 New Non-Thursday folks, Ted Rolston here, joined by Josh Levy in our studio, St. Tech Hawaii overlooking downtown Honolulu on a bright and clear Thursday and joining us today for our show where the drone leads, we have Charles Werner standing by in his place in Virginia. Charles, are you there? I'm here. There you go. Okay. And what's cool is that the sun hasn't set in Virginia yet. It hasn't set here, so we've got the whole country bathed in bright sunshine right now. And it looks unusual to see a guy as casually dressed as that in Virginia. We normally think of you guys in coats with slurry and sleet and snow and frozen rain in the gutters running around, but it's actually summertime, apparently. It is, and we just recently had some tornadoes. Okay. Perfect thing for a guy in disaster management to worry about and think about. But it looks like the trees are starting to leaf out, so spring isn't that far away, Charles. That's right. Thanks for coming on the show. This is a really important time in our world of drones. We have a drone on the table here to make sure that we don't ever lose sight of the fact it shows about drones, but the whole issue of requirements and standards and user needs is through your efforts and others, but I think primarily yours is starting to come into focus here. And people are starting to pay attention to the fact that we need to have some form of self-managed regulation in order to go forward in an orderly fashion here and serve the country well. And it looks like folks do not adjust your set. We've got a technical outage here. Charles, can you hear us? We just lost a video. I'm here. Okay. You give it back out again. All right. So tell us about what you do, Charles, in the Virginia State Department of Emergency Management, how that relates to drones and how that led you into this whole world of drone standards. Well, first, I started pursuing drones when I was the Fire Chief in Charlottesville, Virginia, and that was in 2014. Unfortunately, as most people remember, the rules and regulations from the FAA were not very friendly at that time. So unfortunately, by the year 2015 when I retired from the Charlottesville Fire Department, I was unable to get a U.S. program in place because of those rules. It wasn't really until 2016 when the rules changed that we were able to move up and start taking advantage of that. And specifically about the rules, it was kind of interesting because prior to the rule changes, you had to either be a pilot or you had to go through ground flight school in order to be able to fly an unmanned aircraft system. But then when the FAA changed their law, not their law, but the rule that said government agencies could self-certify, that was both good and bad. It meant that we could now take control of our own destiny, but it really didn't give us a reference standard to go by to say when we had actually done enough to train the remote pilots to do it safely in a way that we could actually have it something to measure against. And then the Part 107 rules came out in August and the question was what do we do now in self-certification? Do we do Part 107? Do we not do Part 107? So then it became a quagmire of we're going to get a COA and now we in Virginia decided that we're going to require, as far as the Emergency Management Office, to require all of our remote pilots to be Part 107 certified because that's the only reference that's out there now that ensures we understand national airspace. Along the same time, the National Fire Protection Association decided they wanted to move forward in helping to develop standards for public safety remote pilots, the visual observer, and the standards of requirements of what you're going to have if you did a program, making sure that people realize when they decide to do UAS that they really know what they're going to. And that means making sure that we have done everything we can as far as documentation, training, proficiency, maintenance records, and all the things that go along with what we know as remote pilots require. And so I was asked to serve as the Chair of that committee and it happens to be the first technical committee from the National Fire Protection Association that's actually multi-discipline. So we actually have fire, law enforcement, EMS, emergency manager, search and rescue, and all those people on it to really help define the standards in this new arena of public safety. So that's the one thing that's happened. In addition to that, I've been asked to serve on an SAE committee, which is also developing a different type of standard for remote pilots and I can't really frame that out for you as to what that looks like right now, but it'll be covering some other aspects of doing that. And then I think you've seen some of the documentation where ANSI actually had a meeting May 19th in Washington DC that really pulled together all of the standard agencies. That was ASTM, NFPA, SAE, of course the ANSI folks, and a list of others to really start capturing what's being done in the area of standards for unmanned aircraft systems such that we can actually be complimenting one another and not competing in the standards world because if you have multiple standards then it gets questionable as to which ones do we decide to use. That's a really, obviously an interesting question as to how to have the standards represented by a broad base but also agreed upon by a broad base, but there may be a lot of differences regional for example. When you mentioned NFPA, I'm thinking back to the days of before the U.S. had a national fire code, different cities, different counties, different states that have different thread and coupling diameters and thread patterns on the hydrants. So the fire poses from one county wouldn't fit the hydrants from the other county, couldn't work together. So something very straightforward and simple like that is gigantically more complex in the world of drones. And Josh thinks in the world of the analysis aspects that the products that come from analysis of digital elevation models, disaster models of structures and such and even that is going to require a lot of harmonization and coordination in order to produce standards that are transferable from one to the other. What do you think about that, Josh, in terms of the standards of standards of analysis? Exactly. So it's not only just standards of analysis but the standards of those sensors too. So you know if you're going out there with, you know, if an organization has six different cameras that they're using they may all have, you know, different resolutions, all these different things that you can have to then, you know, kind of try and figure out afterwards during the analysis period. That's just going to take you more time. So if you have a way to standardize all those cameras and do all the exact same then you can kind of take that extra step out of the workflow to get your products done faster. So a sort of an integration between different kinds of sensors with interface definitions as such. And if our good friend Phil Meliovery, who you haven't met yet, I don't think Charles was with us here on the on the show, he would tell us even the archiving world requires some form of standards. In fact the archiving world in his experience in the Coast Guard may be the most expensive part of all this and the most complicated part. So this is, Charles you've inherited quite a task and you've inherited this three times. You've done it for an FBA, you're doing it for the the new organization that's been created to represent the public safety people and you do it for the state of Virginia. So you got, you're embedded in this thing, Charles. And once people learn you know something they all come after you to help share it. It's such an immature market that your experience just is asked to be used in multiple ways. If you start with just the NFPA piece, even getting that bunch together because we have wildland fire people, we have structure fire people, there's grasslands, there's oil fires, there's hazmat type issues, there's so many issues involving fire. How has, as an example, how has that progressed in terms of getting people to come up with standards or even suggest what standards might be? Well now I add into that not only the all those different firefighters but law enforcement, EMS, emergency management and search and rescue. So what we decided to tackle was what are the fundamental operations that a remote pilot's going to do that's going to be common to all of them? So the first thing we started off with was your takeoff, your landing, your flights, to create some of the basic fundamentals to start with and then what we'll do is over time we'll continue to refine that into the more of the specialization type thing. So you might have wildfire where they're talking about using them to do backfires and there may be some other things of different types of spectral, multi-spectral cameras, LiDAR. So we're not doing everything at once so we agreed that we would all work on the common areas that would be every single remote pilot and then we would find more details and go forward. That's interesting. So you've worked from the operational perspective what has to happen regardless of what the sensor or the payload analysis might be. That's really, we could take, we could come at that from the other direction, the common product orientation and think of that side of it as well and the two could meet in the middle somewhere. That's exactly right. I think the other issue that we have is just what you all were talking about before. We want eventually there to be third-party sensors and payloads that we can utilize regardless of the unmanned aircraft vehicle frame and that's where we create this common interface and that comes back to standards so that we actually have the versatility and it doesn't matter hopefully which particular technology we choose for to be able to take the payload. That's sort of a that that leads back almost to the instant command system. In fact one of the questions that we have out here and it would be interesting to hear your feedback is exactly where do drones fit within the ICS structure. There's some who have opined that they fit within the air system currently under the air boss or whatever the air ops domain might be in ICS. Others have said no it fits more in the intelligence side or the situation side the information side maybe the planning side. What have you seen there in terms of a best practice in terms of how drones fit into the ICS? Well I think it actually fits in a couple different places. One I think it has to fit into planning because you have to plan exactly what it is you want to do as far as the mission. So there is a planning component but once it goes into the operations area the con ops then it has to be under the operational command and in this case my personal opinion while it still hasn't been totally addressed would be under an air branch or something similar because in the past we we've had air operations only in limited cases unless you're in wildfire. Wildfire has has a more obvious or more often medical helicopters those types of things but now we're potentially seeing air operations on almost every significant incident and not only with one drone but multiple drones because multiple agencies can be coming in for multiple levels of government which raises another question of some standardization and this is another topic that we can talk about another time but UAS traffic management. As you think about these things then we have the various forms of FAA notifications such as the one that we just talked about last week of the the the web-based notification that your flight plan has been accepted which is supposed to be out at the end of the year there's so much new ways of compiling information and passing it out it's uh and when you mentioned air traffic integration that's just a whole other domain here beyond well beyond the emergency management side. I think I said it this morning it's dead. And also in software on Josh's side over here and products that we create for the and state user we have the user not quite sure how to define what those products might be we have the operations that needs to respect the fact that UAVs have to be associated with the air ops if there is air ops but as you point out in some cases there may not be air ops so they may not have been kicked off yet so you have you could very well have UAS operations occur prior to the formal air boss and air operations apply and then on the other end as the thing comes down you might have the UAF stand down before the major air ops stands out there's there's phasing here that we have to think of and then there's you bring up there's air traffic integration because we're all done everything wants to go back to base somewhere. Yeah and what I think what we're seeing too is is there is actually there's a misconception that if you have an air asset up in the sky a fixed wing or a helicopter that that gives you the same kind of visual that you get from a from an unmanned aircraft system and it's not necessarily true sometimes the resolution the video the other things that you come from UAS can be a lot closer it can be a lot more refined and we have actually had a fixed wing a helicopter and an unmanned aircraft system flying simultaneously and there really isn't that much difficulty in doing as long as you make sure you continue to deepen the airspace. Let's talk about that airspace integration and then one more bigger topic that goes beyond all is education and the kind of certifications you do for your people in virginia after we get back from our our single break in the show. We'll be back in one minute. A sign that designated driver. Hello folks, Ted Ralston, Josh Levy in our studio downtown Honolulu Think Tech in our show where the drone leads and our unbelievable guest on this portion of the show, Charles Warner of many affiliations and disaster management UAS operations national fire prevention association, ANSI, AUVSI and it goes on from there. Welcome back, Chuck. Charles I should say it's it's natural to drop to do that to you. Anyway we were talking about a really complicated subject as the first part of the show went forward there. I think we'd like to get you on at other times here and talk about more elements of this whole concept of UAS in the standards world emerges and evolves but the education aspect that that comes to mind is something that has to capture all of this that is education we do in our schools elementary schools in the workforce development area in the university. We have a training program here for example at University of Hawaii dealing with UAS in agriculture. It really ought to look similar to the UAS in environmental operations or disaster management to the extent there is as you point out a common aspect that is the very common thing the flight planning the launching and the recovery of UAS but education we've also hit the point where we're out of UAS pilots here in this state if the power company wants one more UAS qualified pilot to their level of qualifications we don't have any and so we're going to have to generate workforce development training that leads to pilots as well as analysts and designers. Tell us about the certification program you put together in Virginia. We know there's one in Virginia is one in Texas but we're going to need to do something like that out here and maybe you need to make a trip out here Charles Shirley and help us out. Well that seems to be the invitation I'm getting a lot a lot of different public services. What we did is we actually was interesting that one of the instructors a person one of the friends of mine who's in the National Guard and I had gone to our community college separately and unbeknownst to each other and requested that the community college think about doing a program to train remote pilots. He was looking at it just from a standpoint of a job or an employment opportunity I was looking at it from a public safety perspective we kind of put our heads together and created one of the first emergency responders for unmanned aircraft vehicles courses and what that did basically started off with giving classrooms today the first day being actual airspace the second day being the technology of unmanned aircraft vehicle itself and payloads and day three with indoor flying and day four and five were actually scenario-based flying depending on who the students were so we actually allowed the customization of that to be dependent on who was in the class so it was law enforcement we might do an active shooter situation if it was a hazmat individual we might do a hazmat situation and so on and that kind of gave us that experiential learning and a chance to test it out so that becomes a week-long program right and you provide the equipment for the students they have to do some pre-reading or pre-studying and some kind I'm sure when they they're not going to get get a 107 out of that so they're going to have to do something else to get themselves qualified with the FAA is that right yes and now I don't want to necessarily give away an advertisement for anybody but we found an online program that is very good video very affordable affordable price which you can work at your own pace and by the time you get done with this class I guarantee you will be prepared to take part 107 in Virginia so we're actually to use that as our prerequisite from this point forward for all of our people who wish to be remote pilots because it does cover so many bases all the national airspace so now we get into it it's more of us talking about the operational aspects and applying okay so that's great because the 107 gives you once again a common standard a common understanding of air ops and air sensitivity as such and once that's in place now you can build the the actual operation on that on that base of knowledge so um so sorry can I jump in so after these so after these no this is your shut head so after these firefighters and has met people have gone and gone through your week training you know what does that put them on the on the scale of you know can they go out the next day and start conducting operations or you know obviously once they have the 107 but or do they need you know a couple of more weeks to just kind of training themselves once they already have the background knowledge that's where the next level is defining per your agency the level of proficiency that you want to have until such time at standards in place so there are no standards currently to tell you what that's supposed to be and for the time being you're going to have to make that and make that up on your own as to individual agencies organizations uh and that's that's the point of and the reason why the standards become so necessary so if you use the NFPA standards as a reference um just much like fire apparatus we have different levels of fire so you take the basic course of apparatus operations but then you you take individualized classes as you go up in complexity so an engine operator will have one certification an aerial operator becomes different certification so the same thing would be applicable in the area of unmanned aircraft systems as you go up in size scale complexity that would require another proficiency certification if you will to allow you to fly those things so for now you're kind of on your own to make it up but you you kind of there are a lot of best practices out there from other departments you can talk to Austin Texas I think there's some North Dakota departments um York County Virginia has a share of fire combination they've got a lot of policies and procedures and and training requirements so that's the other part of the national council's purpose is to create a website that provides access to information on that public safety uas.org that we're in the process of adding a portal to so that you can actually go find the best practices the policies the procedures what other departments are doing and help to expedite that process for you that's right so two two big subjects in that conversation in response to Josh's question one is the national council for uas in public safety which you are the chair of and we need to have you describe that a little bit more to us and also the fact that a staged and graduated entrance into the game would be what you get after you graduate from one of these classes so and your example of other apparatus you certainly wouldn't put a recent graduate in charge of a airplane or a fire truck right up front you learn in the right seat before you go let's see so that's that's really all great models for us to think about tell us about the national council a little bit and how we can get involved with that well first of all anybody can get involved it's uh we now have I think 33 organizations which include almost all the national public safety organizations including the the the AOPA which is the pilots association we now brought on the national association or state aviation officers because we want to be able to do integration at airports and so we need to have those people on board but what it does is we're going to set up different committees that people can participate in so you can become an associate member as far as your organization you can become an individual member work on committee work but the whole idea is we we understand and realize this is such an immature market that there's very little experience the point was we've seen everybody reinventing the wheel and it was time that we started sharing not only between uh the common public safety disciplines but across the disciplines between fire police, EMS, search and rescue, emergency management, all the different players and academia so that we can actually say how do we want to be training people what do we want it to look like what are the policies and procedures so that we're not all doing the same thing over and over again that's we also learned from the FAA that they said you know it would be great if we had this one collective that could bring the ideas forward otherwise we have 33 agencies that are all bringing different ideas forward they're all similar but a little bit different so it makes it harder to get that single message this this gives us one single voice that actually gives an amplification of what it is we're looking for and then hopefully to develop as you all mentioned earlier some of those requirements that say we want these third party censors to be able to be interchangeable amongst that and that we as public safety aren't going to buy it unless it has so that's that's part of how this all comes together and we start getting a collective idea and start working things to make it better so you're kind of becoming the underwriters laboratory or the consumer reports orientation in terms of the the particular world of on-man air systems entering into public safety I obviously have a lot of research to do Josh we got to get on the website and got to join and we got to start participating you know Charles the issue of requirements that that never ends and I'm sure you know how you're here am I telling you that but one that intrigues me is that of dependability or dependence that is when a fireman depends on his Scott air pack or when a policeman depends on his uh on his motor over radio there's a certain expectation of its performance as we start depending on on-man air systems to perform critical missions a disinformation collection may be a critical mission communication relay dropping off medicines as time goes on that sort of thing we're going to have to establish some reliability and uh and beyond safety functional reliability that systems are going to have to achieve has that arrived at the discussion level within either NFPA or the ANZ activity yet I think that's what everybody is really hitting at is they realize that if we if we use the military model you've seen that very quickly the unmanned aircraft system becomes a mission critical component so we can we can anticipate that is going to be happening and and so we are going to have preparing for that in fact I met with dhs today and and dhs was basically saying this the department of homeland security that there's three things that we really have to be concerned about and that's safety security and reliability and so that does come into the standard process of making sure we've covered all three of those bases safety security and reliability yes okay three flags fly over the uas capital here that's great I can't personally thank you enough for what you're doing all this time you're spending all this leadership you're contributing to these multiple organizations and the insight you bring for it I wish we could I wish you had an rs-232 plug we could plug in and get some of that flowing out this way we'll have to do that by getting you on an airplane getting you out here sometime we have activities with the national guard coming up before the hurricane season very shortly we have activities with some sports events that are of international scale that are going to be asking for assistance and support i'd like to take the opportunity to relay those back to you as as we get them developed for your feedback of course we can't ask for you everybody else is asking for you 24 hours a day we can't add too much to that but we'll load you up child and and get as much assistance going back your way from our experience out here which probably is different in the tropics we have salt water incursion for example in circuit boards which may or may not be a factor in virginia but what an activity you're leading and it's great that we're finally getting that level of mature leadership in the industry here in terms of getting standards and getting things that will turn this into a reliable and trusted part of the infrastructure and uh josh any thoughts on your part from the analysis side of this and the products that we develop for our users i mean i'm just excited to see where this all leads and seeing you know how we can better you know as we've said you know standardized you know the sensors the analysis protocols even the software that's used to create these products where we're not all comparing contrasting like oh you know i'm using x software and that's going to give me a different product from b software let's just kind of let's take that out of the equation just make sure everything's all standardized so we can you know go about and get building the best results so we can and we have this the other side of that is we have to continue to promote advances in industry in terms of miniaturization higher reliability lower cost and so the standards issue will forever be dealing with new technology coming into it and uh but that's good it's it's time it's got here to 1927 the fAA was created out of a morass of bad stuff going on in the u.s. the fAA got created out of the cAA back in 1970 or there are 65 or so for same reason and now we're doing the same thing for u.s. so it's good that's coming to the front and Charles you're the guy to lead it and we're going to learn as much from you as we can and uh at this point we're going to be signing off at the end of our show and thank you very much Charles Warner in Virginia for sticking with us on on this Thursday and anything we can do for you please let us know and we'll get you back on the show again uh as soon as you want to do it absolutely happy flying okay thanks a lot we'll see you