one of the things we've been trying to do Ted is we started this national unmanned aircraft system credentialing program that began with actually one of the oil and gas a lot of oil and gas in Texas and one of the oil and gas companies came to us and said hey you know we're looking for people to do stuff for us inspect pipelines inspect different structures that are on their property and they're thinking that UAS is there a good way to do that and they put out these proposals looking for folks to do to work and they get all kinds of people coming in saying hey we can do this work for you and they've hired a few of them and once they've gotten them on they've determined that they couldn't really do what they're looking for them to do so they they're in Texas they know us as a training institution and they came to us and said hey could you guys put together some credentialing kind of stuff for small UAS companies and says in particular we'd like to give you a set of criteria and have you certified people that were looking to hire in basically certifying their ability to do to work at we're looking for them to do so we put together a program that involves going through testing their their protocols companies that are going to do business with this outfit we look at their protocols we look at their safety we look at their paperwork and then we bring their pilots in and do basically flight testing and we've got some structures that involve towers and a couple other things and we have them fly a couple maneuvers that might replicate flying a pipeline or inspecting a structure and once we've taken them through all of this if they get through it all successfully we sort of check it off put them on a list of certified vendors and the company that asked us to do this looks at that list and their plan is to hire people from that list to do the various work that they're looking for and to get back to your original questions collaborating with some of the other sites what we've done with this program is we're looking at other industries and to date I think we've certified somewhere in the race we're dealing with better on 50 or 52 companies that we've either certified or we're talking to about going through the process and we've talked to some of the other sites about doing the same sort of thing we have this process that we we refer to as cooperative learning centers where we provide our curriculum that and we provide materials and go out certified their instructors to do the training certified their facilities to do it and once we've got them certified they can go out and actually do the credentialing of companies either in their regions in their areas or otherwise that's a really great summary of things you've done to drive forward and again Josh show we got to think about this real hard but this whole notion of credentialing as the starting point as a center point and as a easily recognizable value we got to think about that Josh I think on our end here we do have George Purdy on the island of Linai I don't think you had a chance to meet George yet he's in our public safety department here and is in the educational systems as well and has a similar concept in terms of using the hunter training card that you have to get when you want to go hunting and use some kind of a credentialing system that has a identifiable mark on you that could be used for drone people because what goes through my mind is our local power company here and other industries are attempting to move forward and using UAVs and infrastructure management but we don't have a supply of readily trained people who are airmen and also UAS people and and as a result we're having to import from California and we need to grow our own here I think and the kind of things you're doing the credentialing program the training program that leads up to credentialing those would be really important things for us to take on here that would be a tremendous value to the state of Hawaii to have that capability and the important thing also is to have to make sure that the there are people that understand that there is that training certification out here so they should be even looking for people which is a whole educational concept which goes back to the website and Josh you that's another thing you do it isn't it your expectations just keep getting out of sight here building and what you got to do getting stressed no you know that's another interesting issue we've got to take our first break here this thing goes by real fast-tank as you can see but let's talk about the whole educational flow or the way you out post information the way you get people to call you and and don't call the wrong person how we all how that works in your area so we can think about that after our first break here hi I'm Tim Appichella I'm the host of moving Hawaii forward a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic issues here on Oahu join us every other Tuesday at 12 noon and as we discuss how we try to solve our traffic headaches not to not to include just the rail but transit and carpooling and everything in between so join us every other Tuesday moving Hawaii forward thank you you want to talk about some socially sensitive issues relevant to women listen to these guys well I think it's important in Judaism that we don't take the Bible literally we take it seriously okay I agree and the really the key to understanding Christianity is compassion if you're compassionate towards other people you are living a Christian life and that relates also to dealing with women and men and women issues as well are women and men equal they're equal who better depends on what tune in we are back live folks here Ted Ralston and Josh Levy in the downtown Honolulu Studios of Think Tech Hawaii overlooking downtown Honolulu and we have standing by in the great state of Texas Hank Lawson incredible leader in the Texas A&M network the Texas State University's network I might say UAS program and emergency management and disaster operations program Hank thanks for joining us again and in the second half of our show here it goes by fast I'll tell you 15 minutes on each segment man you're about hey did we even start yet we haven't got our stuff talked about so much thanks for taking your late afternoon and coming on with us but we were talking just before the break about these wonderful ideas and things you've you've created and the things we have to create that follow along in those footsteps how in Texas does some ambient company out in Austin will say or someplace who has an idea about getting into UAVs how do they know to get a hold of you and get taken in the right direction I mean there's plenty of guys out there who sell them a training class and plenty of guys out there who sell them a drone how do you control that or or manage that in a positive way so that everybody wins and one of the things that we have sort of an advantage that we have for us is our organization Texas A&M engineering extension service we've sort of been doing this for a long time we have a fire field disaster city a simulation center we also have four divisions one that does law enforcement and security training another one that does knowledge engineering economic development community support we have the Texas A&M fire field which has been around over 80 years now and we also have infrastructure training and in safety which does OSHA training and we touch 173,000 folks a year throughout the country so we have instructors that are always out there so I mean in terms of reaching people we have fliers when the instructors are out in the communities they take information out on our courses we post things on our website and on the Lone Star website you know under unmanned aircraft systems we also do a UAS summit that doesn't matter if you attended last year Ted but we get the word out that way and in conjunction with that we put together a an introductory course on unmanned aircraft systems at the prompting of some of our law enforcement and fire customers actually some of the some of the cities within the state of Texas San Antonio Austin and Dallas and basically our general outreach we are we have Twitter feeds we have Facebook and Snapchat and a whole host of other things and number of these communities basically we're out there we've been out there for a while we talked to the responder community and a lot of our word of mouth as well as these tools help us get the word out that's great and I think that I learned certainly from you last week that you're kind of a techno geek yourself and up and you're kind of in the social media thing with the cameras that take pictures automatically when it's time to update the scene of the state Capitol for example and so you are very well-tuned Hank is a good example of a person who's well-tuned to using those social media those means of communication we got to think about that as well but you know the concept of public safety and law enforcement and such one of the discussions that came up at Primo last week was with our own State University of Hawaii policing organization and the observation was that the University campus is somewhat a microcosm of the island of Oahu or any island here all the things that you have to think about from public safety are present they're just concentrated in the campus and there's boundaries and so why not think of the the University public safety organization as a beta test area where ideas and development and concepts can come together and and also in full transparency with all the issues of expectation of privacy and protection of civil rights and retaining information for custody reasons and all that sort of thing all the things that are required in the big world can be looked at in the small world and they're the same problem we can solve them there quickly and not have necessarily all the protocols and such necessary external so we're thinking about that Hank and we welcome your thoughts on that on that subject in terms of again using a campus structure as the framework for evolving some of these protocols and concepts in fact I mean it's take to our own advertisement here a little bit just I think if Zurich and flip through these just to show you where we are Hank we're way down up the learning curve from where you are this is the beginning of our our segment of unmanned air systems testing we had get some funding from legislature got the people together we are collecting the capabilities that exist in lava threat reef health management maritime awareness marine sciences and power grid inspection where we have capability today and we think that's like the center point of our of our technical capability we have to align that with the available ideally private lands are much more useful than public lands in terms of getting space for testing and training as such which we started we actually have the university itself as well as some farms and we have the entire island level and I available to us so this is kind of where we're going down that path if we could take that frame and think of how the campus of public safety situation needs to be needs to be developed and demonstrated in terms of UAS participation in it in that physical context that's what we one of things we'll be thinking about here but your thoughts are on on a campus as a place to develop these concepts for for us again Ted we we're with the engineering department at A&M are in you at the Texas A&M University system we have lots of folks in there the engineering experimental station engineering extension service as well as the transportation institute our veterinary organization and one or two others and pretty much everyone in the system when we started looking around us at who was doing what with drones and unmanned aircraft systems we sort of put a call out it turns out that there's all kinds of people within our organization who are doing it so as a result of that our risk management folks put together a protocol for the for the system on how are you going to handle that and how we get a handle on who was flying what win and where and one of the things we've done is set up a policy that requires registration for anybody who's going to use unmanned aircraft systems whether it's for business purposes for research purposes or even if they're doing it for recreational purposes they have to be registered on campus or off campus so if they own them and they're planning on using them we're asking them to register them and tell us there's a checklist of things that we ask for but by doing this we found that we get them to come to us and then we can tell them things that they may not know like what the rules are the campus is within five miles most of the campuses within five miles of our local airport which you know basically is restricted area a lot of people don't know that the other side of it is we get a lot of students we've got roughly 60,000 plus students on campus and they're easy to these the drones are easy to find easy to buy students are buying them and they're putting them up we had one student that actually did a nice video overhead video of the campus great footage and he put it out on YouTube to you know turn around and have the system administration come to them and say hey you know it's illegal you're not allowed to do that but but but where I was headed with all of this is we put that in place and we're trying to get a hold on who's doing what but we've got folks doing research our transportation guys are using them for for all kinds of things related to road networks and accident forensics inspections we have our agricultural guys are using them for precision ag we the railroads using them powerline inspections we basically we got people doing using them for all sorts of things so your idea of using a campus as a place where you can explore where it can go and what kind of rules you need the corral I think this is probably a pretty good one we'll give that a try and in fact you're bringing some ideas up Josh we got to think about May we have our annual UAS conference in May at UH and it's a month away from next month so where it's like six weeks away seven weeks away we got AUDSI in the middle of that so there's not much time and I think we could take a lot of what Hank's done as the structural of how how this works within the UA system we're similar we have the the main campuses on the islands we have the community colleges we have a similar political lay down in that regard we don't I don't think have the maturity of connectivity that Hank's talking about but we could certainly think of that as a model and and certainly we can hang invite Hank to come on to our conference by Skype if not by real and that'll be sometime in May Hank out here but I like the idea that you're using the extension service using you're using the extension services and the connections that already exist you're not making new connections you're using the framework that exists in the university and just adding some discipline to it and some responsibility and some reporting just because UAVs are a more complicated system than other technical systems might be they're not the same thing as 3d printers for example where it's a different level of of care is required and this takes me back to just last week we were out there you know where we were we were right adjacent to the departure end of 08 at Dillingham airfield we were legally 10 in 10 feet away whatever the road width is because the field boundary is at the road we were on the ocean side of the road so we're talking about some work out there and you know we could we could play the game of it's just plain old class G airspace and we'll do what we have to do but we really should probably take a higher level of care just because we are it's class G but only class G by 10 feet for example so this the concept of that you're bringing up of thinking the thing through and having protocols and procedures that make and ensure a safe operation is our first experiment will be right there a locally yeah and in fact we should I would like to reflect back what we're doing at locally to you Hank and get you to see what you was thinking about it and let me give you one other thing that I didn't mention another thing that we're doing we we set up a working within the system and we required that each department identified individual who's going to be their UAS coordinator or point of contact and once they identified these people we actually sent them there there this week they're going through a a four-day course that we put together that provided them an overview on unmanned aircraft systems what the rules are what the regulations are we sort of train them up in some of the protocols and then they're going back to their organization so anything and anybody in the organizations that's using drones for any purposes if they have questions they need to know where we are on anything all of that they go to their coordinator and the coordinator can bring issues to the larger working group hopefully they're all going to be familiar with basic rules and they can talk to their people about what the rules are if you're doing them recreationally how high they can fly if you're using them for research you know what kind of things you need to do so that's that's another tool that we're using to to corral this whole process that's really great in fact if we had that in place ourselves we can take our our locally in Dillingham operation and turn to chapter 7 and there would be all laid out so we'll keep back and forth on this Hank we we managed to run our time right into the ground here and want to thank you very much for coming on there's so much you've provided to us and so much guidance and structure that I really want to think more about and we'll go work with you on so Hank thanks a lot again and well we'll get Jerry on from Lone Star at a future time here and get the specifics on the actual operations but we got together a long way to go thank you very much and we'll find some way to get you involved in our conference out here in May all right thank you Ted appreciate okay and Josh thanks for coming on and folks we'll see you next Thursday at noon