 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It is a noon hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Rawson here in the Think Tech studios looks like we're in Waimanalo today at, probably at, probably at Makapu, as a matter of fact. Anyway, online with us we have from far away across the sea in Virginia is Charles Warner. Charles, welcome aboard again. There you are. Thanks. Good to be here. Hey, great. This is very appropriate. In this particular episode of our show, we're the series of where the drone leads is ending and why not end on a high note with the very important subject of UAS in public safety. That's what Charles represents at the top of that echelon in terms of, in Charles case, in terms of his role as president and chairman of the National Council for Unmanned Air Systems in Public Safety. So, Charles, it's great to have you on after hours, of course, thanks for giving us your time. How's things going, first of all, with the Council and its evolving role in forming up the way we're going to use UAS in public safety? Well, I think that I pulled 21 of my closest colleagues that have been in this for a while. My first question was, has unmanned aircraft systems met your expectations in public safety? And the answer has been overwhelmingly yes, almost unanimous. And the excitement, as we move forward, is looking toward the ability to fly beyond visual line of sight and over people. And excitingly enough, in Virginia, our Burial and Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, which is one of the six FAA test sites, was able to achieve the first beyond visual line of sight over people waiver from the FAA following Hurricane Florence for Virginia North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. And so that's just showing kind of the change in the mindset as we work with the FAA and them supporting us in our missions. That's fantastic. That's a great example. In fact, I opened my book here because I want to write down the thoughts of brilliance that come out here and take advantage of them. But you mentioned the FAA, and one thing that's most interesting, I think to me and to a lot of people, is the FAA's reaction and response and promotion of the items, the will of Congress items that are in the recently affected law called the FAA Realtorization Act. There must be a dozen elements in there that are really going to be pushing the utility of UAS forward in ways that we could never have imagined occurring this early in our collective careers here. So we have, I think, time clocks on most of these things. For example, the use of UAS in public safety, wildfires is the initial point. Federal address or management, perhaps, of the issues associated with privacy. Even the most intriguing one of all, perhaps, is how the state's counties and travel governments are going to view UAS operations in the 400-foot layer of air space adjacent to the earth. Does that belong to the FAA anymore, or should that rightfully belong to some other means of agency, and how are we going to control that? So there's been many more. But this is the biggest load of work we've ever seen pushed on the FAA, I think, Charles, and all of it is good. And I'd like your thoughts on that, too. How do we get an influence that and help the FAA move forward in the right way? Well, I think the really exciting thing for public safety is public safety was put on as a high priority for the FAA to work with. And one of the side things that I understand is going to happen is they're going to create an emergency service stakeholder group to work more directly with the FAA and give some ideas and help as we transition and understand space and work towards understanding how we actually move these things forward. So it is a very exciting time. The FAA is very excited as well. Congress has kind of given them more latitude to be doing things, as well as creating some expectations. So it's good for all of us in that respect. That's great. So I think with that activity, I would guess that this emergency service stakeholders group will be the means by which information is collected, such as from the National Council and other organizations as well, fire departments, police departments, and state governments and such. So that's going to be a major task, pulling all that information together and then condensing it, consolidating it, and making sense out of it, and pushing it forward to the FAA. Is that an action that the Inspector General is going to be taking on? I believe that the stakeholder group and those kind of things will be done by the FAA itself by a certain individuals. I mean, there are certain things that are mandated that the Inspector General do, but he may also work through representatives that are already dealing with public safety, which would make the most sense. That's great. And again, I think that the right approach would be whether to wait until the FAA comes knocking on the door would be to have our agencies, our governments and such, government organizations have thought that through from their own local perspective, like here in Hawaii, and have a good set of ideas to bring forth rather than get asked a question and then try to figure out what the answer is to the question. So actually, we're having an event out here in Hawaii at the state capitol on the 24th of January called Drone Day for lack of anything else, and this very issue will be one of the topics to be discussed with our legislature. Hey, Ledge, you have an opportunity to influence the future. Let's start thinking about it now. Well, let's hit one of the things you and I have talked about. Currently, I'm now working with 23 states to create state councils, and we're hoping that we can work through you or someone else there in Hawaii to create that voice from Hawaii that can be sharing successes. You all had some very interesting missions with the volcanic activity, and we want to capture that and share it because that's what we're all about. And also to be able to hear your concerns or have that voice be able to express the questions that you have that we can expedite a response to those questions. So we'll be looking as the National Council to be working with you or whomever is so chosen to help develop that state council, which will then actually blend into a nationwide directory so we can really start sharing things across the board with best practices, lessons learned, trends, or even just start discussing training and how we go about doing training in regional areas to make it available. I appreciate your invitation for us to participate. And I did certainly that message through our public safety people here, and they all came back and said, why don't you do it? And normally I would jump into this thing and say, let's absolutely be glad to do it. But I don't want to jump in front of somebody who might be more qualified. So I will run that loop one more time and we'll see if we can't get you to somebody and maybe the two of us together can operate in some way to be your agent from Hawaii on the council. Yeah, so let me just make sure I simplify this enough. So basically what we're trying to do is create a directory. So it's pretty straightforward. It's not really about the person who has the expertise. It's basically being a connector and getting the information into a spreadsheet. And then the rest will kind of take care of itself. So I don't want to over complicate it and whoever is the right person I'll be glad to work with. Okay, well that way you've defined it, sign me up. I will be your man and we have the connections I think to the university and it's working out pretty well right now. So I'll be glad to take that on and the way you can find it. All right, I'll send you the template that'll kind of walk you through the process that I used in Virginia and we'll work from it from there. That's great, okay. And then once again that kind of a mechanism allows us to collect our ideas, collect our thoughts and bring them into the picture for understanding at the federal level and perhaps as an example of a way to do it. But she mentioned the volcano and we've had other events out here of not quite of that magnitude but similar. Believe it or not, sometimes the hurricanes have generated a really interesting consequence called wildfire. How can you imagine a hurricane with all our incoming down in a wildfire to co-exist? They have. I think the second part of this that we have to think about, especially in regard to the volcano, is the getting the incident command people, incident commanders themselves, emergency managers, getting that whole aspect of the infrastructure and the social network that operates safety mechanisms. We have to get them into the picture from the perspective of understanding what UAS are all about, how to capitalize on them, how to make it their solution. And when we start introducing beyond line of sight, that changes the scope and scale quite a bit. And as you know from the experience that you were part of, as we were trying to get some participation in on the volcanoes, we had a situation where the Airbus is handling about 50 manned aircraft flights a day, which pretty much means in the daylight hours, which could be press, it could be helicopters, could be state officials, could be federal officials, could be the tourist helicopters as quite a range of things barraging the Airbus for attention. So Airbus is going to pay attention to those things unless we have some means of finding a way that UAS or designing a way that UAS can enter that mix without adding to any stress on the part of the Airbus, we will have a kind of a barrier there until we can solve that problem. So the unmanned traffic management system that NASA and the FAA have been developing might be a way in on that. But whatever the technical solution is to getting in there, we do have the educational and socialization role to play to get the incident command structure to adopt and accept. And I say that to you in particular because you are one of them. You are an incident commander in the past and maybe even in the present. So how do we think of taking on that task of the socialization side of the equation in parallel to the emerging technology? It's interesting you bring it up because it really is a cultural change in how we do things. In a lot of cases, probably in most places in the country, the only air operations they would ever deal with would be a medical helicopter that's coming in or in a wildfire situation, dropping water or some type of chemical as a suppression agent. And now we have the opportunity to have drones flying in almost any significant event and we could also have multiple agencies that arrive from a local and a state and a federal perspective that could all have drones. And the question is when we have that and now we add in news drones on top of it, we start having how do we manage the space? And I know that we had discussions in NASA Ames is working diligently on creating an unmanned traffic management system. But one of the other people with NASA all said it's important for us to understand that it's not just unmanned traffic management, it's really all about air traffic management because it is the combination of both manned and unmanned and we've got to respect that. And but there are ways and I know that in California, the wildfires have kind of changed a little bit of the mindset because before there was no drones flying when we were doing firefighting, well, that's changed. They just had 16 teams that are flying 7500 acres. What they've come to understand is one, the ability to communicate with the air boss. And the second is to create some general rules that say if you're going to fly unmanned traffic management for certain purposes of damage assessment or situational awareness, that you may not exceed 100 feet in altitude. And what that does is it starts organizing the airspace in such a way that you can actually avoid most of your issues with the exception of helicopters and those types of things landing unexpectedly in places that they might not normally land. So there are ways to manage what we're doing. I'm going to zip back a little bit to your reference to the air wing idea. And you're right, it kind of depends on the department. Some departments air wings have embraced this wholeheartedly and they move in and realize the benefit. Others are resistant because they fear it somehow takes away from their current helicopter status or other things. And one thing that's really important to impress upon people is that neither one replaces the other. They both have very unique and limited capabilities in each of their respects. The helicopter can fly larger distances and cover more area and do a lot more things from a higher level. While drones are at a lower level and have a limited flight process that they can go through a distance. And the drones can also get below tree canopies and see things that helicopters can't. So it's really understanding that benefit and how it makes it work. The air wing is a natural fit if you have people that are proponents as opposed to opponents. And that's kind of one of the things you got to look at. But we do have to be thinking more as we use drones of having an air boss, so to speak or at least someone who's in charge of the air operations at an event so that you are coordinating and deconflicting the airspace. Absolutely, and so collectively we have a social obligation to figure out how to do an educational campaign that addresses these issues and brings them up. And I think that should be part of our response into the FAA, the emergency services stakeholders group needs to think about that and maybe take it on. Let me bring an example of what we're doing here on the North Shore of the surfing competitions and such because it might be very similar to what's taking place in California after we get back from our one minute break. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Yep. It is still Thursday noon now, our folks. Ted Ralston here in Honolulu. We have Charles Warner standing by once again, coming on our show from Virginia. Charles, who is the National Council for UAS or drones in public safety, the chairman and president of that organization. We're just talking during the break about how that conduit into the FAA to help them move forward in an effective way for drones in public safety is gonna be a very important role here. But Charles was describing before the break about a social change taking place in the way UAS drones are used in California wildfire situations, at least some of them. But there's now a more cooperative spirit taking place and a higher level of utility then of the unmanned systems and even the man systems as a consequence of that. So I was just asking Charles at the break, how is it that that actually started? How did that cooperative attitude form and get going? Well, I think it started by those people that were remote pilots and had the unmanned aircraft systems and drones actually working with the air bosses and showing what could be done. And then they kind of came to an agreement to say, okay, as long as you stay at 100 feet of AGL above ground from an altitude standpoint, that they would be able to operate in and around the area without any issues. I think again, the major issue that started in the beginning was the interference that we had from hobbyist drones. And that kind of created a negativity that stayed for quite a while. But now we've seen during these fires, I just had a report back and I think I shared it with you that there are 16 teams that are flying 7,500 acres and they're getting a great deal of information. And one of the things that came out of one of the experiences is that when they were returning from a UAS flight, they actually detected a fire that had started from a brand that flew over in a different area that they didn't even know about. So they actually discovered the fire more quickly because of that drone active. So now there is this coordination. And I'll just add to it, when you look back at Hurricane Harvey, we literally had thousands of flights combined, manned and unmanned. And we had very little issues because what the understanding is to those flying officially is that if there's a manned aircraft in the area, you will immediately go below the tree canopy or you will ground yourself and they have priority. And that's the understanding that needs to be in place. That's great. Are the hobbyists now part of that solution as opposed to part of the problem? Are they paying attention to these self-generated rules and obeying them? You know, that's still kind of a hit or miss type situation. In a lot of cases, it's better now because the words getting out to the hobbyists through the news and other places, but you still have people that buy new drones today and they go out and start flying and they haven't heard or haven't had a reason to listen to any of that kind of stuff before. The other issue that's happened now is that under the New Reauthorization Act, the remote ID is now required. So we'll start seeing systems that can give us passive identification and detection of both the controller and the aircraft. And in most cases, most state laws have a law that says you can't interfere with incident operations. While you cannot manage the airspace, you can actually handle someone who is flying erratically or interfering with your incident operations through those kind of walls, but you'll have to be able to find out where they are. And that's some of the new technologies that we'll be looking at next because there's gonna be a balance between enabling public safety drones as well as being able to identify friend from foe and potentially nefarious actors. That's most interesting. There's so many different branches could come out of that last part of the conversation, but I'm intrigued by what has occurred in California fire. So I'll connect with my California fire friends and we'll see if we can't adopt some of that attitude and thinking here. But there is something interesting that we can pass back to them. I just came across this yesterday talking to our ocean safety people, something I did not know was going on. We had the same kind of problem in the surf contest that take place on the North Shore here between November and February because of all the, well, there's commercial drones out there videotaping or taking imagery of the competition itself. And there may be even official interest on a part of the organizers of something they're gonna collect. And then there's the hobbyists out there flying their drones to do what they can in the surf zone as well. What has apparently occurred is they've all gotten together and they said, we will be the eyes and the lookouts to assist the lifeguards in taking on actions that are needed. So the rules of the road, the unwritten rules of the road are that the drones are out there flying hobbyists or commercial. And if you see somebody in distress, guy can't get back on his board or guy had a water or something like that, the drones go to that location and then do a flutter mode and sit there and wobble and attract attention. And that's a signal that says something underneath here is something you gotta pay attention to. And we may have lost your signal here for a moment. I hope that isn't the case. I think the socialization and the collaborative feeling that has generated that North Shore action in conjunction with what California has experienced on the wildfires would be a great example of how this can actually work in a positive way. And the hobbyists aren't to be left out. They'll come into the picture positively if we give them the guidance. I think that's an important point. I think we have to realize that there's a certain amount of allowance that's out there that different people have the ability to fly. I mean, and officially can fly. So you can't just say nobody can fly because you don't like it. So the best way to look at that is how do we educate all the people that are gonna be involved and create a plan that says if we're gonna have commercial pilots, let's find out who they are and let's find out where they're gonna fly and let's figure out how to organize this in such a way that everybody can benefit from their presence, as opposed to kind of a confliction because we're not willing to work with each other. So what you're saying is we have a kind of an easy up attitude. So people who may not be instructed or informed or advised can still join this kind of a collaborative and slowly but surely they become part of the operating team and they begin obeying the rules and everything is gonna go off in the right direction. But we get two examples, that's great. That actually leads to another category of discussion that I would like to get your thoughts on. That is the will of the Congress instructing the FAA to figure out how to manage the airspace below 400 feet. Does that still belong to the FAA like they have today from the blade of grass to the moon? Or is there some reality in terms of local government agencies managing their own airspace from 400 or pick a number on down? To me, that is such a, the question is, it has so many elements to it. We get different government organizations getting together. You got landowners involved. You got antennas poking up on top of buildings. There's technical issues. There's administrative issues. There's communication issues. What are your thoughts on that, Charles? How are we gonna address that in an effective way? Well, I'm hoping that a lot of feedback will be taken from various users, commercial and public safety from this aspect because what we've gotta be really careful about is we don't wanna create a patchwork of different types of ordinances and regulations across the country because what happens, I know in public safety alone, we have found out as we travel from state to state because the regulations change somewhat of being able to fly. Like they might have a stipulation in a state that says you can't fly an unmanned aircraft system unless you have a permit. And they just didn't think through the process of saying, well, except in an emergency for public safety to fly. So you don't wanna have to be figuring out when you go from county to county what level we can be flying at, especially from a public safety perspective. But then on the business side, if you're gonna be looking at the Amazons and the Googles of the world, they're looking to do package deliveries, which could be very beneficial as well having that hodge podge or patchwork of different types of ordinances really creates confusion and would hinder the continuing evolution in a positive direction for drones. That's a really compelling argument. And in fact, that fits with the discussions we're gonna be having here on the 24th of January at our legislature. And that is let's try to discipline ourselves to stay away from making local specific rules right now. Let's let the next FAA Reauthorization Act requirements work their way out. Find out what kind of leadership we're gonna get out of the federal government and the FAA for dealing with these various issues. And once that's all in place, which will be a couple of years I presume because the lawmaking process is not fast, then it would be evident what local rules might be necessary to supplement what's already in the federal domain. But let's not generate that hodge podge, that crazy quilt. Let's let the federal government do what it needs to do first and then we'll fill in any gaps that are necessary at the state and local level. Yeah, I think one of the things that's important is that we need to continue doing outreach to our communities about the positive nature of what drones bring to our everyday lives to save lives and property. Because at the end of the day, the public safety UAS drones that are out there really make a difference in making us being able to operate more effectively because we can see what we couldn't see. And it helps us operate more safely for the responders and the citizens alike. So there's a huge benefit of drones for public safety. One last question, Charles. And then the clock will run out on us here on this particular episode as well as this string of shows. But regarding the standards work coming out of the various standard organizations, there's the RTCA on the communication side, there's ASTM on the technical and performance side and there's ANSI on the general overall process side. How do you see influencing those standard generating functions from the perspective of the National Council for UAS and public safety? Well, I think that comes back to the discussion of creating the state councils. The state councils allow us to have a communication capability to share ideas and thoughts back and forth between each other, which we don't currently have. So, I mean, there is work being done and there are those people that are in public safety that are engaged in the standards process, but it's still very limited in who it is and not only just adjusting it, but knowing what standards are out there and available for access. ASTM is one, the Airborne Public Safety Association has a set of standards that says if you're going to have a drone program, here's the elements that you need to include in a program so that you realize it's not just buy and fly, you've got to have governance policies and procedures, you've got to have your maintenance for the airworthiness of the aircraft and a lot more. And NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association is supposed to come out really soon with NFPA 2400, which is a similar type of standard to the Airborne Public Safety Association. So, what ANSI has done is they've created the UAS Collaborative Coalition, or committee if you will, that will look at all the standards, it's creating the roadmap now of those standards that don't exist that should be addressed. Okay, so that's great. So ANSI has put in the big picture around looking at the whole thing from top down and where there's gaps, they're going to identify those gaps and then the various technical organizations will jump in and do something about that. It's great that NFPA is putting its out there. I know that myself and Dr. Mike Brown and company were out there with those guys about three years ago and actually suggested that to them that, hey, well, before this gets set in concrete, why don't you, NFPA, generate a set of standards that apply to firefighters or that would benefit firefighters so that it's done from the users? Well, what they did, though, is the NFPA actually created the first multi-discipline technical committee in their history and I was actually the first chair of that committee. Okay, and you're chair now of the larger issue, the National Council for UAS Use and Public Safety. What are the various other organizations besides NFPA that feed into the Council of Charles? Since I'm now your Hawaii guy on the Council, and you just aren't asking these questions. Well, there's about 30 national organizations, but I'll just give you kind of the highlights, the International Fire Chiefs, International Police Chiefs, National Sheriff's Association, the Major City Police Chiefs, the Major, the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Association, the International Association of Emergency Managers, the National Association of Search and Rescue. So you get the picture. It's a large group of people that are communicating back and forth and sharing ideas across disciplines, not just being, we're trying to get away from those silos of excellence. Well, great, and I hope the FAA understands all that and pays attention to it and then turns to that as part of its Emergency Services Stakeholder Council and maybe other councils that are out there as well as we go forward here with this amazing next five years of logic and regulations coming from logic that should be much more aligned to serve the future rather than what we've been in the past. So I'm looking forward. I will tell you that to date, I have to tell you that the FAA has been phenomenal working with Public Safety, helping to address the issues and get us in the air quickly and safely. And I know they're anxious to help us move into the next levels of beyond-visual limits. I think we all owe a big hand to them, Jim Williams in particular, who kind of initiated this basically thought process in the FAA about five years ago. But just remember in our own past and just in the last couple of years, people are still whining in the FAA. When are you gonna get moving? When are you gonna make regulations? When are you gonna make this thing work? Now, they're moving so fast. The FAA, stop, stop, you're moving too fast. We can't remember when you made the last law change. So we have a really quite a change in C-state here in terms of moving forward with drones. So at this point in time, I'd like to thank Charles Warner for being on about the fourth or fifth time you've been on a show, Charles, and I appreciate your insight very much. It actually helps us tremendously to have this kind of concentrated insight, which we can then generate in YouTube and pass around. And I'll be your man from Hawaii on the console. And at this point in time, we will shut the show down and we'll end this particular series of shows on drones. Thanks very much, folks, for watching.