 Thanks, Taylor, and thanks everybody for coming here today. I wanted to talk about what Congress can do to make airspace more innovative. So I'm going to start by talking about drones, but then also maybe get into a couple other issues. And the problem that we're dealing with here is the FAA. You have to understand the FAA as an agency is almost entirely focused on safety. They're a safety agency. If they're in the headlines, that's almost certainly a bad day for their PR department and for everybody at the agency. So their incentive is to be ultra, ultra cautious. They do not want to see any change ever. And so, you know, the idea to them of the sky being dark with drones, you know, millions of drones being out there and available in the airspace, it's terrifying. It's not something that they welcome. And so what we have to do is we have to overcome that. And so what are they afraid of? This image is from the Miracle on the Hudson, right, in 2009, a flock of geese hit a commercial airliner taking off out of LaGuardia and took out both engines. The pilot had to do an unpowered landing on the Hudson River. Miraculously, everybody survived, but that's the kind of bad news that the FAA doesn't want to see. And they're concerned that if we have drones, we're going to see a lot more of this. So, you know, does that match reality? This chart is self-explanatory, I think, but I will just walk you through it just so that everybody's perfectly clear. So the FAA keeps track of how often aircraft collide with wildlife and wildlife of various different species. And so we have over 25 years of data on this. And planes hit things a lot, right? They're out in the world, and there are lots of animals out there. And so over the last 25 years, we have 198 documented instances of planes and other aircraft hitting turtles, right? And typically, these are not flying turtles. These are turtles typically on runways, in case you were wondering, which I have gotten people wondering, how is this possible? And during that time period, we've had no collisions with anything that we would today call a drone, like a quadcopter or commercial or consumer quadcopter or multi-rotor aircraft. So right now, there's zero evidence that drones have actually posed a threat to aircraft. The FAA has hung its hat on sightings, right? Like how often pilots can see drones looking out of the cockpit. There's never been a collision, right? So my colleague Sam Hammond and I dug into this wildlife strike data a little bit further. And here are some things that we found, right? So there are about 10 billion birds in US airspace. It's seasonal, right? They migrate, so sometimes it's even more. The FAA has data on over 160,000 collisions between aircraft and wildlife since 1990. We have data on which collisions caused damage to the aircraft, you know, costly repairs and so on. And we have data on which collisions resulted in human injuries or fatalities. And the numbers you see, as you can see, it's like a lot of birds, quite a lot of collisions, like many fewer that cause damage and many, many fewer that actually result in any harm to humans. And we can use this data to say something about the relative risk of drones and birds, right? We can show how dangerous these drones are by looking in comparison to birds, by analogizing to birds, seeing birds of different masses, because we have the species of every bird that is involved in one of these strikes. We can look at how dangerous they are to the airspace. And so this is what we found. Based on just the number of birds, how much of the time they spend flying and the number of collisions, we can calculate that about once every 374,000 years of flight time will an aircraft hit a bird, or as we would estimate, a drone, because they fly about the same. And we also estimate there's a policy discussion about whether or not two kilogram drones is a good threshold for essentially unregulated ability to fly. And we estimate that a two kilogram drone in particular will cause an injury to a human on board, a manned aircraft, about once every 198 million years of operation. So it's just a staggering number. Drones are very, very, very safe. More evidence from the wildlife strikes. We actually, you know, that miracle on the Hudson incident is so vivid and we all remember it. But remember, in 25 years of data, only one wildlife strike resulted in a human fatality on a commercial airplane flight, only one time. And that did not involve a bird. Any guesses? Not turtle either. Deer. Deer on a runway, a pair of white-tailed deer. The passenger in 3C was injured and later died of an infection. So this is not planes falling out of the sky sort of material. So collisions in aircraft are just not... Airspace is very, very big. It's just not the biggest problem that we face. So what has the FAA done on drones? The FAA was forced to allow commercial drones in the FAA Modernization Reform Act in 2012. It did not want to do so. Congress made it do it. So Section 332 of that act required permanent commercial drone rules by September 30th, 2015. And Section 333 allowed the FAA to create temporary rules in the interim period. And so that's what Congress said. Let's see what happened. So, A, no surprise, the FAA did not meet their September 2015 deadline, statutory deadline for permanent rules. And the permanent rules that the FAA put forward were put forward under 333, the temporary section of law, which has much more restrictive parameters for flight. So the FAA has totally shirked its obligation to put forward 332 rules. So the FAA is doing something very, very illegal, and Congress should step up and exercise oversight because Congress made demands and the FAA is not meeting them. In addition, Section 336 of FIMRA prohibits the FAA from making any new rules related to model aircraft and drone integration. And the FAA has just completely ignored this and created new model aircraft registration requirements in December 2015. Their interpretation of 333 is, well, this isn't a new rule. We're just taking existing rules and applying them to model aircraft. And in fact, it is a new rule because they're changing the way that the registration works to accommodate model aircraft specifically. So this is, again, very illegal behavior on the part of the FAA. This is subject being litigated in the courts right now and hopefully will be overturned. So it's not just drones. I want to talk about some of the other innovative things that the FAA is holding back. So flight sharing. This is essentially Uber for small planes. So a guy has a plane. You want to go from A to B. He's willing to take you. In the actual cases that people have tried to do it, it's only sharing gas money. They're not even making an additional payment. But the FAA has ruled that pilots participating in this are illegally operating as common carriers. So common carriage is a legal standard that's been developed throughout the common law. It usually has to do with set rates and schedules and timetables. It's never defined in the statute for aviation. And so the FAA has just come up with their own standard for what common carriage is. So I think that one thing that Congress could do would be to define common carriage in a reasonable way in order to allow flight sharing and allow people to experiment with non-common carriage type arrangements for flight. Supersonic flight. Civilian supersonic flight over land in the United States has been banned since 1973. And the FAA has says, we're looking into this. They issued a statement in 2008 saying, we will eventually legalize this. We're just going to have the same noise standard for supersonic as for regular flight. Then nothing else has happened. They've just let it sit for eight years. And there are companies now, there's startups that want to build new supersonic jets. And of course, their market would be greatly expanded if they were able to do it over land. We are still flying slower today than we did in the 1960s. So if you go back to the 1960s, like Don Draper flying across the country could do it faster than we could do it today. Electric aircraft. You know, what's going to be the Tesla of aircraft, right? Like electric vehicles are a very promising area of development. The FAA accidentally banned electric aircraft. They didn't mean to, but they issued a regulation saying that light sport aircraft had to have a single reciprocating engine. And so that means no electric aircraft. And so this is just stupid. It's going to potentially, electric aircraft could massively reduce the cost of pilot training. You're not going to be flying cross country on an electric airplane anytime soon. But if you want to learn to how to fly, it's much, much cheaper to do it on an electric aircraft. And so just telling the FAA to please fix this would be, I think, very beneficial. Don't even think about manned drones. I can't really, it's in the corner there, but there's a person that can fly in this. This was a company that unveiled itself at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. And they adorably thought that they could come to the US market in about six months or so. And it's just not going to happen. They're going to go to China and New Zealand first, right? But pilot error represents about half of all commercial flight accidents, and 75% or so of all non-commercial flight accidents. So just shifting to autonomous aircraft would make air traffic cheaper and safer. But the FAA isn't even considering this. And then modernizing air traffic control. NASA is working on multiple concepts. Other concepts have been put forward for just radically different ways of doing air traffic control. Instead of just completely centralized and where every air traffic controller is a government employee, we need to think about how do we have a machine-to-machine communication and have the machines negotiate routes and keep separation between themselves. So I think Mark's going to talk a little more about this. For me, the first step is privatizing air traffic control. And then the next step is decentralizing it. The FAA prefers the status quo. So we need to do, I think, three things. So one takeaway I want you to have is that drones are safe. And we need to push the FAA a lot more on moving faster on this exciting technology. The second is that Congress should hold the FAA accountable for the illegal stuff that it's doing. And lastly is that innovation needs to be a priority in aviation, not just safety. So we need to give the FAA some sort of incentive or mandate to do more on innovation. And with that, I will turn it over to Mark. Thanks, Eli, and hey, everybody. I have a much less visually appealing presentation to me. And mine isn't going to be as exciting, but I'm going to try to get into a little more to tease out some of the details of Section 333 and then some of the drone provisions that are in the current dueling FAA reauthorization bills. First, though, since Eli closed with it, on air traffic control, corporatization, or commercialization, I don't like the keyword privatization because what is being proposed right now in the House is not a private company like UK Nats, where equity shares are issued. What we're talking about is a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is much more akin to the Red Cross or a utility than a private company. So what we're actually talking about right now, and that is it's based on the NavCanada model, which is the gold standard of air traffic control in the world, and there's no real reason we shouldn't do it here. But Eli is absolutely right. We're not going to have supersonic domestic travel, and we're likely not going to see some of the greater things that we can do with drones, particularly once we get above the 55-pound small UAS that we're seem to be focused on right now. But we're not going to have that with our 1960s air traffic control. So I urge you to really consider what has been put forth in the air act in the House. So let's step back a little bit. Let's go back to FIMRA 2012 and section 333. Section 333, before I explain what are some of the restrictions on it, it's important to note why they did this, because until we had section 333, commercial drones period were essentially illegal. Before section 333, really the only way to operate a drone in the US was through a special air worthiness certificate. And generally that meant getting an experimental certificate. And experimental certificates, one precondition, is no commercial operation. So 333 allows commercial operations. But they're very limited in what we can do right now. And hopefully Congress will fix this right now. You need to operate the drone within a visual line of sight of the operator only during daylight hours. And you can't fly nearer than five miles from a towered airport without their express permission. And until last week, you couldn't fly higher than 200 feet. Now the FAA has done a blanket change to the 333 and has upped that to 400 feet. So I guess that's good. But we can't fly over people in urban areas generally. That's a problem, because there's a lot of things we would want to see drones do that would require them to operate near people. Now, model aircraft, as Eli talked about, those have similar restrictions, very onerous restrictions, similar to the 333. But and with that December 2015 drone registration mandate that Eli discussed, yes, this is something I think Congress should look at very closely. I think this is, even if you don't even care about drones, which I suspect you guys do, but even if you don't, I think this is a rule of law issue. What they did was use an emergency rule making the good cause exemption of the Administrative Procedure Act. They twisted and abused that to ram this through without taking public comments. I think that's a problem. What they did defeats the whole purpose of the Administrative Procedure Act. And this is meant to protect the public and it has for 70 years from these types of actions. So I really encourage you to look at that. And as Eli said, John Taylor, he works in town here, but he lives in Maryland. He has filed suit and we wish him luck. Now, on to where we are with the FAA reauthorization bills. So there are similar provisions in both. For instance, both codify the FIMR 2012 UAS subtitle or at least parts of it because some of you may know trying to do research on what that said in FIMR 2012, they put that all in the entire drone subtitle ended up in a statutory note of 49 USC 40 101. So a lot of people had a hard time finding that so they finally assigned them sections. The house bill also does something significant. So with model aircraft, that maintains the unlike 333 commercial operations are prohibited. You can't operate a model aircraft for commercial purposes. But the way it was written and Congress figured this out, a problem was that the way it was written and basically forbid someone from accepting money to teach you how to fly a hobby model aircraft. So what the house bill does, it includes a section that would permit recreational UAS lessons. I think that's a good thing. It's fun for the kids and for the whole family. Now, another good thing I think the house did was the, and this is before I get to an amendment, but was it explicitly said the FAA needs to do equivalent level of safety permitting. This is something that CEI, when we filed comments back in April, 2015 to the FAA on their bizarre integration plan, as Eli said they were using section 333 rather than 332, we don't know why, but they were. But that was one of the things we told them. And that is I think incredibly important because this is a new technology and basically you don't have an equivalent level of safety procedure. You're either gonna have to wait until they come up with very detailed technical regulations to describe exactly how and when they can authorize specific aircraft or they're going to rely on a precautionary principle approach, which means you're not gonna have any of these aircraft flying. So the E-Law standard, very important. We're glad that that's in the house bill. Section 440 of the Air Act also has a pilot program for at least three airports for detecting UAS. I think this is a smarter approach than some alternatives that have been proposed, namely a geofencing mandate, which would have proposed mandating technology that does not exist. And that even the low level technology that does exist is easily defeatable by hackers as the fine folks at DJI can tell you. And then 441, and this is good, it orders an evaluation of this electronic registry that the FAA unilaterally created in December, 2015. Now, the way it's worded, at least how I read it, it doesn't endorse the bizarre legal theories that the FAA relied on to promulgate that interim final rule, but it does, I guess, provide some scrutiny over this. And it's likely we're going to be stuck with an E-Registry at least for a significant amount of time, so we might as well know some things about it. Now to the big amendment, Representative Davis successfully got a micro-UAS amendment attached to the bill. That's Eli, as he talked about, the two kilogram, the 4.4 pound drones. What it does is it largely exempts UAS and their operators from operations regulations. And the FAA's operations regulations are some of the most honorous regulations that the federal government administers. So it exempts them from airmen and airworthiness certifications. If you're a realtor and you wanna take pictures of your house, you shouldn't have to be a licensed pilot. Congress recognized that. And then a lot of the fight rules and maintenance rules that were designed for commercial aircraft or for aircraft that carry people, it makes no sense to apply that to what I think are often toy drones, but these are these very small drones. And this is based on international best practice. This is similar to a, to call out Canada again for being much better on aviation than us similar to a November 2014 rule from Canada. So Canada, in addition to being 20 years ahead of us on air traffic control, they're already ahead of us on UAS regulations. Now, the Senate bill, and I'll just preface this by saying, I think the Senate bill for a variety of reasons is horrible. It doesn't do the air traffic control reform. It basically ignores that this problem exists. It ignores reams of government reports and decides to just hunt again. I think that's a huge mistake. But it also, it isn't just an action that makes the Senate bill or the Senate's, I think it's only gonna get worse too, but it isn't just in action that makes the Senate bill problematic. One thing that it has, it has this section two, one, two, four, and I encourage you to look this up. This would require manufacturers to get every make and model of their UAS certified by the FAA. Now on its face, that doesn't sound, it doesn't seem like a big deal if you're an aircraft manufacturer you're used to dealing with regulators and getting your aircraft certified. But this does not exempt micro UAS. This does not exempt educational applications. So students who are building this in their classroom before they operate it outside would be required to go to the FAA for each iteration of their aircraft that they build. Same thing goes from modelers, hobbyists who are tinkering in their basement, and any entrepreneur who's launching a startup that doesn't have this regulatory expertise, that doesn't have this army of lawyers, they're gonna be caught up in this and potentially they would be, I mean, we're facing felony charges here. This is a big deal. So please, I encourage you to look at two, one, two, four. What we had hoped is that before markup is that Senator Booker introduced an amendment basically identical to the Davis Amendment that was exempting micro UAS from most FAA operations rules. We had hoped that that would also, because the Senate bill contains this manufacturing a certification requirement that it would also address the manufacturing side of things, but it didn't. So I think that is really probably the worst of it. The Senate bill, though, to its credit has kind of a neat thing. Senator Heller introduced an amendment that was attached to it in markup that would allow or requires the FAA to develop rules explicitly for small UAS package delivery. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I don't think most commercial UAS applications involve parcel delivery, but this is a potentially very transformative application of the technology and something that we've all heard about, the Amazon Air Prime prototype. This could be very exciting. We could get all the junk. We have to wait for a day now in 30 minutes. That would be great. But yeah, so I'll close there. Really, what I encourage you to look at, I encourage you to go read it and see it in all of its awfulness in the Senate bill is this section 2124. So with that, I will end here and happy to answer any questions you have.