UAS News Podcast — 2013-07-10
Transcript
Welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast Series where we interview newsmakers and discuss the news and applications relevant to the global unmanned technologies community. I'm your program host Patrick Egan. This is episode 54 and it is titled NOAA Pacific. Let's welcome our co-host Mr.
Gene Robinson. Gene. Hello, Patrick. I thought I would not keep you waiting today and be on time.
How do you like that? You caught me off guard. Yeah, I figured it would. But you know, it's good you're keeping me on my toes.
So what's going on with you? You've been doing any flying or what's happening down there in Texas?
As a matter of fact, we have done a little flying. Of course, we're stress testing all our equipment about this time of the summer. You know, unlike our guest who is going to cooler climes, it has been hotter than 10 acres of burning cedar stumps down here in Texas. And we're pushing the limits of our equipment and people and everything else.
But it's good. I mean, we're finding out what breaks and what doesn't. So it's good research on our end. It's just kind of rough on the old bod.
Hey, I hear you. I hear you. But it is good to get out there in the extreme climates and put the equipment through the paces and see what you get. There's some real value in that.
I noticed that too in the projects I was in. You get out in the hot desert temperatures and stuff starts failing. But it's a good learning curve. I've been busier than the proverbial tick on a hound dog with the Small Unmanned Systems Business Expo.
That is certainly eating up a lot of my time. However, there's a buzz out there in the community worldwide. Everybody's talking about it. They're interested in it.
We did try and shotgun this deal early, but we actually we've got a lot of sponsors. We got LeClaire, Ryan Law Firm. We got Nexutech sponsoring the Internet. Just think we're going to have a new technologies symposium.
And we're actually going to have free Internet for the attendees. That's like a groundbreaking right there. I never understood why you go to these shows. Hey, what's the password for the Internet?
Oh, there's no Internet. Oh, OK. I'll sit here in the mushroom cave for the next two days. So we're going to have that.
We also have a deal cooking with Domino's to deliver us a pizza. You might have seen the video of the Domino's pizza drone. Of course. So we'll call over there to the FAA and see if we can get Clarence to fly in some pizzas.
Right. Oh, it'll be no problem. You know, I got a lot of friends over there. All I got to do is pick up the phone, make the call, and I'd be like, the skids are already greased.
I'll tell them that I know you. How about that?
Oh, OK. That 15-minute COA just got stretched out. That's right. Personal friends with Mr.
Gene Robinson. Anyway, it's coming along good. We got a great, great line of speakers. It's going to be groundbreaking.
We're also going to try and stream it, and I think we're going to stream it for free. We're also trying to do a new first there, and you'll be able to ask questions via the Twitter or email. We're also going to have, we're going to try and Skype some folks in that can't make it from around the world. So it's just so they can talk for a few minutes and kind of, you know, what it means to them.
It's a real history-making event. So it looks good. Got a lot of folks. I know we got this guy, Gene Robinson, coming out.
He's going to talk about SAR. You may have heard of him. Yeah, he wrote a book or something like that. He did.
He wrote a book, and that's actually a pretty good piece of work there if you're interested in learning how to do SAR with small unmanned aircraft. So, you know, we did do a show about that. You can go back in the, go back there in the past episodes and hear all about it. But all right, well, let's move along here and do segment one, and we are going to bring on our guest, who is the Deputy Superintendent for Operations and Administration, NOAA, NOS, Channel Islands, National Marine Sanctuary, and Project Scientist, NOAA, OR, Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program, Mr.
Todd Jacobs. How's it going, Todd?
Good morning. Just fine, Patrick. It's kind of a long, and we're glad you're here. It's kind of a long title, and it kind of suggests that you're kind of busy down there, Todd.
So maybe you could introduce yourself to the audience, you know, a little bio, where you've been, where you're at now, and how you got involved with unmanned aircraft systems, if you could. Sure, happy to. And it's actually two titles. That's probably why it reads a little long.
But in my day job, where I work with the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary of NOAA, here in Santa Barbara, I oversee our staff that does operational things with our research vessels and oversee our sort of budget facilities and administration. Since 2005, I've been on half to two-thirds time detail to another part of NOAA, and that's the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office. I'm sort of
one of the initial people that were selected in NOAA to work on what was our first unmanned aircraft systems project, which was a collaboration with NASA Dryden Flight Research Center to put a NOAA payload on Altair, which was a pre-production Predator V, in flight science missions.
And that was really the inception of UAS and NOAA. And that was really a project at that time, funded with some discretionary money from the then-NOAA administrator, Vice Admiral Lautenbecker. And from that effort grew the UAS program, which later included full and part-time staff and people on detail such as myself. And really the UAS program office mandate is to determine where UAS technology will be beneficial to add to NOAA's fleet of scientific research aircraft.
The operations are conducted principally by our Aircraft Operations Center, where we have several aircraft and many pilots. But the program office really develops the requirements, analyzes the systems and sensors that are available on the market, conducts demonstrations and evaluations, and then makes recommendations for procurement and acquisition, and puts together the science missions, which are then operated in conjunction with our Aircraft Operations Center. So I've been with NOAA since 1989, and in various capacities of operational things sort of led me down this path.
I've had, I think, four research vessels built in my time with NOAA. I was attached to a project for a few years that worked with National Geographic, training scientists to operate single-seat, one-manned, deep submersibles. I worked a lot with remote sensing in various systems, mostly in operational with a management background. Go ahead, Gene.
I would just say that when you get into remote submersibles and putting one-man remote submersibles down deep, that's some pretty intense stuff there. So yeah, that's good on you. And Todd, do you just have an affinity toward flying things, or was it because you're maybe like a Mr. Gadget that you got volunteered for the job, or puts your name in the hat?
How did they pick you to do that? I'm trying to reach back. I mean, I spent some time in the Special Projects Office of the National Ocean Service, and I have sort of an engineering type of mind, although no formal training in it. I'm pretty good with equipment and machines and understanding systems.
But I might have just been available with some extra capacity in the prerequisite skills for the additional... I think I was in the right place at the right time more than anything else. We hear a lot of that. It's not one of the common threads here on the show, is people are like, well, you know, it's just kind of here, and this thing kind of happened.
And I was like, hey, that's kind of neat, and had a little bit of extra time or whatever, and got involved in that, and it took off. I really do...I'm primarily an air guy, but I do like...I think that the undersea stuff is really cool. And the things that you can do, it's kind of funny as everybody, oh, you know, they're talking about space, and I like space too. I'm not deriding space because I really think there's a lot of opportunity in commercial space.
But I mean, as far as the ocean's concerned, I mean, there's a total frontier there that's been barely analyzed. Is that fair to say?
Oh, very much so. I mean, there's a million analogies, but, you know, so little of the deep ocean especially has been explored that it's almost a shame. Of course, there's less money for space exploration now too, but I thought it sort of interesting and sad in a way when the Challenger Deep was recently conquered by Jim Cameron with a full ocean depth submersible. It was really a competition where there were three privately funded competing entities to go back to the deepest part of the ocean where nobody had been since 1959.
And the people that were there that one time before basically did a bounce dive with no windows. So what troubled me about this, that there were these three efforts, and one was involved funding with Richard Branson, the other with Eric Schmidt of Google, and the third, of course, that actually finished their submersible and went to the bottom of the ocean was James Cameron. And, you know, good on him for doing it.
But what makes me sad is that NOAA doesn't have that capacity, that, you know, that a consortium of government research, international government research institutions doesn't have the funding or the capacity to do that, but the private sector does.
So I think that's kind of a sad statement of, you know, where priority is for research in the deep ocean of God. Although that's pretty tangent from our discussion here on manned aircraft systems. Yeah, but I mean, I agree with you. I, you know, I really, and it's not just a NOAA thing, you know, I would, we used to meet over here at NASA Ames and go into the airplane or the blimp hangers.
Blimp hangers are excellent. I'd give my eye tooth to have one. I wonder if I could get it moved into the backyard. But you go in there and they have all these aircraft from the 70s, all of these, you know, like groundbreaking scientific aircraft.
And I was actually there to see the Zeppelin NT was hangered there. And it was interesting and everything else. But man, I was gravitated right to these aircraft. They got all the pictures in the flight ops building, you know, the glossy code of chrome, you know, color photos of all these scientific equipment.
And I was like, man, you know, remember when NASA was just really doing all this science and trying to break new ground and everything else. But, you know, funding's an issue. People have also become risk averse. Our culture has become risk averse.
And it seems like blazing or pioneering a trail is just too dangerous and too hard to put together or too much exposure for people. And I agree with you, Todd. It would be nice if we were doing, the United States is doing more in the ocean and in space and things like that. But I don't want to get too far off in the weeds on that.
But I do think it was cool. Now, do you remember how deep they went in the trench there?
Oh, I'm sorry. I don't have that off the top of my head, how deep the deepest part of the Marianas trenches. It's deep. But yeah, I forget to.
Anyway, well, yeah, it's dark and it's cold. And there's a lot of pressure there. Okay. Well, anyway, so, you know, let's kind of talk about, you know, you said you go out into the field and you collect data.
So maybe you can tell us about the types of missions you fly with UAS. And now I didn't limit that to smalls because you did allude to doing some work with some bigger steps. Maybe you can give us the whole spectrum there. Yeah, I can sort of characterize NOAA's forays into unmanned aircraft systems, what we've done, where we're going, and then kind of showcase my specific interest in developing small UAS science missions in NOAA.
So, you know, to just carry on chronologically from our Predator experience that kicked the whole thing off, we've all the big UAS work, so the Predator and Global Hawk-related missions have been in conjunction with NASA. So we work very closely with the Dryden Flight Research Center, especially, but other units of NASA as well. And for the Predator, we had initially one NOAA Corps officer pilot, a winged aviator, trained to be a Predator pilot. And that was following NASA's acquisition of Econa, which is a Predator B MQ-9 Predator that's configured to fly, is different variants.
So it can fly. In fact, it's been recently reconfigured and upgraded to the current block Air Force type wiring harnesses and so forth, in addition to its capacity to carry science pods, and have partnered with NASA on science missions on Econa. And when the Global Hawks were acquired and set up for science, NOAA's been flying science missions and training more NOAA Corps officers to support NASA in those affairs. And most of that work is high altitude, obviously.
It's missions that are related to global climate change and advanced weather, principally, and Arctic issues. That's pretty far from the work that I focus on personally, and that's small UAS. And my career has been in management of national marine sanctuaries in NOAA, which include some pretty remote places. I just got back a little over a week ago from a 10-day long mission where we used the AeroVirma Puma AE UAS system to survey the remote outer coast of Washington State, essentially the coastline of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary
and Olympic National Park Wilderness Area for their annual seabird surveys, which include surveying for several sensitive and endangered bird species, such as the common mirrors, tufted puffins, rhinoceros oculates, et cetera.
Incidentally, we also captured sea lion and sea otter populations in the remote areas and did shoreline and offshore tsunami marine debris surveys along these really remote pocket beaches on the coast that you can't even hike into. Now the marine debris surveys were incidental to our bird work, but for the birds, we're flying the bluff tops and faces, cliff faces, to do the marine debris work. We just flew the same areas
but along the shore. Now that's a fairly remote place, but we also go to places like the northwestern Hawaiian Islands archipelago, where we'll have a NOAA ship underway for a month to do biological surveys up and down that chain.
So that's basically from Kauai to Midway Atoll is about 1,200 miles, and the inter-Atoll is a little farther than that. And so the value of these small UAS systems to do remote wildlife surveys that don't have a chance of hurting people, because traditionally we've done this by launching small boats from the ship and landing people through the surf to then walk the beaches and conduct these surveys
for, say, albatross, sea turtles, bunksheels, for the Hawaiian example. By switching over to flying, say, with the Puma, we're not only doing a mission that's safer, we also eliminate any risk of introducing any exotic organisms to some of these Atolls and islands that are pristine, people going to shore, but also there's much, much, much less chance of disturbing these organisms than having the people
out there as well.
So really being able to launch and recover at sea is part of the holy grail for NOAA, and that's what led me and led us to following up on small UAS systems that were ship launch and recover capable. So most of my work is what we call LMR, Living Marine Resource. I've been developing with a team of people. I mean, it's not just me, but I've been working with folks in NOAA to develop the protocols
and procedures to do various wildlife survey missions pre- and post-oil spill quantifications and for a little bit of initial research on the potential to use these systems for fisheries and marine protected area enforcement daytime and night.
So that's where my sort of main interest is, and that's why I really focus on the small UAS. All right. Well, now that was a lot of really good information, because that's what we like to have people like you that are pioneering stuff like this on the program to share with our listeners, because that's what people want to hear about. People speculate about uses, and there's probably 200 speculative uses for the technology.
And speculation is one thing, being out in the field doing it is another thing. So I came up with a couple of questions for you, and one of them going back is, and I'm pretty much on the fence on this one, but the global warming thing. Is there science supporting that?
And I don't want to get too deep into it. I just, you know, you're a professional. You know, honestly, Pat, I'm not qualified to comment on that as a scientist or as a representative of the agency. Am I concerned about it personally?
For sure. But I can't give you an expert opinion on that. I'm sorry. That's all right.
Fair enough. The other question that I had when you were talking about that is the tsunami debris. And is that, I mean, you know, in the news media we saw, you know, on the waves there was just literally tons of garbage. What's been the fallout from that tsunami?
Is it tons of garbage in these pristine areas or did it kind of dissipate before it got there? What does that kind of look like?
Can you give us a picture of that? Yeah, I can give you a sort of general characterization of the work that we've been doing and why, and mention that this is a collaboration with people that work in NOAA dedicated to the marine debris issue. So we collaborated both at the Olympic Coast of Washington last month and a year ago out in Hawaii on some initial research on using small UAS to be able to identify tsunami-borne marine debris in the ocean.
And of course they've been, NOAA has been using our capabilities for modeling to forecast when the large waves, if you will, of debris will impact the Hawaiian Islands and the Pacific Coast of the United States and Alaska over this year and next really.
So that issue is a huge issue and it impacts, and will impact different areas, different amounts. So a lot of that debris ends up in the garbage patch in the North Pacific gyre where it's entrained, but eventually slowly starts to spin out. And a lot of that material builds up in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands archipelago naturally. And there was debris doing that, you know, so it's a lot of that material.
There's been debris doing that, you know, since there's been marine debris in the ocean. It's, you know, oceanic, so patterns of weather sort of determine that. There's just sort of more of it from that source now. And in Washington we were collaborating with our marine debris colleagues to survey both the remote outer coast, which I mentioned earlier, and test a theory about whether or not there would be an accumulation of debris entrained on the shallow edge of the continental shelf about 25, 30 miles offshore.
So we did both things last month. And of course there have been a couple, three very large, very well documented in the media items of debris that were documented to have been of the tsunami origin. There was a pier or two that washed up or three, you know, in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, amazingly with exotic organisms that survived the tri-o-ific. And there's everything from that to small, you know, containers and most notably a lot of large cylindrical pieces of foam that appears from the air like styrofoam.
But when we hiked in to find some of this material, we determined it to be much heavier and denser than foam. But these barrel shaped items that are roughly six to eight feet long and maybe six feet around, and they're sort of cylindrical and tapered at the end, we believe that they may have lost their outer plastic coating and their way across the ocean and maybe common floats from docks and so forth. We're trying to identify what they're the remnant of. But of course items with Asian and Japanese markings were not unheard of on the Washington outer coast prior to the tsunami.
But there's a heck of a lot more of that stuff out there than we know for sure. Yeah, so that's an interesting thing. And then I take, you know, the stuff that's inorganic is probably going to take a while to be sitting out there for a while. Interesting.
It's really interesting. So I want to let Gene in here. Gene, you got anything?
Yes. Todd, you mentioned working in the Hawaiian Archipelago quite a bit. Did you do anything with the LoLo project here, the flying wing that was ship launchable?
With the Malolo? Yeah, the Malolo flying wing. I was not out there on the ship when the initial testing was done, although I have been on a smallboat off of Haleiva in a warning area when the system was tested and have worked over the years a fair amount with Tim Veenstra and his company, and I'm very familiar with that system. We had actually, the marine debris folks that we collaborated with last month in Washington had actually been planning on bringing the latest variant of that, the resolution that's
now called, out but didn't resolve airworthiness issues in order to operate it on this past mission.
Yeah, that was kind of one of the issues that has been bandied about pretty heavily there in the Hawaiian Islands because there were several start-ups and several folks that were trying to get something flying, and the FAA said, excuse me, and kind of brought those things to a grinding halt. And I was just wondering, because the Malolo looked like it was a pretty robust, and I've got a soft spot for wings. I'm a flying wing guy,
so that's why I was kind of interested in that. I didn't know whether you could say anything or not, but I thought it was a very interesting project there because I've tried to keep electronics and salt water separate in the past, and it's not an easy task.
Well, I'll tell you, that's a great point, and maybe that's a good sort of intro into why we're flying the Puma AE and how we selected that for our sort of pretty heavy-duty, almost exclusively vessel-based operation. The fact that there's approximately 900 to 1,000 reps of that system out at military service, and it has military airworthiness certificates and statements from the Army and the Navy, and of course, Mount Noah, make it a fair bit easier to secure both access to special-use airspace and to COA because it's a familiar system.
There's a good solid supply of parts and documented training available for various sources for operating the Puma. But really, the fact is that it was designed from the beginning to be able to be launched and recovered at sea. And when we talk to AeroVironment about things we'd like to eventually see in the system that would make it even better for our use, which of course they're working on for future block upgrades like higher megapixel camera, they'll tell you, and I believe what they say is exactly true, that anybody can integrate a camera to go fly a mission.
It's recovering it from sea and flying it the second, third, and nth time. That's where the timing comes in because that's some pretty salt and electricity, obviously, or a terribly corrosive combination, and landing hard is difficult on optical systems. So that's a very robust and fairly simple to operate product, and we've had great success with it. Well, and then that kind of, you know, we're covering a lot of ground, but that one is kind of one of the questions that I had for you is what systems you're using and why, and you pretty much laid that out.
But during the course of your tenure here and using these systems, have you tried other systems? Yeah, we have. In fact, we own a quadricopter, a micro drones, MD4-1000 that we also flew off the Olympic Coast last month. We've done integration of a ScanEagle system on a NOAA ship and flew a mission in the Arctic in 2009.
We participated in several demonstrations on various vessels in situ in Boeing with the ScanEagle. Over the years, we've collaborated. We've looked at systems that Lucky Martin and other providers that overlap with our requirements provide, and we're not done acquiring systems. We're definitely.
But our approach has been to really sort of identify and really understand our own requirements and then look at what's on the shelf from the market, ideally systems that are fairly well distributed and operated by the military, because as I mentioned earlier, that solves a lot of issues for showing up with something that's sort of unknown when we're trying to get access to airspace. In recognizing that we have a fair amount of experience flying in difficult and remote areas with our fleet, we don't have a nav air.
So we're better off buying the best off-the-shelf stuff that's available and using that equipment for the missions that it can do really well as it is and not spending too much time going down the slippery slope, at least with small UAS. Again, I'm focused on small UAS, not integrating payloads into a Predator or a Global Hawk. But with a small system where the payload and the airframe are more integrated and less separable, if you will, we're really looking at what can we take out of the box and be successful with.
Okay, I like that. Now I'm really moving. A simple, stupid approach. Yes, well, and that's important.
And I want to try and drill this down a little bit more because, again, every episode, I believe, has gold in it. And we wheel the gold card out and people can examine the nuggets. And you're hitting on some of the nuggets now. You're talking about some of the reasons that you're purchasing systems that you are.
And so let me just ask you, have you tried, let's say, any of the mom and pop offerings? And what was your experience with that?
What could you offer to mom and pop as advice? Personally, I think the closest thing I've been involved with was mom and pop, if you will, would be just our work with ATI and Malolo Resolutions. And that's hardly mom and pop. You know, a small manufacturer, if you will.
I believe a fairly simple system was deployed on an Antarctic mission quadricopter that went along with the micro drones unit a couple years ago, and they actually had some success with that. But that's not, you know, that's kind of counter to my perspective. And that's with my background of integrating some new technology into NOAA, where we had inadvertently, if you will, engaged with systems and companies that we had believed to be fully documented, fully operational systems where we realized that unfortunately we ended up with beta versions
and had to develop the operational procedures ourselves.
And spent a lot of time spending our time and money and spinning our wheels, perfecting someone else's, you know, in the private sector's product because we made a commitment to use it. So we're, you know, just from my own history of working with various system integrations, you know, I've been trying to keep focused on using, on not having to do lessons learned the hard way, you know, and trying to get the equipment that's already been through the mill. Right. And, you know, those are some great points.
And I hope the people that are potential manufacturers are listening because, you know, I know that, you know, you talk about you go on these, you go out to sea, you're on these missions, you're out, I'm sure, the daily to have all of the people, equipment, everything out there, it starts racking up pretty quick. And you're out there and something that's been billed as ready for prime time is not ready for prime time. I'm sure that kind of throws maybe a little monkey wrench into your program, fair to say.
Sure. And, you know, some of this is about earning and maintaining credibility, not personally, but for the movement, if you will, you know, for the integration of all UAS for science, you know, in the national airspace, even in remote areas. So, you know, we've got to be really careful to make sure we can safely and effectively accomplish what we set out to do. And certainly that's part of it.
And, yeah, when you look at being out on one of our ships, it's, you know, it's $20,000-plus a day for the ship, depending on which one we're on, up to $30,000. And that does not include the salaries of the crew or the scientists on board. So, you know, every hour of every day is pretty valuable. And, you know, sometimes people say, well, how much did that system cost?
When you look at across as when we do these UAS missions, either in lieu of a different mission or collateral too, we're talking about dollars a day and the marginal cost of flying small UAS missions in a remote area from a ship isn't even a rounding error. You know, it is so inexpensive. And that's why, you know, we want to use the best equipment with the best optics that we can get. And that's a lesson that, you know, I've learned and have been trying to promote for a long time, that it costs so much to be here.
And we're never sure because of funding and everything else, although we may plan to be back next year. We may not. So, you know, collect the data, the most data with the highest resolution that you can, because you may be able to post-process that yet again in the future for another purpose you hadn't even imagined. So, you know, that's why it's got to be good, you know, when you're there.
Well, and those are great points because really what you're saying too is, and I think some people don't realize this, but the other thing is the potential capital that you're missing. You know, like you're saying, I'm out here and we're out here now. We got everyone out here. And if for some reason this thing's not working for day one, day two, day three, then there's that potential data that we just lost, which is,
you know, really at the end of the day while you're out there, you're not out there for pleasure cruise, although some of these areas that you're out doing studies sound pretty nice.
You know? Yeah, I mean, they're long days, but you certainly can't help appreciate how lucky you are to get to have that experience or to, you know, see pristine and amazing remote places. That's for sure. But yeah, if, you know, all these systems, the harder you use them, the more you use them, you're going to have some attrition of small parts and pieces.
And that's why, you know, like a full Puma system, for example, the way we buy it is similar to a military configuration. There's three airframes, two ground controls, you know, all kinds of spare payloads and parts, and enough to, you know, to keep operating for weeks on end in a remote place because, again, although it's not trivial what the system costs, it's certainly, you know, if you lose an airframe or some parts, you're going to keep operating anyway. Right, right. Well, and then that's kind of the point.
But I think another thing that, you know, for this to evolve, be it, you know, within each agency or with the FAA is, you know, I mean, we've been joking that the first time somebody, you know, loses one of the small UAS systems in a remote place, that, you know, we should give them a medal because thank God there was nobody on board. You know, instead of, you know, the loss of a, the potential loss,
and we haven't lost any yet, but, you know, a 13-pound carbon fiber airframe with a battery and a camera in it, you know, shouldn't be, in my opinion, unless it was a flyaway in an urban area, shouldn't become an NTSB thing.
You know, if we're a thousand miles offshore, be it in the Arctic or, you know, off of Hawaii and the Pacific, and, you know, we should unfortunately lose some equipment, you know, that's attrition. You know, in the military, all these small systems are used as relatively expendable, over-the-horizon situational awareness tools. Of course, we expect to keep our systems a lot longer, and, you know, we're less likely to write one off because it's not safe to go recover it, but that could happen someday, and it still wouldn't necessarily be somebody's mistake if it did.
Right, and now, you know, it's funny you said that. I've got a few friends over at NTSB, and I think they would wholeheartedly agree with you about, you know, setting out an investigation, and years ago I'd come up with an idea for the NTSB. It was kind of a do-it-yourself kit where you downloaded the form on the Internet, brought your own hefty bag, bagged everything up, filled out the form, and sent it in with a couple of pictures. You know, you're good to go.
Now, as far as, you know, you made up or talked about the FAA a little bit and the COA process and things, do you find that, let's say, easier to deal with because you guys are out in really remote places? Is it pretty simple for you, or is it not?
Our Aircraft Operations Center does our COA process requests and tracking for us, so I'm not personally directly involved in COAs, although, of course, we'll outline the geographic area for the request and work with our flight ops people to perfect that request to the FAA. I will say that, you know, we look forward to the future when we can fly beyond visual line of sight under COA, and are planning on doing, working on state designation for our UAS, and we'll be operating under different rules in really remote areas.
But, yeah, I mean, we were within one mile. So we've had better luck testing and developing protocols for beyond visual line of sight to date in special use airspace, you know, working with military airspace. Right, and, you know, that might be one other question I'd like to ask you. Now, there's an, obviously, there's, you're a champion in the technology.
There's inherent value to it, and, you know, when you're flying in that, let's say, the VLAS envelope, obviously, you're still getting value out of that, but do you, I mean, that when the day comes when you can do beyond visual line of sight, what do you think about that, the promise of that? Oh, sure. It'll open up a lot more missions to be viable science missions than we can operationally do now. You know, we've developed some in special use airspace that we can't fly under COAs now, and certainly you can't fly any surveillance or enforcement missions within a mile of your ship.
You know, you're already, people can see you with binoculars or with radar at that point. Right. But, you know, there's lots of missions we can actually do well, and the one we did last month within a mile was great, because we were flying the PUMA within 100 to 200 feet of these sensitive nesting bird colonies, and they didn't know we were there, and if they did, they didn't care, because birds were coming in
and landing while we were flying over and observing them. Now, those are traditionally done with manned helicopters, making a lot of noise, flying at 1,000 feet above and at $1,000, excuse me, at like 800 feet above it, at $1,000 or more an hour, and at some risk to the personnel aboard.
So those are great missions to fly with small UAS even under a COA, you know, even under a VFR, visual flight line of sight restriction. Right, right, and I think that's great, and I'm looking forward to the future. Now, you're going out in the field again here pretty soon. Can you give us a brief overview of what that will be about?
Yeah, I'll be part of a NOAA contingent aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy to do some sort of pioneering small UAS work in the Arctic in conjunction with the Coast Guard. We've worked quite a bit with the Coast Guard on small UAS stuff since the beginning of when we really started to analyze systems. So we've had their engineering folks and people from their R&D center out aboard NOAA vessels with us before.
This time we're going with them. And so our objectives, there are a few demonstration objectives and then a few science test objectives. And so, you know, initially we want to demonstrate that Puma ops can be done safely on an off-board U.S. icebreaker while underway.
We want to demonstrate NOAA Puma operations in the Arctic and international and controlled airspace, which I alluded to a moment ago. Look at ISR capabilities of the Puma for a multi-agency science crew. So basically, you know, demonstrate how the visual video and higher data can be used so people can sort of put their mind around that for the Arctic in general. But the specific purposes of what we want to do scientifically rather than demonstrate are to stream, you know, full motion video back to the ship to help it look at CIS ridge detection and monitoring for ship operations.
We want to use some new software aboard to produce digital elevation maps of ice ridges in the surrounding areas. So we'll come back and post-process the data, you know, right into 3D maps. Any marine mammals that we may see, we'll document those, which, you know, we've done in several places several times now, just not in the Arctic. Look at its usefulness potential for search and rescue and emergency response.
Some of the more important things that I'll be directly involved with include detection and monitoring of oil spills from ships or oil exploration in the ice. So that's a new and growing concern with development in the Arctic. And we've been collaborating with the Canadian and Norwegian governments and industry on that. Detection and monitoring of marine debris in the Arctic, as we discussed earlier.
And, you know, that's basically the package. So we'll be underway on the Healy from Barrow sometime about September 7th or 8th up into the Arctic. It'll be a two-week long cruise ending up in Seward on about the 22nd of September. Well, it sounds like you've got a full plate, but are you going to have comms?
You've got a sat phone up there in the Arctic? Yeah, yeah, there's definitely all kinds of comms on the ship. And we'll bring a NOAA sat phone or two with us. And ships should be able to communicate and the ship has the emails as well.
Well, it would be nice if we could, if you got time, because it does sound like you have a full schedule, but if during one of the shows while you're on the cruise, it'd be nice if it's possible if you could call in and maybe give us a five-minute update from the field. Our listeners would love that, if it's possible. We'll try and work that out. But, you know, we're at the end of the show and I want to thank you, Todd, for coming on.
It was enlightening. It's real gold again. And that's what we're here for. So I'd like to thank you, sir.
My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Hey, we look forward to hearing from you in the future. Gene, thanks a lot, buddy.
And we'll see everyone next week. Okay, take care. Bye. Bye-bye.