 think tech away civil engagement lives here it is the two o'clock hour on Tuesday folks Ted Rawson here in our think tech studios downtown Honolulu overlooking my man all the Bay right now in the studio with me here is Josh Lee Beach Josh a long time since you've been on the show all of two weeks right yeah how are you Josh can see you again and one of our faraway members on this on this network is Charles Warner standing by in Virginia Charles you there I'm here glad to be here Ted okay good we got you we have actually a facsimile of you your actual reality is hidden by electronic media right now but we got what looks like a picture of you down here and in my monologue I would guess it looks like to me judging by the mountains in the background the Charles Warner is the director of the very interesting and important organization at the national level these days the I want to say I want to say it right Charles the National Council of Public Safety UAS pretty close okay and what's important about that is the whole aspect of unmanned air systems that we talk about on the show where the drone leads every week really have their their greatest fulfillment in in disaster management in public safety in an operations like that where the work they do can reduce the risk to people that are attempting to act in response and can gather information can gather imagery and can make analyses available to commanders faster with lower risk and a lot lower costs than our conventional methods as Josh Levy who's been starting down that path knows very well but we have with us Charles because we have an event taking place on the island of Hawaii right now the lava flow in Pahoa and Lailani and Kilauea and it's it's the kind of thing that drones or UAS could contribute to the situation we have however is that the our our total use of drones in public safety has not arisen to the point where it's a common activity at this point in time so Charles your organization is seeking to figure out how to make that all seamless and make that successful and satisfactory tell us a little bit how the council got formed and where it's headed and how this current experience we have on the big island right now can be a learning experience heading us in a proper direction here the National Council in Public Safety US is basically comprised of 30 national national organizations of public safety the chiefs of police national sheriffs fire chiefs general or police national emergency managers and a host of other organizations that basically realize that there's a great value of unmanned aircraft systems but there's a lot that we don't know and it's but it's that that not knowing of what you don't know that prevents people from actually being able to utilize unmanned aircraft systems in the way that they could and what we've seen now is as departments across the country in public safety are using public safety US more often there's a lot of success stories and I'll give you one real quick when it was similar situation of a unique situation that occurred and that was the Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse and the Florida Highway Patrol was able to come in they had a drone they waited a little bit before they actually flew but when they actually got permission and decided to fly they were able to do an autonomous flight push the button it goes up does its flight comes back down to create a 3d model of that particular situation and so similar things like that we start seeing that traffic forensics and similar things provide this usage that we can do things in a fraction of the time that it would take to do ground measurements with similar to or for equal to accuracy with a 3d model perspective that now lets you look at it from all different views at a time later to look at things you didn't even know that you wanted to look at so when we think about the Hawaii situation we have a lot of this volcanic activity that has really been never captured in some of these ways before and so being able to use that technology in a lot of different ways one being able to do a 3d model of the fissures and the eruptions a different time increment to see what that looks like now is it changing as well as using groans for the sulfur dioxide monitoring as well as creating both not only the 3d imaging but your digital imaging your mapping and then combine into it your capability of infrared you have this whole array of things that can be done and captured for things that we don't even didn't even know that you want to look at later just because you have the capabilities and what we've seen is while we had some issues of during wildfires we've also seen that a coordination with wildfires means that we can fly in certain areas as long as we're controlling the airspace and we coordinate who's flying where and at what levels you can have unmanned aircraft systems flying at a hundred feet and your aircraft flying at 500 or above which is usually the case so I think that it just opens up so many opportunities of knowing things we don't know from an incident commander standpoint or when we're making decisions on these situations not knowing what we don't know can be the most dangerous situation that we that we're in and now the affordability of being able to fly a drone and if it gets lost let's just say that a projectile from the volcanic ash went up and took one out it's not of such a great danger there's no life danger and it's not as significant value-wise because some of the some of the aircraft that we use is less or expensive and can be disposable just for that very purpose so that that's kind of a kind of a circular mindset of how this all plays and what we're trying to do in the National Council is to start informing people in public safety but not only public safety but into our appointed and elected officials so they understand the value of what this has to offer and in the various a la carte items that you can achieve by having unmanned aircraft systems and that gives you a summary to start that's a great summary and I made a lot of things my mind as you were saying that first of all our HPD and HFT now have COAS here in Honolulu so we have the ability to start executing their beginning their program planning and this sort of thing how do we get them to join your council the bottom line is they can reach out to the council through the emailing me my email is Charles L. Werner at gmail.com and if they have one information or they can go to the website which is public safety uas.org and we have a host of policies and procedures from from local state and federal agencies that have already done this so they can learn from from some of the work that's already been done and we're working to continue to enhance that we're hoping that as we go forward we're able to create a nationwide public safety uas directory where we can then do more collaboration between departments and share best practices lessons learned and those kind of okay so we can certainly pass that information on to them and I think on the academic side we have I think a lot of applications that you've seen here Josh at UH that in terms of analysis methods and this sort of thing and maybe sensor development and that can add to this picture in fact you could add your reef analysis functionality to the story if should there be a marine event event of some kind or even even shark sightings and this sort of thing so talk a little bit about so Charles is aware of what you've been doing in the marine environment sure yeah so so Charles as you're mentioning they're using you know UAV or UAS imagery to go and collect whether it's all the mosaics or three-dimensional point clouds to understand what's happening in your environment now I was applying that just to the marine realm instead and so you know collecting you know very similar types of imagery and doing so in a way that you know with the same benefits that you guys were having versus using manned aircraft you know significant less less dangerous less costs and then you know significantly more efficient as well but yeah I mean so as Ted knows the you know recently graduated PhD Nick Turner down down a down a healer right now is using you know very similar techniques to to you know assess the mapping and the lava flowing as it's going on right now and on on Hawaii Island so what we need to do is figure out how to get UAS involved in exercises that don't have any downside consequence because we're like we are right now with the volcano there's events going on the incident commander has his job to do there's a lot of a lot of confusion there's a lot of complication there's a lot of dynamics going on daily daily there's evacuations there's a SO2 in the air there's all kinds of issues that make you take pause and so sort of stopping and adding a UAS to the system even as good as it may be is sort of automatically rejected by the human nature of the peace people in command who never seen this before so we'll take a break here in a minute Charles but it let's think through together after we get back from this break how we can create some kind of a national event or regional events where in the opportunity to exercise these capabilities within the current command structure along the ESF line exist in fact Josh is going off to JIFIX in a couple of weeks and that's a lot of opportunity there for using that way of thinking as a way to generate these kind of exercises when we get back from our first break here we're back folks it's still the two o'clock hour on Tuesday this is not the noon o'clock hour on Thursday where you normally expecting to see us but Ted Rolston here in our think tech studio downtown Honolulu Josh Levy joining me from Honolua UH and from far across the sea we have Charles Warner the director and chief of the national council for public safety on manned air systems we're just talking before the break about the difficulty of changing that wheels and the cars rolling down the freeway at 40 and as the analogy for putting UAS into a complex situation like over on the big island right now so Chuck or Charles I keep I keep wanting to call you Chuck because that's it just rolls right off but what what can you think of from the perspective of a national acceptance where exercises or tabletops or something can be constructed to have the decision-makers and the incident commanders see this new picture that's a very good point and I think that to really have the effectiveness of unmanned aircraft systems to the to their potential it's going to be identifying the stuff so that people know in advance what's available and how it might be used and so one of the things you kind of hit on this a little bit I think the regional aspect is probably the way to go and in North Carolina they did a tabletop exercise that they combined a tabletop with an actual some activities that were outside flying the drone so that you could see a combination of theory and how it would have been applied in that situation and everybody had a chance to think through it and come up with ideas so that when they now have these assets to utilize they're already putting it in the plan ahead of time so it's not the thinking part it's not trying to understand something it's not trying to learn during a disaster because we all know that when you're trying to learn new stuff during a disaster we already have chaos and trying to learn something new on top of that just creates chaos on top of chaos so having those regional exercises are going to be the way to inform and get people to be thinking about it and then transitioning that into the plan of thinking ahead of we want to have this at what stage who do we have to call to get these resources do we have them local or the regional and and so on and as you mentioned something important to know is that you reference the fire and the police getting your coas in Hawaii here's the important thing to understand is coas also have some limitations so what we always recommend is that the department also have all their pilots qualified or certified as FAA part 107 pilots because then that gives them the full dimension of being able to pretty much fly in almost any situation the coas have some advantages the part 107 has some advantages but you have both and you have the flexibility of doing the best of whichever one is applicable at the time that's right and we'll send you a copy of the course out here so you can take a look at them see how they compared of what you see across the national landscape here I do believe they're tied to the 107 flight limitations and 107 as a as an expectation as your underlying base of knowledge is as part of the of the of the plan so I think exactly as you said is what what they're looking at so some kind of exercises that could be tabletop but I like your idea tabletop inside but but the act but a certain amount of the real activity taking place outside and that's something got to think about jobs we kind of do that at the stadium here talk about the drone boot camp and how that might translate into this this kind of an activity yes that that's actually a really interesting point so so what we what we've been doing here at UH and trying to kind of permeate throughout the the community out here in Oahu is having these these open boot camp you know events where it's just a day where people can come out and start to understand a little bit more about what it means to operate UAS you know various airspace rules and regulations and actually getting out there and flying for a little bit too so using that that kind of half in the classroom half outside kind of kind of a model but the other part of the thing that we're not really talking about here is not only having the emergency responders communicating with each other you know the UAS guys and the non-UAS guys but also having other folks that are capable of providing a service that are you know part of the community volunteers how do we have those public the emergency responders trust those people to come into this into this situation and you know let's Charles that very question is sort of a civil air patrol of drones Charles is that something that's under your hat in this in the council and we're not necessarily civil air patrol but you know the idea was that you get people from elected officials from government agencies from public safety and they come together and you kind of set out and say you first you have to inform so you kind of tell them what kind of different functions that UAS can do so you kind of level set things so that people understand capabilities then you start asking how would this apply to you and your situations now in Hawaii you're uniquely different because you might have pertains you might have volcanic eruptions you might have earthquakes so you make it pertain to those those things that are more likely or probable to be in your area so that's why the regional aspect makes more sense and then say how how would we be able to use it and then you take your next your next day and you put it into applications of doing exactly some of those things to do proof of concept so people can actually see the UAS fly they can see streaming video they can see real time information about a situation and then there's this whole different appreciation of of the possibilities and then from that you go into transitioning to say how do we develop our policies and procedures to implement this during an event and then it's already part of the system and it's not learning at the time you have a disaster okay if I can go back for a minute to the point Josh just made that we have as everybody says a lot of people a lot of citizens a lot of construction companies the power company everybody's got drones in some form or other they have some form of training or maybe they don't have training certainly the power company is well trained the construction people are well trained so how do we put them to use in a case of disaster operations or public safety that's the thing I was poking at has the has the council taken on that task of trying to figure out how to utilize available resources that maybe haven't ever come together before has that crossed your your your into your area Charles yet it has been a point of discussion the thing that we've been focused on right now though is getting public safety established to be able to use that what we're suggesting is that if you're going to use somebody else they they have to be trained to a certain level of ICS so that we so that they know how to operate within our our framework during that disaster because one of things we've had is we've had people that have self deployed and people that are interested in helping but they don't understand the mechanisms by which they need to fly and if they need to coordinate with an air boss and those kind of things so we've got to kind of I think you can do that but you have to reach out and have a conversation with them to identify who they are what qualifications they have that they certainly that you have a confidence level that they know how to fly because if you ask some of these people to fly for you they can become an agent of the government and then you become liable for the the actions that they do so there's there's some things you got to work on there in advance if you want to try to do that at a time during disaster. Okay I like your idea let's get the elected officials and the public safety leadership to get them going first and then start bringing in these other pieces but that doesn't mean we can't develop the other pieces in parallel. Well that goes back to the whole standard situation that we spoke about two weeks ago right and you know it's it's pretty much preaching what what Charles is a session was back at UVSI is being able to train these people on similar apparatus to understand so we know there's a grading scale and there's this this general familiarity from location location that people have been checked out on you know during these training systems have a certain level of kind of capability that people can trust in other locations as well. That kind of goes back to what Gene Robinson was telling us he's looking at a 90 day syllabus to get people fully up to speed with full muscle memory is in terms of how to operate not only the vehicle but also the emergency procedures and its operation within the emergency support functions. Exactly. In fact Charles you know in some of the emails we've been exchanging the idea of the ESS came up I mean that certainly to me and being part of the communication loop on the volcano situation. Everything runs down the ESS you mentioned incident command system and the way it's structured and organized is under the 15 or 16 ESS that exist. So is perhaps part of the strategy to associate UAS functionality maybe interpreted differently depending on which ESS you're dealing with. Is it is that an important tactic to take here. Yes I think as you're doing a tabletop you want to include the ESS because you want to give kind of an overview of saying here's what the capabilities are here's what UAS is capable of doing. Then from your ESS perspective how would this play into what you're doing. So for example when they were flying in Harvey there's a couple different areas that they're looking at one they're looking to see what areas have been affected by the flooding. They're also able to see are there areas where people need to be rescued. And then they're looking at areas of the roads what roads are open and closed. So you've got transportation you've got fire you've got rescue. You may have EMS you may have critical infrastructure. So yes you did the idea is provide the base foundation of people to understand the capabilities and then let them tell you from an ESS perspective how would this help because what they found in in Harvey Irma and Maria is that sometimes when they're flying if they coordinated with ESS they could actually accomplish the needs for multiple ESS if they've coordinated the flight in conjunction with the needs of the ESS. And then the the next part from that is what do you do that information how does it go to all those different you know heads of the ESS and how do we how did they all coordinate based on that one data stream because you know from what I understand is usually they get very different streams going to each of them and there's not that collaboration. That's a good that's correct and yeah that's correct and so then it's like how do we share the information we've collected is it is it on the device itself and we have to download it and then share it to the appropriate people do we have to are we doing streaming video can we make that available to all the people. So yes there is there is some coordination with what you do with what you've done. Yeah that's a that's getting down to a very level very interesting level of detail and I would hope that would what would in my mind I'm thinking here we should construct something like that for the state of Hawaii now that we have a much higher level of interest than we had before we have volcano we had the meeting with the legislature that you were at a couple weeks ago we have the next legislative session coming up there's enough motivation to start controlling these and but they're going to have to be pulled together at an integrated level because no not not one of these functions by itself is going to be able to carry the day nor is it going to be able to integrate with the other functions without some forcing function. So now Charles you've handed us a challenge how do we put this together and copy your success here in Hawaii and get it done in probably October November before the legislation legislation legislative session begins and and at that point it's hard to get anybody's attention. So we have an interesting challenge here this is a fascinating subject and I think you know we could have imagined it to happen this way the volcano forced it on us and fortunately you're out there ahead of us you and 37 or so other significant agencies that are part of the council and I guess we need to be part of that in some formal way. So we'll we'll get on the website figure that out pass the word around to all of our folks here in Hawaii and Charles once again thanks so much for taking the evening hour out of your day in Virginia and joining us here in Hawaii yet again and the next time we have to have you out here in the flesh I would suspect to actually maybe start off this I'm guessing two-day workshop we're going to now talk about how does that sound? Yeah I'd love to do that and and I think that your other opportunity is we've got to educate our elected and appointed officials and one of the things just so you know that I've done is I've been reaching out and challenging the big seven organizations the national governors the national league of cities the national association of counties and all those to put the challenge out to them to help support advancing public safety UAS. Okay well we'll catch on with that and we also have the aerospace state association we got the AOPA got the AMA and there's other organizations that are all headed in the same direction we'll see what we can do to put something together out here from an integrated exercise perspective and this is a big challenge but we'll go ahead and do it and Charles thanks once again for your inspiration and leadership and for coming on the show and Josh thanks for coming over all away from Bonoa we'll see you all next week