UAS News Podcast — 2014-02-06
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast series where we interview newsmakers and discuss the news and applications that are relevant to global unmanned technologies community. Our new program host Patrick Egan, this is usually where we would say hello and welcome to our co-host Mr. Gene Robinson. But Gene is probably a part of a news story this week as he's been called off for another search and he's out there looking for a missing person as we speak.
And we wish him the best of luck on that. It's kind of funny how we think of Gene as he's our resident expert in search and rescue and if I was lost I'd want him out there looking for me. So whoever it is, it's kind of maybe unlucky that they're lost, but lucky that Gene's looking for him. Anyway, today we are going to talk about the drone prize 2014 with Jonathan Evans and we're going to bring him on.
Hello Jonathan. Hello Patrick, thanks for having me. Hey, no problem, it's kind of last minute and we are doing a few podcasts this week, but I think this is important and I will be having fun at NASA next week so we will not be on that one during the regular skyline. So I thought it was important enough that we bring you on now and kind of talk about the drone prize 2014, but before we get into that, do you think it would be possible for you to introduce yourself to the audience, give us a bio and then put a bow on it with how you got involved with an aircraft systems place?
Sure, like you said, my name is Jonathan Evans. I actually got into aviation early, I was 19 years old when I got my private pilot license. I was enlisted in the Army at the time and I was lucky enough to get accepted to Warrant Officer Flight School. I ended up flying UH-60 Blackhawk for about seven years in the Army as a Warrant Officer and then I got out and I've been flying civilian helicopters for about the last seven years, mainly life flight, some utility work in Alaska
and I used my GI Bill to get my multi-engine airplane APP, so for those of you who speak FAA, that's another license, the airline transport pilot license.
And I'm also a CFI in both helicopters and airplanes. I arrived to the unmanned part, because yeah, honestly that's the nine year, oh I was 17 years flying as a man, it's going to cost a lot of shit I guess. But I was, you know, I'm very honest and real, this is, I'm actually the CEO and co-founder of a third startup company, I've been involved with, it's called Rising Tide Innovation. We're a software firm based out of Portland, Oregon.
We are aimed at back check startup right now and you can reach out to rti.io or follow up this at aerial data, at aerial data on Twitter if you want to know more about the company. We're basically working on taking all of that professional aviation knowledge and coding it into a compliance platform for the emerging market of commercial drone operators, commercial UAF operators. And so that's really what brought me into the unmanned space was being able to see that
I could help set up and end these regulations with my background and just being a total geek and fascinated by the technology, it seemed like the right place to go with my next startup.
And you know really I see it, I see the UAF network as a, you know, physical extension of the internet really. It's the information that we're reaching out into the real world and discovering more information about improving quality of that information. And so that was really fascinating to me. Actually I was reading Chris Anderson's article Wires that I think brought me directly into the space as not sure and then it was great to meet him at the S.U.S.D.
Expo last year. Yeah he's definitely an interesting fellow. He's covered a lot of territory and I think that you know a lot of it is relevant. I didn't know that you were CFI too but you know that's a good thing.
I wish you know a lot of let's say manned aviation people have kind of exited this let's say ecosystem because they didn't want to get hammered or they could go and actually make a living. The manned world while we try to sort out the mess that is the regulations from the aircraft system. So I'm glad that you're here and I'm glad that you're inputting on it. I wish we had more people that just in the a lot of the aviation people extricated themselves because they don't want to get hammered by the FAA.
It is arduous. It's difficult and not having the regulations in place. I think that ambiguity is discomforting for people especially as you spend your whole career understanding the rules of the road quite well and getting informative coming to this space where where there aren't any real rules of the road written yet. I think it'd be daunting to throw a lot of the folks from the manned system aside.
Yeah well you know and even young man people I mean I've been here so long I was young until I was real you know and I think that I took that through this and go okay. So you know that's but it's good that more people like you are sticking it out and staying in here and you know being part of it and bringing your voice to it because I mean you know I think we had this conversation offline before it's like you know you've flown the black off and I forget how much that helicopter weighs but I know 22,500 pounds I believe still.
Okay so it's 22,400 and you know 96 pounds heavier than the small UAS. Right. You can't handle that you know you just you just don't qualify or whatever I don't know. You know it's kind of to me it's like wait a minute you know I really think I gotta be honest and this is probably that it depends a lot of technology people off but really my thing is is that there should be no reason that people that have a private pilot license or the commercial carrier license shouldn't be able to fly line of sight last week you know.
All of the other things that they talk about you know how to do you've you've put in your career flying the helicopter you ever de-conflicted airspace that you were flying through or do you fly with on horse? Yeah well we all know that the gold standard right now for flying DFR is to see and avoid things and that's why the medical exam requires you to have you know good enough eyesight to be able to do that.
So yeah we de-conflict airspace all the time. You remember when you remember when the AGC thing last year during the government shutdown they were all worried that they were going to serve going to be all these class D airports basically in the more rural areas of America that weren't going to have towers anymore you know we're going to be but I remember sort of chuckling amongst other special pilots that the the narrative that got adopted in the press was kind of funny like how are how are these airports going to be staged if there's nobody in the tower something to pilot how to land
and if you know if any if any pilot has flown anywhere you know just happens to be another airport without a tower you just have to talk to the pilot area as you say you can flick the airspace because you're professional and your life is to do so you can talk to the roads the road and so you apply the rules the road and we've been doing it safely for what gosh I guess the uh it's almost over 100 years
right so I think we can apply the same things to do on the AGC.
And when you were flying for the army uh you got tickets you were you in the beach and the mountains or just at the beach or where were you did you get deployed? Yeah I spent uh six months in in coastal life I don't know if um I don't know how many people refer to being in the army as being at the beach but that's why that's why I'm struggling but I know yeah I spent six months in coastal though was my only real deployment um as a medevac pilot there
and of course you have to deconflict airspace there in a totally different kind of way it includes threats but it's the same you know it's interesting it's the same regulatory principle about you know I think the word deconfliction is exactly what you know the FAA, Transport Canada, CAA, CAACA all of them are ultimately just trying to do right now and the way they do it in the man's foot is they trust the lightning pilot to be able to do that
and I'm sure that will come will come to a agreement for the unmanned operators that will be very soon.
Well you know just a couple parallels to uh you know what you've been doing with larger aircraft but anyway I want to get to two more down in that I want to talk about some of the good stuff that you're doing and the reason that you're really on the show um and you touched on it we we first met um the um the Small and Med Systems Business Expo in San Francisco and uh you know you touched a little bit on your your company
and I do I make a little joke about how if you want to get any venture funding capital uh out of Silicon Valley that whatever your you know product or invention is has to work on an iPad and uh just so happens to work on an iPad is it not?
It does it does it's beautiful I'd love to show you the latest version again Patrick thank you. Oh you will uh you're going to get your chance because uh you are uh on the the document to be a speaker at the Small and Med Systems Business Expo 2014 coming up here in May and uh I'm looking forward to hear you know it will be a little less than a year but I'm looking forward to hearing about uh where
you guys have been and and what you've been doing and I know that you're out there um you know spreading a good word about this and and so this kind of today's thing is a little bit of an offshoot about that um and if there's a little bit of time at the end maybe we can talk about that product but let's let's talk about the show today and you know which is about the drone prize in 2014 and I was I was hoping that um
you could tell us about the drone prize concept.
Sure um well yeah again thanks for having us on here we just just had our official launch party yesterday for this um this is a project of the EVSI which is um as you know Patrick the national organization you're the president of the Silicon Valley chapter I'm on the board of the cascade chapter and I approached uh our president Eric Foltz that uh you know with this idea of of doing a during a national contest the next drone enthusiast with the public good um
and Eric has been a real champion of it and and empowered me to stand up a team that's just excellent um just to put together I think a really a really beautiful thing for so again the higher arc narrative of this technology um so we are like I said we're running inside of the EUVSI cascade or the EVSI national uh it's a national concept uh contest and what we're doing you can go to droneprize.com
and you can also follow up at droneprize and the hashtag silicon sky is what we're using as well so if you use your uh twitterverse kind of person you can find all kinds of things and points on on the droneprize using a hashtag silicon sky and hashtag droneprize but the the basic concept like I said is to connect drone enthusiasts out there with uh public good and I can tell you the inception of this came when um my my young company at the time um was approaching we approached the fire department
I was flying a light flight out at the time um and so hey you know there's this this color process there's a public entity process that's available to you if you're interested in the technology and really it was sort of a friendly thing I'm starting a drone business would you guys be interested in this and it really involved to be um much more um as I was able to get the chief of the department involved on board
and he really saw the promise in technology so what we decided to do and a lot of your listeners will appreciate I think the sort of threading the needle of the right here a bit is that because we were a commercial basically we were offering these colors and sculpting to our fire department um technically I believe and you can back answer Patrick or not it will say the FAA's interpretation is that if
I was to do a demonstration then to the fire department of anything at PGI stand up that would be for a commercial purpose because it would be in support of our consulting company and and so we what we did solve that was we invited some very clearly delineated drone enthusiasts um that are the Roswell flight test crew that I'm sure a lot of your audience will will know as well they're worth looking up if
you don't the Roswell flight test crew are what I call technological evangelicals they really they really are they are in it for the love of the sport and they they love this technology and they're trying to spread the good word and they're clearly obvious you know they're darlings of the AMA and um and really just rock stars in the whole rq world and so we invited them to come do a demonstration
with one of their home built uh drones that happen to have a um a full year sensor on it because uh because of their youtube channel basically clear they gave them a small uh a small thermal camera for the drone which was perfect for us to go and do a demonstration for the fire department so what we ended up doing was we did three scenarios where we did a hasty river search and we used a thermal camera there then we did a hazmat scene in a rail yard where we were able fly the robot down range
you just literally read the serial number off of a train car that you give the incident commander immediate situational awareness about what's in the community for example you know you fly this thing down there within two minutes you could know that this rail part is just derailed is actually leaking chlorine let's evacuate the community compared to what it used to take which would be putting multiple guys in hazmat suits sending them down range
and putting them exposing them to whatever's down there and then bringing back that answer and they say that whole that whole process would have taken them up with them an hour and so you know when they when they were able to see what the u.s is able to do for them it just those two scenarios they they said boy you know firefighting is never ever going to be safe and this is a tool that's going to completely empower the fire service to help stay alive
and protect the fellow firefighters and the last scenario we did was that was a live burn building exercise so when i met the FAA actually at the AUVSI national conference and i told them about the process they said they told me you can't be told me that that that's that's really the only way that you could do it with the regulations right that you invite to invite a drone hobbyist or a u.s hobbyist or enthusiast to basically
you have to ask yourself why is the flight initiated right if they're doing it for pleasure and recreation and they're following all good FAA guidance and basically now the AMA's rules with that MOU i think i think that that's pretty much you know the the rules you should be operating under under recreational standards is that if they're doing that they're doing it for pleasure then that's completely illegal
and so throwing prize is basically taking that exercise that we did with the fire department here in oregon and amplifying it projecting it to a national audience and really trying to inspire creativity out there in the enthusiast people which we all know is a huge slung orc of enthusiasts out there that have a lot of creativity and so we've asked them quite broadly to employ the aerial perspective
and the public good they speak take your drone out and go find somebody to help in your community do do it with a civic minded purpose and then upload a video showing a successful mission and we are going to be having multiple multiple avenues of of of being able to market and and instead of telling your own story as an entrance you'll have you'll have the ability to produce your own content they share across their own channels as
well and then there'll be a voting system and we will have we'll select our finalists we have select three finalists after suscxpo and the auvsi national conference in orlando so basically by the beginning of june we'll pick the three finalists and we'll fly them out here to fortland and we're going to do a very similar thing to what we did in that demonstration i described just now we're going to we're going to run our three finalists through scenarios in training scenarios with with actual first responders here in oregon
and we're hoping we haven't we haven't got the exact location nailed down yet but we should be basically at another fire training facility for at least one of the events and we also want to highlight the fa designation of the test site here in oregon and so we'll probably do a wildland exercise out at the warm springs test range that is just designated by the afp so very exciting we've just launched like
i said germaprize.com everybody should go check out our intro video produced by you guys in fortland visual aid which is just beautiful work and their their production sponsors it's also sponsored by api aerial technology international that is grand pride sponsors they're out here in clinton this oregon and and they're actually putting up a heavy lift multi-rotor chamber platform but valued around ten thousand dollars with the great side
so we are also looking to us for additional partners and and sponsors so if anybody out there in the audience right now you know go to the website if you are a business entity or you are a career and not profiting anybody that thinks that you have something to add to this project where we'd like to invite you as a sponsor or partner to you know tell us how you can participate well i mean i i did get to see the video last night that
you did in it the production quality is great the idea is really good i like the idea that you know you're trying to give people a view of what you can do with this technology and really i think it's a time that we as a community step out and show people this because i think more and more i know even myself when i talk to people who are let's say you know apprehensive about drones didn't you start kind of talking about some of the things that you're talking about that apprehension starts to evaporate yeah absolutely
i mean you tell them that you tell them that we just did an exercise with firefighters to help find a drowning victim in a river and all of a sudden people are completely evacuated of their concerns right there they almost immediately they they say oh that's a great idea i'd like to get firefighters the best tool possible right and and the thing is is that they're so let's say i mean i would call it or like a dronism
and they're so uneducated about what a drone is and what they can do and all the rest of that that's uh you know they have no idea so you know a lot of time they'll be like okay well let's see you know show my hands who you know who doesn't want to feed a hungry girl yeah no one shoot up no who doesn't want to find lost children oh you know hey there we go so uh it is but you know come go ahead it's a very good
you know this this endless debate over over the lexicon about what we're supposed to call these things that if i can have a winner at the end of course press the public give us drones so we we're we're trying to inspire a new imagination i think in the public mind for what that word means which is obviously drone prizes without but boy if they could all take out i would choose to have a term like the nettle is little aerial robot or
you know something you know or ar maybe aerial robot you know just some sort of you know aerial platform or whatever i know what you're saying the drone thing though i mean you know it and we did just go to some point really that this is the president called him of the united states of america you know uh we lost that battle so i agree with you it's time to say okay well you know you get the old jack of diamonds is a hard card to play
you know you get it yeah you play it so that's what we got dealt and now it's up to us to say okay well how long are we going to take this uh hand that was dealt to us and move forward and so yeah drone things just over just to you know embrace accept enjoy and you just have to go out and say well now not every drone carries hellfire missiles it's it says this i don't think we have to get bogged down in that conversation besides what you're showing hey look the thing is that if
you can establish the high ground or even just the normative ground right just the what would seem normal to society in the sort of next iteration of technology here if you can establish that the bell curve is actually you know quite i'd say on the order of you know benevolent to banal like really these things are going to be scanning farms are going to be kind of boring to some degree right so if we need the public mind to see that the sort of the normal the bell curve is all quite um
you know it's actually empowering but if anything it's really an octopus the most then the things that are at the the tails of the bell curve are going to be spoke for a verdict right so paparazzi paparazzi are still going to have seen like jurors right like they're they are whether they whether they have a camera on the ground or camera in the air it's not you don't want to basically you don't want to diminish the technology
you want to diminish the behavior or or specifically on the behavior still so um or is that ostracized or ostracize those people from within the community and if you know i mean that paparazzi thing is one thing you know but i mean we don't we don't even i don't even think it's up to us to really uh put lipstick on any pig you know it's just like hey we want to go do this we want to use this technology
and that's why you know even at the expo last year my presentation was trying to awaken the giant of technology uh to technology sector like jeff bezos did at amazon there were very very small um amount of people a percentage of people that had any concerns about that they're like oh i'll get my dvds in 20 minutes great yeah no i know it was kind of the technology limbered moment in some weird way
you know you couldn't you couldn't have the same sort of off for that moment in history i think because you're right it was it was that we'll get our package in 30 minutes and i think that you know public stood up and paid attention for a second and said oh that's cool overwhelmingly cool um you know wow you know or even that beer thing the other day yeah yeah i'm sure you saw that story and people were like
i mean there's a petition going the petition the white house to keep your meat hooked off my beer uh you know i don't know if you've done any ice fishing out of a week or from not beer drinking i don't know if that counts as ice fishing i don't know yes i've done a lot of that i would have been you know that would have been really handy because there were times you know like you would be when we had to draw straws it was in the liquor store after consuming the beer
and being out of the beer usually uh it's time to go to i used to have this thing like if you're out of cigarettes or you're out of beer you've been drinking it's time to go to bed even if it's 5 30 in the afternoon i'm pretty sure we've had that at this point don't we but i think it's a great it's those stories that are kind of getting people to you know that's why the dinner table conversations are getting a lot easier
i guess because it does seem like a cool fun interesting again empowering technology you know that's ultimately what drone prize is about again is that we just wanted to give all of this populous up swell of energy out there and creativity a channel and a mission and something to do with all of their knowledge and and capability of this technology now and you know we're not talking about firefighters we're talking about land use managers conservation scientists
i mean they're you're going to talk to your school about stem stem education anything really that you could think of that just engages the public market in a productive way and that's what we're trying to encourage everybody to do and we'll give a reason ten thousand dollars prize in terms of 400 and and a platform of the story i hope everybody i hope everybody that's listening out there is already starting to know for anything i'm not who am
i going to go talk to you know my community to see how they could for your perspective i just brought my drone i don't know but maybe you could you know put that whole philacontist guy thing you know get an episode of portlandia you know during the year i think that show well i think that we would i think we'd be a great success up here if we could if we could make it out of school for portlandia episode in fact
i think i think that's what i'm doing more i'm getting home on you taking that after i think that might i might i might motivate my team with that okay our new goal is to get on an episode of portlandia i'd actually like to see you in the women and women's first look store with the drone i think that would be glasses uh god that's right or even the minimum air's off is that'd be excellent but yeah
you know i i think it's good i think what you're doing is is a long time in needing to be done and you've given an outlet to a very very uh creative and forward thinking i mean that's one thing and you probably realize that's already just meeting the people in this community i mean there's some i mean there's some smart people um there's some some people that have issues with interpersonal relationships
but i mean smart uh people that they just know the way they think and what they think about is just like wow you know this is that's amazing i get a lot of knowledge with them no it's true it's true exactly this is a this is a very interesting crowd of enthusiasts you know we're a bunch of we're a bunch of geeks and futurists you know we're a bunch of people that see this technology is as becoming uh as significant as as
you know smartphones and we and we're the guys that are just sitting there at the edge saying oh look it's right over there it's right over there and well you know all of a sudden it's right here too so i think i think this is a big year for it there are a lot of things i mean drone tv is another great example i we're seeing we're seeing a lot of popular stuff swell now for this technology and and the stories are just the stories are just getting more
and more interesting right well and that outlet that you guys come up with i think it's going to be great because you're going to see some i think people are going to go wow yeah i hope so i agree that i truly do i i i throw out things you know i just have to list it off like you know potential people in your community kind of thing we obviously think about that right like how could we actually help nudge our contestants to the
right place but i tend to pull back every time we have that conversation to say actually i want to leave it why you know like let's leave it let's leave it to the imagination to some degree and in terms of putting up any boundaries to you know our deals you should read through our contest rules very carefully and you'll see that every every bit of guidance you have a and the a m a gets caught in our contest rules
so clearly have to be obvious clearly seem not to do this commercial purposes you need to have a minimum team of two so you need to have an observer and other other sort of basic rules that are best practices from the community our capa also has excellent best practices that you'll see that are codified in our in our rules that it's that's the only indication you will we'll we'll make sure that you're legal basically by giving
you this this enthusiast vehicle that i mean we have an fa admin layer on our on our contest so we really are we got the rules right um so we're offering all the enthusiasm you know a vehicle as as as obvious to go ahead and and um show us that creativity and from there the sky's the limit pun intended i like the idea well we're out of time but i want it one more time maybe you could uh give the website
and the twitter account please sure at droneprize.com and at drone prize on twitter and we're using the hashtag silicon sky all right well you know hey thanks a lot for coming on thanks a lot for all of the effort and you're putting into this and i look forward to hearing uh what the year has been like for you and your business at the expo so we'll see you then thanks for coming back patrick can i i'd be remiss if
i didn't mention something with the cascade chapter of aub si were hosting a uh an event a conference in tacoma washington on march 19th and 20th specifically geared at uavs for first responders so again taking all of this work work we've done with fire departments we're going to be going through coa processes and the sfoc process in canada and i'm actually going to be leaving a workshop on that on the 19th
so encourage everybody out there also it comes to coma march 19th and 20th cascade a uvsi at cascade a uvsi and you can find out everything about it sounds good all right well good luck with all that and we will talk to you soon in the future here sir have a good day thanks so much patrick this was fun all right take care