 It is a noon hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Rawson here in our Honolulu Studios, Think Tech Studios downtown Honolulu with a fantastic show on our Where the Drone Leads periodic episode. This one is all about shared airspace, sharing airspace between drones and manned helicopters. And helping us figure that problem out, we have, first of all, online from the island of Lanai. We have George Purdy, who is Mr. UAS Aviation on the island of Lanai. George, welcome aboard again. Thank you for having me on the show. Glad to be here. Cool. And we're glad you're here. And we have, on this side in the studio, we have Mr. Scott Allen. Scott, thanks for coming on. First time around the show. Always a pleasure. Scott is part of either the Future Farmers of America or the FAA. I've forgotten which is it. It's FAA Safety Team. FAA Safety Team. Safety Team, OK, which is part of the FISDO. I presume. Indeed. I'm attached to the FISDO. Attached to the FISDO. Right on, OK, here on Honolulu. And Eric Lincoln, who is the Director of Operations at Blue Hawaiian Helicopters, taking care of the tourists who come to town here and emergency operations as such as well. So we have a fantastic gathering of two complete opposite bookends of the whole airspace issue, especially the low altitude airspace. So I wanted to just start by pointing out this is a show about drones. So we have to say that we're drone. We've said that, that's enough. And then we have to have a drone item here on the table. So we have with us something for you guys to take a look at. This is kind of the entry-level military-type drone used by Spec Ops and such. This is missing its battery and missing its payload. This thing weighs about two pounds. Battery is another pound and a half, and it carries four pounds of payload. And that's its ground station over here. And I would say that most drones, we're speaking of, that would be in the airspace we're thinking about where we have common interests, would be in the same size and weight scale. So I just put that out here for physical awareness. This is a ground control station that would be used to operate this thing in flight C. A drone is always two things. It's a ground station, radio communication, and the air component. So that's what's going on here. Quite different from manned aviation where it's the guy in the cockpit. Anyway, I wanted to introduce this subject of airspace sharing. You know, we have a, my experience in the way, we have a increasing population using drones. And they come from basically not from the aviation side of the house. They're not familiar with a lot of things. And you take a drone out of the box, and there may be some instructions you can't understand. And you think, well, since I can't understand it, it probably doesn't apply to me. So I'll go use my drone anyway I want. We have that bunch. Then we have the folks like George on the other side and the professionals we work with, which are very attentive to rules and such. And you probably have people in between. There's all kinds of folks using these things, and they're all using them. And in general, they're respecting 400 feet and below because they typically have a software limit of 400 feet. But not always. And so there are so many users, and there are so many means by which you can actually use a drone in the airspace today. There's educational, there's recreation, there's various forms of ostracizations, and there's 107 now. And so with that situation, we have a lot of competition, frankly, in the airspace in some regard. So I wanted just to start a long conversation here that won't ever have an end. They won't certainly solve it today. But if we can begin some kind of communication between the various users of the airspace and find a way to get at them, and let them know what's going on, that would be great. So let me turn first to Eric. You were the other side of this equation using the airspace with jet rangers and such. Yes, we've got about 34 aircraft at the moment. And just in our organization, there's many more than that operating here. One of the conflicts that we've experienced is we're all looking at the same thing. You know, the waterfalls. So the focus is the same, right? Yeah, exactly. So the waterfall, the beach, whatever it might be that attracts people to Hawaii. Exactly. And everyone wants to take a picture. And everyone wants a different preview. And we've had some closing clowners. We actually had one hit one of our aircraft. So it's a very real to our people that fly them and to the people that are in them. So we're very invested in seeing how we can integrate safely. And we understand that the professionalism for segments of the industry are huge. Very professional, very well disciplined in how they do things. And we admire that a lot because they're valuable in disasters. They're valuable in rescues and agricultural work. There's just all kinds of avenues that we know they're going to be ahead of the manned aircraft very rapidly. It's more concerned to us that we see is going to be the amateurs, the people from foreign countries who bring these in and they carry on baggage that have no clue about what their U.S. airspace how it's constructed, what regulations we may have. And they're not, as you say, they take it out of the box in the way they go. That's what we see as one of the biggest problems. So that's sort of like a promotional and educational campaign of some kind that's going to be required to get that information out. So let's turn for a moment to Scott over there at Honolulu Airport watching all the standards emerging and such. In fact, standards are emerging so fast in this business. And I don't know how you guys keep up with them. It's tough for us to keep up with them. I was going to say a little while back you said the conversation will never end and the technology is evolving at such a rate that there is always a new facet that's being developed. In one point of information you'd mentioned that a drone operation what we tend to call small and manned aerial systems is the hardware and the operator on the ground, the ground station. And the FAA would add another element in that we define the links, the command and control linkage as being a third element that makes up the system that operates the drones. And I'm using drones generically here because... It's more complicated than manned aircraft already because you're obligated to have the man on the ground situation. It's just not a guy in a cockpit anymore. So it is quadruply complicated already. So quadruply might be an understatement. Today it could be, but tomorrow it won't be. OK, so FAA is sitting in the middle of all this potted stirring and we have the uninformed users, we have the professional users, we have folks in between, we have the other folks using the airspace. So keeping up with all that and finding a way to pull up the salient information and get it out there has got to be a bit of a challenge. It is indeed... That's why you're on the show. No, the drone zone is a great program that we have online that facilitates transfer information, requesting waivers, any number of things. The drone zone, we have another program, Lance, the president has directed a fast track pilot program for industry and regulatory collaboration to move ahead and move faster with getting drones integrated completely into the system. So there are a lot of initiatives like that. There was a program on the FAA website where you can call up a map that will show the maximum altitudes that can be flown in any given sector. That map is not an authorization to fly those altitudes. It just says what the maximum permissible request could be. So we are working really hard to promulgate the information. And there's a whole other side of this that is not present in our conversation and it's sort of represented by George to a certain extent but that's the landowners and the people who have issues with the privacy invasion and trespassing on land and such. So there's a whole civil side to this that we don't have to worry about in the manned aviation domain so much. And we don't really have a website you can turn to. Frankly, this says here's what the landownership requirements are. Here's what the... We have best practices but you have to dig hard to find them. So we really have a situation where just for the average guy who either came from some foreign country or who bought a drone at Amazon or something here's quite a challenge to figure out all the information he needs and figure out where his relevance is and what he has to do. So it's a daunting thing. Let's turn for a moment to George Purdy standing by on the island of Anaya and let me just offer this before we hear George talk. One of the recent FAA solicitations or innovations was something called UPP. It's the unmanned pilot program which is the follow-on to the IPP and that is requesting manufacturers to figure out how to do the data block transfers from users to the FAA air traffic control centers to the dealing with the ADSB out and such in some data transmission form to support UAS operations. We submitted on that along with the University of Alaska and guess what? Out of all the 450 airports in the United States of America that the FAA picked to have one of the one airport scenario that you have to bid on is the airport called LNY here on Lanai Island, Georgia's airport. 450, that's like less than 2-10% of all the airports. Something about that airport is magic in the eyes of the FAA. It's got its controlled airspace echo. It's not operated that way, it's operated more like VFR. So it has the need to be disciplined in controlled airspace but it doesn't have the traffic that would present a problem for testing. So somebody inside the FAA figured that out and wrote that into the script. So anyway, we're very proud of that and proud of George. George, are you there? Yep, I'm here. So you heard the conversation so far. Tell us a little bit about what you've been doing on the island with regard to public safety, UAS use all these gaps that we've just described. Sure. There we are. So about two years ago, I came across this FAA document called Community Involvement Manual. It came out February 2016. So as I started reading this manual, it gives you a step-by-step how to involve your community in whatever project that you wanted to do. So as I was studying drones and what was happening on the continent and watching how the communities were really left out of the loop and my feelings and their feelings as they put it out there was that the government was just shoving drones down their throat. So I took that as an opportunity to start now educating my community first and have the community actually support me in drones and for certain search and rescue and emergency situations. So I got them involved in that sense of them taking ownership. And this manual has a lot of information that it helps us as FAA operators or in the FAA airspace to actually find that local person, like for me I work at Launa Airport. My day job is on my airport firemen and I do a lot of emergency preparedness planning, tri-annual disaster drills. So it has taught me how to interact with my community. So I took just some of these skills and when UAS came out of the woodworks and I wanted to be a part of the UAS in Hawaii, I took the lead in educating my community, taking what FAA is sending down, educating it, tuning it up and making it digestible for my community. That's the way we got to look at local airports taking the initiative and educating their community. We can't wait for these folks to actually read a memo from Washington which they have no understanding what it is. We need to find those local key personalities or businesses willing to step forward within the community and explain what is going on. Taking pride in supporting schools, having an aviation day, a drone prevention month, just something that we can expose a lot of the issues that we are having today. That's great and we got to take what George is doing on Launa which admittedly has a 3,100 person population and not a lot of heavy air traffic and transpose that over here to Oahu where the numbers go up by a factor of 100 maybe and figure out how to distill all this into, as he said, digestible information that the public can grab onto. We started at one school here, I think, Kupolei Middle School in the approach of Kupolei Airport and Kalei Lola Airport and we've had one interaction there. I think we could do like George said, start with the airports and let's work in the airport community area. That's kind of where one area where interaction is going to occur and start generating get-togethers of some kind, information sharing, get-togethers, looking each other face-to-face and figure this out. Where it is today it's going to be four times that in a couple of years so the sooner we start the better. I wonder if we can use the aviation caucus as a channel here. What do you think about that, Eric? I think that would work well but the bottom line issue is going to be what's happening now and how do we get the users that are presently doing this to move forward with it because it's the helicopter community or the airplane community is regulated with certain technology, ADSP for example. There is no way of identifying a UAS that is not being a drone that's being operated outside of the regulatory environment to avoid and I know there are software things like that but the community I think is so, they don't know enough about it to even start with this. To them it's still that personal toy and that personal toy now can go up to 50 pounds or whatever it can be but it can be lethal much smaller to an aircraft that's airborne. Something like this for example in a rotor would be a bad day. Or come through a window and hit somebody. Having the community involvement and doing that in a larger scale, we have several organizations I know in Oahu that are focused at UAS. They have memberships, they have get togethers and that spreading that out. The Helicopter Association International is very serious about integration of this because they see the future of that also. So their involvement locally would help. AOPAs, things like that as we discussed earlier are all venues of education. The FAA I don't think is tasked in their staff to enforce anything. They really don't have enough trouble with existing regulation let alone it's coming down the road. So I agree that community outreach is definitely where we need to go. Let's take our one minute break here that we're allowed by the show and come back after that break and talk about exactly how we should do that maybe even within the next six months. Okay. I'm Jay Fiedel, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of MENA, Marco and me, which is MENA Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangelsdorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on ThinkTech Hawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. We are Back Show. Back folks on our show where the drone leaves. Senator Alson here with the guests, George Purdy on Lanai and Eric Lincoln here. Eric, thanks for coming on the show again for the timer. Thank you. And Scott Allen of FISDO. And I did get that straight. That is FAA, not Future Farmers, right? It could be both, but today it's FAA, okay? And we're just talking before the break about the need for getting information out, getting people to understand it because it's foreign to a lot of folks in this world of drone usage and this legislation session begins in basically December of this year. The timing is right to start planning some kind of a November gathering of some kind where the various users of the airspace gather and invite the legislators in as well and our public safety people following the lines of the FAA community involvement manual, which I don't know how many people inside the FAA know that even exists. That thing is actually a very rich document in terms of what goes on. Anything that changes in the use of the air, adding a runway to an airport, going from ILS to sat-based, anything like that really is required to be led into the community by that means. So perfect. We'll follow that example. Let's do that. Let's set up something that we can work with you and the aviation caucus on pulling the manned users together. We can certainly work on as many, the unmanned as we can find and invite the legislators who are involved in this. There's half a dozen who pay attention to this a lot. That we could do. And that's just the idea here, but we'd have to think of a location that's convenient for people where parking is easy, not like here where you have to find a narrow little slot to pull into. It worked. And the capital is a little tough parking-wise, but maybe out at the airport would be the right way to do it. Is that something that makes sense? Let me ask Scott, is that something we could pull together? Absolutely. And as George was talking and George, maybe we can get together offline. There are some notes in my talking points about the UAS integration pilot program. And that was initiated in October 2017 where the president directed the secretary of transportation to come up with a pilot program intended to advance integration without stifling innovation. And I'd like to read one of the bullets and I don't normally like just reading stuff, but it was so on point with what you and George were talking about. And I think we can pursue this, but the UAS integration pilot program creates a mechanism for the private sector and state local tribal governments to make experience-based and data-driven contributions to the national framework to safely integrate drones into our economy. And you were talking about expanding from the 3,200 people population on the nigh and expanding it into Honolulu and expanding it into the national airspace. And I haven't been working with this, but it does exist. George Tedd would like to invite more research into this, and it might be a mechanism for us to move forward. You know, we can capitalize on that because we did make an application as Hawaii for that under D-Bed. We didn't get selected on the first round, but we were part of the Alaska submission and did get selected as part of that. So we're a little bit in there, but I got a call from a gentleman in D.C. who was taking all those who didn't get selected to say, can we still help you? That is, don't think because you didn't get selected. We're not here to help. If you've got some ideas, let's go. So I can recontact that gentleman and get D.C. to come out here and be part of this thing we've put together, this calibac. Whatever I can do to help. I very much want to be on board with that. And I didn't realize, but again, when it comes to SUAS, when there's something that I know about the programs that you don't know about, it would be a very shocking day, but I'm not surprised now that you're already engaged. We can go to that now. You can get your side to come into this, get the educators into this. And then, why Helicopter Association, which should also participate, it's mainly the two helicopters, but it does, we're trying to get as many of the utility operators, police and fire, involved also. So that understanding each other's point of views, really where we need to go. The aircraft in flight, of course, pilot command, he's got a lot to deal with already. So it's going to be that task, a large task, so we'll participate. So I'm just wondering how we communicate these complicated issues to the public, who is the guy who bought that drone, takes it out of a box and doesn't necessarily see things, doesn't know about classy airspace, doesn't know about 12345, or some other means of communication, doesn't know about looking at 129, 988, whatever the two helicopters are. 136. So there's a lot of things that go on all the time that you guys have found a way to make effective and you do it without thinking about it much because it's what you have to do, but it goes so fast and it's in such a cryptic language that it's hard for the folks on the outside to pick that up, I suspect. So some form of explanation of what you actually go through on a daily basis, going across my Manalo Bay, for example, down low, you've got to check with Kaneohe to get into the Delta Airspace there, and then but if they're closed, what do you do? So there's, well, that's all going on. The drone guy down there is hauling his fishing line out or something and they bring the same space. He doesn't know what's going on and he doesn't know how busy your guy is trying to work through the circumstances. So we have to illustrate somehow. Just maybe start by basically illustrating what we're all doing. You see a very good point she's brought up. The 400 foot ceiling is misleading to start with. A lot of the operations don't need to go to 400. And the helicopter operations were already restricted to do air tours a certain, but other than the air tour, you know, it's a safe operation and that leaves it up to the pilot to operate. So the education on both sides as to what's necessary versus what's legal is really where the common sense is going to have to come in. But we know that doesn't and aviation isn't always applicable. But we've got some good leadership, I think, in the communities to tap. And I think George has really given a good example of how he's taken to his community and taking the bull by the horns and actually stepped up and making it a part of their tools kit that they can use. How we do that to 1.4 million people That's a good question. But I think we have a lot of retailers we need to talk to. Some of the clubs that we're talking to, there's in today's generation, the internet people are on board a bit before you actually, they even was a suggestion one time before you could even buy when you had to have a license that you actually go on and register and do this, but it met a lot of resistance. I think we have to overcome that resistance. I think we have to actually make people who purchase these responsible. And I'm top of all, this is the current status, there's always the things that are emerging. Like there's going to be an electronic signature required to be broadcast by these guys as soon as the DCA gets the specifications written, it's now part of the FAA transferred from our DCA to the FAA recently. So that's going to happen ADSB out is going to be in all the small aircraft up in April of 2020 or something like that. It's the execution day. January 1, 2020. Yeah, and a lot of these guys are carrying dual ADSB out already. So there's good now as soon as that happens, if all of the drones began broadcasting on ADSB the system would be flooded. I have the feeling and we'll see. But I don't know if anybody sets the thing for that level of operation or exactly what do you do? You get a warning aircraft nearby. Okay. What's next? From the pilot perspective, is he going to see that at what distance? Yeah. Is he going to see an avoid is not really a realistic thing at that small aircraft. Alright. The user on the ground seeing ADSB aircraft nearby has one perspective. The guy in the cockpit at 99.8% and two has a different set of things. He's on a radio. He's talking to the tourists and he's looking down and got to take care of this now too. There's two different circumstances and two different perspectives that are merging in some way. And the impacts are really what concerns in the industry. I mean, it's one thing to lose your drone. It's another to lose six, seven lives. Right. Yeah. And I think that's been a gap in some of the users, the amateur users. The professionals I think are doing a great job. But the amateur users, a lot of them don't understand that that piece of toy can bring down an aircraft full of people. And again, if I could jump in the communication and part of our outreach, as you mentioned the schools, if we could start with the schools and get the younger people involved and maybe they can help carry the message to their parents. But as we say, toy, it's not a toy. It's an aircraft. Anything that flies in the airspace is an aircraft under the purview of the FAA. So it's our job to promote and ensure the safety of the flying public and everybody. And drone operators, it is definitely not a toy. But it's anytime you lift off the ground, it's serious. This show goes very quickly. This is the first of many interactions I hope we can have like this. Just a quick one, Rob. Do we have any call-ins, questions coming in from the audience? Well then we'll drive forward here. So I think we're sort of mutually committing ourselves to something that pulls us all together. We'll take George's guidance and leadership and helping us make that happen. I will just illustrate one story. I was talking to Jace Gags and the Fairbanks and he said, make sure George comes to our conference next week. So everybody needs to know that George is a nationally respected voice in this game and we appreciate that very much. George, what do you think of this idea of having a gathering before the legislative session begins, because that's an important part too. And I should put a shout out to Roger Wong at HPD who's working on the HPD side of it. George, some comments from you on putting together a island level interaction? Oh, that is a must. That is actually the driving force that will change our future and how UAS integrates into the airspace. We should never stop having these conversations. I mean, for example, when you came to Lanai and we did that UAS public meeting, you saw how the UAS integrated into the airspace and the UAS public meeting. You saw how a community and well educated community came in there with viable questions and know this hardly. They knew exactly what we were talking about. And you can give some aspects on just meeting this community and the meeting and how we explain what we want to do on Lanai. And I followed the FAA's community involvement manual to the T and that's the outcome that you got. So you can speak to that experience. OK, so we have George's leadership and guidance and permission to go ahead and copy what George has done on Lanai over here on Oahu and we'll invite you to it, George, of course. And so we're talking about something before the, we're talking November to December. We'll all do it together. We'll get on this show and tell how it's going in six weeks. How would that be? Sounds fine. OK. Brazilian to follow. That would be our coordination center. In jail. All right. Possibly get the state DOT also. Absolutely. Yeah. And the Department of Education. I mean, that's the point. Like we said at the beginning, it doesn't end, right? It just keeps rolling. And we'll have to imagine ourselves doing this every year to keep up with the technology changes and issues, best practices that are occurring elsewhere. So at this point in time, let me say we're going to have to close the show off. Let me just thank George Burney for sitting in from Lanai and you can go back to work now, George. And Eric Lincoln, same for you. Back to work. And Scott, back to work. That was a pleasure. And thanks for coming on this show and all of them for a long time. You're on. Thanks very much. Good job, George. See you all next week, folks.