 Camera three. Dead Rawson here folks, Thursday afternoon downtown Honolulu think textiles when our show where the drone leaves and one of our frequent flyers on this show, a guy who I want to have the audience help us. He's very shy. There's a hard time coming up with ideas and opinions and he's very, very reserved in his expression. I'd like to welcome back Mike Elliott. Can you try to get over that hump this time Mike? I think so, I might be able to. Yeah. Okay, good enough man. Good seeing you out here. Thanks. So we actually were together by accident on Saturday, how does Saturday have to do with where the drone leaves? The drone led us to Hokalea. You were doing some work with a commercial aspect of that, in terms of. Well, Hawaii News, actually no, it was a community service event that we did within Hawaii News Now to share Hokalea's return with the rest of the world. When I happened to be in the water and one of the two men in double canoes, it was unloading people from the incoming voyaging canoes and taking them to the ramps and such. And I tell you, I've read about helicopter noise in Honolulu a lot. I live in Woonward side, so we have our own version of it out there. But I never experienced the skull numbing effect, the turbo machinery noise at 200 feet over your head, like I experienced on Saturday. Right at the very peak of the ceremony and Hokalea arriving, the noise, the helicopter noise got louder. But there was also you out there getting probably better imagery at making no noise at all. But it just struck me that we have this opportunity in front of us here to do something we never perhaps thought of, and that's use drones to help in reducing the noise signature in Honolulu caused by helicopters. We could even penetrate into the purist business in some way, in some intelligent way, and assist in getting that noise footprint down as well. So what are your thoughts on that? I think too on the other side of that too is this ecological impact, DLNR, that's one of the complaints that they make about not allowing drones and state property and parks is the impact upon the ecology of the noise factor. But you already have helicopters that are out there doing tours, so it's for research that they want to do for ecological research and preservation, archaeological research and preservation, low impact, small footprint, low noise, and then the ability to collect a lot of data quickly on site is really where these things are starting to take into their own. And so there's an opportunity here as the next legislative session begins in six months to start having some of these ideas put together in a way that everybody can understand and have a better run through the legislature this year with well thought through, well reasoned, and easily understood legislation that deals with gaining access for drones and identifying their purpose, identifying the users and the owners, and coming up with sort of a standard operating principle in pursuit of that work. It's a simplicity aspect. There's unfortunately, you know, government seems sometimes its purpose is to regulate and to continue to regulate and write bills without necessarily knowing the full impact of what it is that they're doing until it's already enacted into law and then there are excessive restrictions that take forever to roll back. So a thoughtful approach is to engage the community, provide feedback that allows for a system that will work for commercial operations in conjunction with and addressing the concerns that legislators and the community have at large. And that's what we've continued to advocate for. We hope that that is the case because this again and again is going to be a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry. And along with the work that you're doing and then George Purdy, our partner over there on the line, working to secure some possible, some additional support for the test site, you know, is local jobs, local people bringing that right here to Hawaii. So we want to tie a friendly environment for rules and regulations into a new booming industry early on. You know, we had on this show the last three weeks, we had Charles Warner, who is the head of the deputy at the Department of Emergency Management in Virginia, who has a lot to do with how NFPA and the firefighters and the public safety people are beginning to generate standards and user needs for drones. We had Gene Robinson, who's operating in a private way, but the same approach in Texas. And then we had George Purdy on last week talking about how we can perhaps use drones and people own drones in sort of an adjunct with the public safety people, but yet outside the curtain, outside the yellow caution line, but providing a formal service. So these ideas are starting to percolate. And I'll say that for the next three weeks, we've got Joe Williams, who used to run the FAA, UAS integration, Gretchen West, who has a lot to do with the emerging coalitions within the industry, trying to get things right. And then we have Jonathan Ruprecht, supposed to be an interesting conversation. He's all over the regulations area. So I guess a lot of opinions coming up right now in the next couple of three weeks that we collectively, all of us who are part of this, need to think about modeling in some way again, as you're going to echo in what you said, that is community value, return value to Hawaii and in several ways, and something that the legislature can grab on to and find. So we've got to do that together. Oh, and definitely. And I think part of it is an issue of understanding. You know, when you have a new technology that's out there, and I hearken back to reading stories about when automobiles were first introduced. And you read the ridiculous rules that were out there and the stories that were published. And it just was a lack of understanding as to, this is a new technology into a horse and buggy world. And it was a difficult initial integration, but it was also an understanding issue. I'll let every state legislator know here in the state of Hawaii, if you want a demonstration of this type of capability at the time and place of your choosing, our staff is more than willing to support you on any island, and we will sit down with you and talk with you and show you everything that these things can and cannot do. The cannot do's are usually the things that people are most concerned about. And then when they realize how innocuous that some of this capability really is, then they start to understand the realm of where they're used, how they are used, and not just for hobbyists, but also in commercial operations. Like we just talked about fire, police and other agencies that are looking to use these in large part for safety aspect. And we tell people sometimes, if you think about this as a one life saved kind of aspect and using this type of technology in different areas. A lot of your fears and concerns kind of go by the wayside, because one life saved in a new type of technology that's introduced may actually sway you and make you a believer in what this stuff can do. Your idea about a collective demonstration of some kind with a lot of hands on it is great. In fact, we had the thing that you sponsored a couple of years ago up in Manoa, up at Paradise Park up there, the first gathering of the drone professionals of Hawaii, right? And then why not think of October? That's a little bit before the legislative decision begins is a good time. And maybe actually there's so much going on in October, maybe November is the right time. But in fact, we had that summit at the state capital last October. I don't know if it's going to happen again, but we could think of an outdoor version of that. I say we just go right out on the lawn there. On the capital lawn, we get plenty of time to plant it right now. We just do some basic flight and we show folks really what these things are about and how help to alleviate some of their concerns. And in the meantime, we work with the standards people that are as the standards activities building up and have that story complete. I believe that a senator or a rep from Minnesota started some kind of a legislative framework for drones activity in Congress just this week. Have you read about that? A little bit, but there is a, what part of that bill that they're discussing is basically allowing, and this is where it all falls off, falls apart here, is allowing state, city, county, who knows, homeowners association to draft rules for everything below 200 feet. Well, that doesn't work. And if the FAA had to deal with a system where they controlled everything above 18,000 feet, which is where class alpha airspace and commercial airliners fly and everything, that everything below 18,000 feet fell under the same type of jurisdictional mishmash stew, it would never work. You could never get from point A to point B because every time you crossed another boundary, you would have to abide by a different set of rules. You know, to that point, a good thing we could take on, let me just suggest here to this thing we're going to create now in November for all of our friends in the legislature and any of the public agencies that want to participate, we ought to take on the, think of the future situation five years from now, when there's 500 drones operating in delivery service in Honolulu. Exactly how are we going to do that? I think that's true. You know, NASA's got the UTM program, but that may or may not be certified at the end of the day. It hasn't gotten to that point yet. So if we took on and thought of ourselves, this larger group we represent, how would we handle high drone traffic in Hawaii, in Honolulu, for that matter, and have that kind of a thought process on the table and start opening the door? Right. So the testing that's going on and once again coming back to the UAS test site, you know, over on Lanai and, you know, George working very hard with the folks at the University of Alaska to get some of these first few events, you know, up and running and with the University of Hawaii, there's an opportunity to test those types of technologies and those fail safes associated with those technologies to turn these into proven systems. The state's already very interested in allowing driverless cars on the road with no, I don't hear anybody crying or complaining or any concerns at all about driverless cars, which I think the incidents or the, you know, where an incident or accident could occur and actually kill somebody. Well, I want to compliment you. You seem to have gotten over your shyness and unwillingness to bring up controversial ideas. Yeah. That's kind of gone away. It's a show. It's your jet. Yeah. But those kind of ideas, you know, sure, yeah, driverless cars, no problem without a second thought. And so if you're willing to accept those types of technologies where you're putting, you know, a 4,000 pound vehicle on the road traveling at 65 miles an hour with nobody at the wheel on each one or any back road here in Hawaii, then, you know, it's not that far a leap to accept something that's in the air that does have a user interface and control. But at some point in the future, too, like you're talking about with delivery, will be an autonomous type of system. It'll fly from point A to point B, deliver the product and return. You need pizza on Super Bowl Sunday. Well, guess what? You know, Domino's is delivering. You know, that's what they're working on. So you're using an outline to problem statement for the high level of this activity in November. Now, let's take a look at what you brought here to the table because people also probably aren't familiar with how fast the technology is emerging. And what you've got here is a really interesting miniature system, Mike. So this is a DJI Mavic, puts in one of the skins that they have on there. You can actually just wrap it normally. That's not how you fly it, right? No, no. So it folds up and it fits in a small bag. We brought this out for the demonstration we did for the Philippine and Indonesian delegation at the, over at Diamond Head, Crater the other day for the HADR discussion that we had. And we're basically trying to show them that, you know, you can have some low cost, lightweight, semi-disposable, I say semi-disposable because of cost, you know, something where it happened. Technology that can actually provide you some really great data and information. So what you have here is the drone itself with, let me put it back here. There we go, we can see that better. Rated at about 27 minute flight time, range, range out of, it said, you know, about four miles, but you know, right now you're still limited line of sight, but what that really means is you've got good signal. So you've got radio comms out to four miles. Good, yeah, you'll have good control signal. And you have a live video feed back to you. Back to your cell phone, I might add. Right, so it runs a little basically. You take this apart. The cell phone comes out. Yeah, take your phone back, but you run an app on the phone itself. You have a display up here that'll have information on it also. And you have the control features that are right here. So it's extremely portable. What we were discussing was the ability to empower people in local communities to be first responders in natural disaster instances. So if you, in countries like Indonesia and Philippines, if they had a budget to distribute technology throughout the provinces in various remote locations, work to train people to be those first responders. How about in Hawaii? How about in Waimanalo? Can we do it right here? Yeah. That they could actually provide that information back to larger entities within the government or when international agencies begin to show up, that they've already collected data. They could map areas and provide that. Here you go. Here's my memory card. I made a map the other day for you. I knew you were coming. What's intriguing to me about this, and we'll take a break and come back to this after a bit, but what's really intriguing to me here is how miniaturized these systems are getting and how simple they're getting. So the fear factor that many people have of getting into something with a lot of switches on it and a lot of gains to adjust and such, it's gone. Yeah. Well, we had that Philippine general, and he wanted to fly. So he flew this, and I was letting him fly there for a little bit and just kind of watching over him and keeping a close eye, make sure he was good. And then he wanted to land it. So we sat there. I just talked to him. He realized how quickly, how forgiving the controls were, and he landed it within probably about six, eight inches of where I told him to put it with no problem. And he was very surprised at how forgiving and easy the technology was. So for him to do that first time kind of helped him realize that maybe this is something that is simple and easy to learn. So now it's time to start taking that to our own communities here. Let's talk about that when we get back from our break. Sure. Sounds good. Aloha. My name is Raya Salter, and I'm the host of Power Up Hawaii, which you can see live from 1 to 130 every Tuesday at thinktechhawaii.com and then later on YouTube. I am an energy attorney, clean energy advocate, and community outreach specialist. And on Power Up Hawaii, we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future? To do that, we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum, from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility. So please join us Tuesdays at one o'clock for Power Up Hawaii. We're back folks. Ted Rawson here and our guest, Mike Elliott. Mike, welcome on board again. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. And then your little friend here. We're just talking before the break about how straightforward and easy to operate. Cell phone simple, you might say. These are becoming, in fact, you might think of this drone you've got here, the DJI Mavic as a cell phone app. It's got a cell phone bolted to it, and it's the cell phone tells it what to do. But with respect to cell phone, it receives the information down from the Mavic. It does. It gives you some information. It does. And it actually downloads a cache of some of this video and photo of your shots that you haven't instantly available to share out. So you could send a low res quality photo or video to somebody as long as you had cell connectivity at some point. These types of systems, too, are used in disaster relief or actually putting some stuff airborne, too. One of our UH researchers is using this exact piece of equipment to do inshore, coral, and sand bottom monitoring out in Guanaju Bay. So it's starting to happen. These things are getting so competent and so capable and affordable, you can now see your way through to get them in a lot of people's hands because they're more trustworthy in the sense of the people's confidence to use them. And so we were staying before the break about how to get a staff of these business capability out there in the citizens' hands here in other countries to generate information when anything has to be observed, a natural disaster, a fire, or something like that. And as long as we could have some standard that the people perform to and have some means by which the information is tagged for its time and date or its latency or that sort of thing. And provide it across the barrier to where the professional first responders, the professional public safety people are, and have an interface that would connect in. What's wrong with that? Nothing, and I think you had some folks on just earlier when I first came in from the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, got it right the first time. There we go. That's the first time anybody has ever pronounced NDPTC correctly. But some of what they're trying to work on in a hear but also overseas is, like I said, this concept of empowerment of local communities with technology. A lot of countries skip landlines in developing countries around the world. So you'll go to a lot of places overseas and try to find a landline phone or a phone on a street corner. Good luck. They just went straight to cell phones because that was really the first mass introduction to phone technology. So they skipped a generation. You can see some of that also, possibly, with this type of technology in the support of disaster relief and search and rescue, humanitarian aid type situations, where for the military, when we show up in an international incident in support with the Marine Corps taking the lead here with Mar-4PAC in the Pacific, we spend time setting ourselves up so that we have a place to eat, a place to sleep, we can refuel, and where are we storing everything before we distribute it out? That's a period of days. So heavy footprint, too. It's a big footprint. It's a period of days before we're actually in mass supporting the community that's affected. So initial first responders at a lower level in the communities with low cost systems could actually provide a very valuable asset when the first responders do show up that they have information that they can hand over. I map this out. Here's some photos of the fuel facility that's damaged. The dam is broken. The roads are washed out. And so they have this information that they can act on instantly. Satellites don't get re-tasked right away, either, like they do in the movies. 30 days. It takes time, and that's money, also. Also, it's a 1-meter resolution. Yeah, on some of them. So that's an issue, too. So they don't get tasked right away to instantly support within hours. There's competition for their tasking to face that. Yeah, true. And they have priority in who pays and everything, yeah. And then also you have other large UAV assets and stuff. But once again, they have to be brought to bear. They have to have a place to take off and land from, a mission to fly. What are they collecting? So there's an intermediary ground here that allows maybe a local community to begin looking for lost people, find lost livestock. Livestock is life. Boats in water-borne communities and stuff. Boats are life. You live or die by the fact that you can fish or that you can transport family to a hospital because the only way to get there is by boat. Being able to rebuild your home by collecting materials that were blown away or washed away and finding where this stuff is at, any way to expedite that. And this is maybe one way that that could begin to happen in Indonesia, Philippines. It'd be cool to start right here. All of our island communities around the periphery, Haulu, Waimanalo, Kailua to a certain extent, they're all one way in, one way out. And if we ever lose one of those roads, which we do in time to time, we get some period of time before that transportation channel is going to be fixed. So if we took the fact that these systems are becoming very simple and are becoming a higher trust level as a result and found a way to gather together the people who want to participate and get them to a common level of training and appreciation of their role and the safety aspects, give them a Hunter's Safety Card equivalent, thanks George Birdie for that idea. And then operate them once a month in an exercise or once every two months, something like that to keep things fresh, figure out how we're going to distribute information who's going to receive it and how it's going to be archived and such. Well, you have an organization that kind of does something like that now, it's called the Civil Air Patrol. Right, so the Civil Air Patrol can assist and has been called on the mainland and other places to provide additional aircraft and looking for downed aircraft ground personnel to support that. But they're not a government agency or entity at all, but they are trained in that process and are volunteer pilots that work for the Civil Air Patrol. So in some aspect, they've kind of pioneered a way to do that and interact with federal and local authorities in an incident that has occurred. And here at Hawaii, we have the CERT teams, which are kind of a national standard. And we have the H-H-A-R-P, the Hawaii Hazardous Awareness Response Teams. And so there's a budding organization in very strong and certain communities like Manawa, where the power is there, the interest is there, and the ability to provide senior leadership is there. But you've got to do it. In fact, Manawa, Helen Nakano up in Manawa has asked for that kind of support to Manawa. So I think it's reasonable to extend this invitation to the larger network of UAS affiliates here in Hawaii, at least in Oahu, and come up with a couple of options of how we might go, how we might do this. Definitely. And similar to amateur radio, the ARRL was created for this reason 150 years ago. So on this thought process in line right here, too, the other thing that you've got to consider, when you're in the military, there's all these great ships and airplanes and weapons you wish you had. Oh, they're developing this. But if something happens, you fight with the force you have. You fight with the people that you have, the training that you've done, the ships, aircraft, ground personnel, that's all you got. So if an incident were to occur tomorrow, say God forbid, there's a tsunami that washes ashore somewhere here in Hawaii, we can't wish for what we would like to have in the future. We've got to go with what we have now. So in some degree, expediting these programs and getting off a top dead center and stop talking about it and start doing it to make sure that it is available as a resource is really where we need to go. Because we've had this discussion for quite some time, you know, over the course of the past couple years, and slow progress has been made, but we really need to get off top dead center and turn it into something that's actionable. Let's take that to the November time period as a part of the demonstrated capability we can provide to the legislature to give them both the understanding and the touch and feel aspects of it, also the real value that comes from this kind of a thing in a citizen environment. Now I'll go back to the very beginning of the show. I'd like to think of the fact that the noise footprint in Honolulu will come down if we can start displacing manned helicopters with UABs for the various reasons we can. And as to the point you made, I think our wildlife and forest and fauna in the deep valleys would be very happy to have less helicopter traffic going in and disturbing them. In low impact, used by DLNR and other agencies, USGS. For lots of reasons, we're kind of turning the corner here it seems, and I think we have the obligation to go push that around the corner and get a good story in front of the legislature in November on the capital grounds with a multi-faceted hands-on demonstration of petting zoos, so to speak, for the future review AS. Mike will do it. Glad to do it. We'll keep talking about it though, because this show is all about talk. We're going to make it happen. Let's make it happen. Mike, thanks for coming on again. Thanks. You bet.