UAS News Podcast — 2012-11-14
Transcript
Alright, hello and welcome to everyone to another installment in the series of podcasts where we discuss the issues and news that is relevant to the unmanned technologies community. And the UAS News Podcast series is where we interview those making the news as well as those shaping the future. And I'm your program host Patrick Egan and I'd like to offer a big welcome to our co-host Gene Robinson. Hello out there in podcast land, glad to be here.
Oh that's funny. This week episode 28 is like a serial. We're going to take an informative look into some current unmanned aircraft system or remotely piloted aircraft work and also we're going to get some historical technical perspective with Jeff Bland and Mike Logan. But before we bring those on, I'd like to talk about some more current events.
Our last show was all current events and we talked about some of the news stories that were in the headlines. I think folks are a little news weary. I know I am. I've switched to the Weather Channel and I'm going to stay on the Weather Channel I think for all of November.
But a lot of stuff out there. And one other thing that our event show we did, Gene, has cracked over 15,000 downloads even with the satellite phone call and horrible audio. But you know, that's edgy man. That's what you get from right out there in the field.
That's pretty impressive, I would say. Yeah, I'm tickled to death with it. That's where we're headed and that's the information that we kind of need to get out there. Yeah, we're going to have to really sit down and I think we should really hammer something out.
I know it's hard as we've done this podcast to pull it all together out in the field, but it would be sweet if we could maybe even do like an hour and a half show and put something together. It might be technically challenging, but yeah, you know, pull up another webpage where we could have pictures and some video and really put on the dog. We'll have to, maybe we can do that in 2013. That could be one of our goals to pull all that together in our spare time.
What do you think? You know, we do have a prescribed burn that we're going to be doing on an army base here in Texas. That may be a good candidate because we'll be flying a Superbat over several hundred acres of burning Texas hinterland there. That could be pretty interesting.
It may not allow me to be able to talk much, but it'll allow people to listen in and kind of see just exactly what an ops does sound like that we're running out here. I think it's possible we could put that together, you know, put up that webpage for the pictures and the video and stuff. So, are you tired of that?
You got enough time? Well, I've enlisted the aid of some help, so maybe we'll, with the help, we'll get that pulled off, but I would like to. I think that would be a super show. I think that it would give folks an insight of just exactly what it takes to run a spare on cockpit, as they say in most of the COAs.
And we've got all those procedures in place. We're ready to rock and roll with them. All right, well, let's try and pull that together. I know you're busy, you know, where everybody's a little bit busy, but let's see if we can pull that together.
I think that'd be a really interesting show. We could probably go long on that, and I think that'd be a lot of fun and very informative. I still do think things are heating up. I was interviewed by another reporter for another magazine, and that topic was mainly law enforcement and privacy.
And it's kind of an interesting thing with the privacy. People keep talking about that privacy thing as something new, and I know we kind of beat the drum here, but there's cameras everywhere. It's like the kink song, you know?
I think it's kind of a red herring. I just think people might be a little leery in the technology, and it's something new. Again, something that we have to work on, but hopefully I did a good job in the interview and kind of trying to put some of those fears to rest. And I also sent that person on to speak to Tad McGeer.
I know you think I'm a guest. No, Tad, good guy, and somebody who really wanted to just do commercial work with his aircraft like ScanEagle. And I know a lot of people, you tell people, oh, I know ScanEagle. You know, ScanEagle was developed to find tuna, you know, or aerosond.
And aerosond was, you know, used as an unmanned weather sound, which we will probably talk with our guests too. But that's what I got for this week. You have anything else, Gene?
Well, no, not really. I've been watching with interest some of the things that have been going on in the news with unmanned aircraft, but I'm like you. We've kind of gotten news out. Goodness, we're a week out from last Tuesday, and things have kind of settled down some.
And I'm kind of hoping that we can get on with some real business now. I think folks were kind of frozen in place until we got past the election. And it should, I think you're right. I think things are going to start heating up a little bit more.
It's that this juggernaut is not going to be stopped. Robotics are going to make a significant jump, I think, in the next five to ten years. And we're going to be right in the middle of it. So I'm ready to go.
That's just the way it's going to be. And folks are going to start getting used to it and accept it in a lot of different ways. Yeah, and I think as soon as the technology gets out the gate, I think people will. I mean, they're all ready.
There's robotics all around us. It's the same deal with the ground robots that police already use. People are very used to that. I mean, almost any, let's say, hostage situation or bomb situation in any city, if it's suspected, they send the robot in and nobody even thinks about it.
It's got a camera on it. Anyway, I'm still out here in NIE 13.1 at White Sands. And we're still doing experiments. That's almost over.
And I'm looking forward. Not that I don't love the desert. I love it out here. It's beautiful.
But I'm burnt to a crisp and I'm ready to get out. I'm ready to go home. So hopefully next week we'll be from the home office. But anyway, without further ado, I want to bring on our guests.
Today we have Jeff Bland and we have Mike Logan. Both of these guys, I met through the airspace integration effort. They worked for NASA. These guys have been doing work with unmanned aircraft for years and years.
And basically, I'd like to bring them on and we're going to talk about some historical perspective on using these things and then moving into the future and some stuff that's on the plate now. So without further ado, I would hope that you gentlemen could give us some information on yourselves and how you got here. And we'll start with Jeff. Hey, good morning, y'all.
I've been at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallace Flight Facility for a couple of decades and first started working. Sorry. A couple of decades. Started working in the UAS in the early 90s.
So one of our original objectives was to start using them for atmospheric research and sensor development. So that's an extension of our work at Goddard, which is in the earth science area where we use airplanes and aircraft to augment our satellite-based and rocket-based research. So it's a natural extension. Yeah, excellent.
I know you've, you know, over the years we've talked and you've done a lot of stuff and I hope to delve into that a little bit more. But let's bring Mike Logan on. Mike, could you give the audience a little bio about yourself, sir?
Sure. I worked for about a dozen years out in the real world before I went to work for NASA. And I've been there, like Jeff, about two decades now. The last ten years, actually, I've been setting up something called the Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Laboratory at the NASA Langley Research Center there in Hampton, Virginia.
And we've done a lot of development of new types of UAS and different types of configurations. We also look at application development and, you know, seeing if there are missions that a small platform could actually perform. You know, the state-of-the-art pushed a little bit. So we're kind of all about pushing that state-of-the-art.
And I've done a lot of good work. I've been trying to engage in the airspace integration activity here over the last four years, as you know. And we're making progress. It's a lot like pulling a boat anchor through a beat dog, but we're making progress.
That's a good visual analogy there, Mike. I like that one. Well, you know, I mean, I want to talk about that. But first, before we, like, we're going to be all over the map.
And that's OK, because this show, we kind of pride ourselves on this being a real casual conversation. And so we're not real rigid here. So whatever subjects come up and we talk about will be fine. But I did want to, I want to touch a little bit on some of that historical perspective.
I know you went into it a little bit, Jeff. And I know, you know, you were out there in the 90s. You were doing stuff with this technology. And there were all kinds of different things.
And I know there were limitations with sensors and whatnot. But maybe you could speak to some of the stuff that you were doing in the early days and maybe kind of bring that through where we are today with the miniaturization of sensors and whatnot. Is that possible?
Oh, sure. Just a little more about the Waltz Flight Facility. We have the lead for a lot of suborbital work. Not just, NASA's not just involved in the satellites, but we work with the airplanes to take measurements to validate our satellite measurements or to do detailed studies.
We also have a balloon program that can carry large payloads or small payloads. We have an active meteorological balloon program. And we have a sounding rocket program. Sounding rockets go to space, but they're not orbital.
They're suborbital. So they return to Earth. And you get about 10 minutes of observations. And there's a wide variety of disciplines.
Well, the UAV and UAS became an extension of that kind of work, not just for sensor development, but for actually doing process studies and for validating some of the measurements. Originally, the very first program I worked on was the Zappasaurus program, which was an electric airplane designed in 1993 to carry water vapor sensors. This was in conjunction with some balloon-based measurements. So we were trying to actually develop the water vapor sensors using this electric platform back in the early 90s.
It took approximately 20 people to fly an airplane that weighed 20 pounds. It was balloon-launched because the electric motors weren't powerful enough. So nowadays, the concept of a hand-launched airplane that can fly for an hour is just fantastic development that certainly we didn't have access to. The Zappasaurus had 77 different battery cells in it just to fly for about 10 minutes.
So we went from that and worked with the X-Drone and the Tern from BAI, developing our small spectrometer systems. Again, looking primarily at the measurement side and capitalizing on the available technologies to try to augment what we could do. We're on into today by way of flying the same spectrometer development systems, the follow-on ones on the Aeroson. And now we're integrating similar systems in both the NASA Sierra and NASA Econa aircraft.
Well, you know, that's a very informative timeline that you've given us. And both of you guys kind of hit on this. But that's another thing is talking to a lot of reporters, and I've been getting interviewed for all kinds of stuff. We're giving people information for stories.
And it runs the gambit there in the different sizes of publications. But most people have no idea that this technology isn't just brand new. It's just out of the gate right now. And, you know, I know you guys, we've talked about a lot of these applications and possible uses in the past.
And people are like, well, do you think they could use it for agriculture? Yes, I think they can, you know, all these different uses that people are thinking are totally new. And I'm like, you know, prior to 2007, it was all legal, man. We were, you know, everybody was out doing, you could do experiments or photography or, you know, whatever you wanted to do.
And, you know, the thing since 2007 is I really looked at this technology and even like you're talking about Zappasaurus and it's kind of funny and all the rest of that. But the technology and the advancements prior to 2007 made this technology the great, like say scientific equalizer, you know. No more did it take a full-size aircraft and all that money and the licensing and everything else. You could just go out and do this yourself, you know, and see that go away has made me kind of sad, especially that we've been on a five-year hiatus.
Thoughts? Well, sure, Patrick. If I may, we had an airplane just prior to 2007 called the Twin Cam. It was based on a model airplane and it carried two cameras.
It weighed two pounds. It was made of foam and we were using it to fly over the agricultural field to actually look at crop stress and help in the nitrogen applications and the water distribution. And so this was an airplane that cost four or five hundred dollars including the sensor system and students and researchers. Very easy to deploy.
And all of a sudden it's something that you have a huge gradient to get access to that kind of technology today, so it's a little disappointing. Yes, I remember that. I remember Twin Cam and I remember the work you were doing with that. And boy, you know, when you describe the aircraft and it was two pounds and, you know, you had to get, and I'm really in my mind's eye trying to conjure up, you know, this little aircraft with horns on it.
You know, this big menace to the airspace. But anyway, you know, besides that, I know it's kind of disappointing. But, you know, and Mike, what kind of stuff were you working on prior to 2007?
Well, let's see, I guess back in 2002 we'd actually, one of our first exercises was the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab came to us. But hey, you know, we're thinking about this whole ISR thing and, you know, we're kind of thinking about, you know, could you guys make a vehicle that might be able to, I don't know, you know, be taken out of a backpack and tossed in the air and then go over the next hill
and take a look and, you know, see who's shooting at us and that kind of stuff. You know, we really kind of want something that can go maybe, I don't know, maybe five miles away and get there really fast and then put her around for an hour, sending us video back and so forth.
But at that time, you know, the things like the lithium batteries were fine for, you know, laptops and not even all that great for that. And of course, you know, the only type of battery technology that you could really use was, you know, the nickel metal hydrides. And so we designed a vehicle that sure enough, and oh, by the way, we didn't neglect to mention we wanted to fit a 15 by 15 by 5 inch box that, you know, you could carry. So, you know, we designed a vehicle and it's kind of like, well, okay, you've got three major requirements here, pick any two.
Because the technology just didn't support that at the time. But, you know, we did a little baby, you know, twin ducted fan that sure enough could go 60 miles an hour or it could go, you know, about a half an hour. But it was a neat little plane and, you know, we kind of pushed that envelope out and then, you know, they used what they learned from us to come up with some requirements. And, you know, eventually that became the DragonEye that I think everybody is aware of.
And, you know, the interesting, you know, Jeff mentioned the X-Drone. There's a perfect example of how technology enables things. Did you know that the flight control computer, if you want to call it that for the X-Drone, actually has one gyro in it and it's mounted on a 45 degree. And that's it.
So, it's basically a wing traveler. And it's interesting because the box is about, oh, I guess, 8 inches by 7 inches by about 5 and it weighs about 3 pounds. Well, now, of course, you know, you've got these little boards that are, you know, maybe 2 inches square that have a 3-axis gyro, a 3-axis accelerometer, a magnetometer, you know, the whole airspeed, altitude, altimeter, you know. Oh, and by the way, the processor and, you know, all those waypoints and GPS, all that kind of stuff and it weighs, you know, 2 albumen.
So, yeah. So, you know, the whole technology and technology and so forth really has enabled an incredible explosion in the ability of these small platforms to do things. We did a tilt wing. You may have seen some of the tilt wings that we brought to the, for example, the AVSI shows where the tilt wings tilt differentially.
Well, you know, early on when we did that back in 2003, 2004, we designed that to be a kind of a search and rescue vehicle that could fly, you know, into a partially collapsed building, you know, in hover mode. The problem with a lot of hover mode things is you've got to launch it from far enough away to be able to do you some good because you may not be able to access that fairly, you know, you may not be able to get close to the building, right?
You may not want to get very close to the building. So, you've got to go out a ways and then hover around. So, we designed this kind of interesting vehicle to be able to do that, something that would have halfway decent fixed wing performance and then transition to a hover and hover around, you know, peek through the windows, go in through the doorways, and look for the survivors because, you know,
you don't really want to risk a team. I know here where I'm at, a city called Chesapeake, Virginia, we had a couple of firefighters that were killed because they went into a building and they didn't know how involved the building was in the fire and it turned out that they had no overhead access to be able to determine that.
So, they went in and started looking around at the roof blast off. So, you know, those are the kinds of, you know, real world applications that, you know, we like to focus on because, you know, they make a real difference. Right. Well, and you're hitting on, you know, some good points that we talk about here all the time.
You know, it's very hard to find one tool that can do all the jobs and for some of the reasons that you just mentioned. You know, you may not want to, I mean, it's the same thing like if you were going to do some radiation sampling or, you know, go to Fukushima and do some work. You know, you're not going to want to drive up next to the building, park the car, jump out, and, you know, horse around there all day. You're going to want to be off at a safe distance.
And then, yes, then you would probably want to do some hovering and some other things. But you make a good point. I know where you're coming from. So, how's work progressing on that aircraft?
Oh, pretty well. In fact, just this past summer, we did kind of a next generation version of that. I had a couple of summer students that I put to work and we designed and built a fixed wing, tilt wing that really is kind of interesting. It has a very high aspect ratio.
It has like about 20 wings. It's really designed for about a two hour flight time and yet it can take up vertically at the same, you know, token. So, we're just getting started with the, you know, controls work on that. We did have a good first flight of that in conventional mode.
It's interesting, you know, when you have a group of students that, you know, just work their tails off for a pretty significant length of time. In fact, we went from, you know, scribbling on a marker board to first flight in a little over six weeks. And so, they, yeah, that's pretty impressive for a brand new design. And I tell you what, there's very little that needs, you know, in terms of satisfaction for, you know, a student to see something that they've really worked on very, very hard.
You know, take flight, go up in the air, fly around and come back and land. And, you know, you come back with the same number of pieces you left with. That, you know, is something that they will take with them for the rest of their career. And I think, you know, in a lot of ways it helps solidify in students' minds that, you know, that's what I want to do.
I want to make a difference. Well, and you know, it's funny at that point because I noticed the same. I was mentoring some kids at the high school robotics club and we did an ROV and, you know, we also, I tried to take the cracker barrel out there. But the poor cracker barrel hadn't been flown in two years and I guess in the heat, the wing had warped and that was pretty hard to get altitude with a warped wing.
But anyway, the kids, the upshot on that was I saw this, I witnessed the same thing, Mike. When they put this thing together and the ROV was successful with the sea perch and they put it in a 3D environment, they were like, wow, you know, this is amazing. And then even flying around the little flying we did, this is amazing and I totally agree with you and that kind of touches on, we did have a little conversation prior to the show about the STEM or STEAM concept which the science, technology, engineering and math curriculum but we're also adding the art into that.
And I want to give credit to Josh from Boca Bearings, is that right, Gene? Yeah, that's correct. Who actually gave us the STEAM concept but I really like that idea. I just kind of shared it with you guys.
I think that, you know, the arts adds a lot to it but I agree. People say, oh, we need to get kids interested in science and technology. Well, you know what, if you go out there and you give them this type of training, I find that they're soaking it up like a sponge, you know. I'm finding the same thing that you were talking about, Mike.
You show them, hey, we can sit here and on the whiteboard, pick a mission or something that you want to do either commercial or science. Let's think about it and then when we come up with this mission, let's design something that can fulfill that mission. And when they put it together and they're doing the mission, man, they're going nuts, you know, and I know Jeff, you and your wife do a lot of work with the kids. I know you guys do some rocket stuff and whatever else would you like to add to that?
Oh, sure. We've extended from the work with the fixed-wing electric airplanes to the surface realm and we're currently using a little boat called Rover remotely operated vehicle for environmental research. It's a shallow water boat that's actually being used to gather information to support the biology teaching and research at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. So with some NASA sponsorship, we're able to have the students build these platforms
and they're actually making a whole fleet of different types and instrumenting them with in-water sensors so that they can show the extension all the way from the design, the fabrication, the preparation and testing and training proficiency all the way to data acquisition and analysis in multidisciplinary teams so that it's a complete, a complete experience that kind of nails the reason for why you're,
you know, you're putting all the effort into the work.
And we've done the same thing with KICE as well. We have a program called AeroCADS where we have actually a device that we use to carry some of the instrumentation. Again, this is used down to the middle school level. Again, it's used to show that you can use these tools not just for fun and because they're cool, because they are, but also to really do meaningful, make meaningful measurements and meaningful observations and draw a conclusion based on the work that you've just done.
And so we're trying to, you know, extend the whole hands-on type activities and observation experience to a variety of different methods. And would you find too at the end that it's the same type of esteem builder that Mike was talking about with the kids?
Without question. Yeah, without question, Patrick. I really agree. We've had several students that have gone on to careers.
My wife has a rocket program. She supports the sounding rocket program and got a postcard from Antarctica from one of her students at one point. He was so thrilled. He's gotten the opportunity and he'd gotten the opportunity because of the rockets and so now he's writing from Antarctica and looks forward to, I mean, where do you go from there?
I don't know. But yeah, I think that that's one of the things that's kind of missing in school, you know, is this hands-on thing and then the coming back with, you know, hey, I can do this, I can actually build this, I can make this and it can actually do something and it works. And I really think that that's something that we need to build on into the future. And I don't know, I kind of left my robotics club high and dry and not by choice, but you know, we talked about that too.
We're kind of out of time, but I would like to, or out of time as far as personal time, I have little free time, but I would like to, you know, we talked about this STEM thing and you know, I kind of look at it as kind of an open source type of education thing and you know, get out there. I think people need to, if you have these skills, you need to get out there and you need to share them with the next generation. You know, I definitely feel that that's important because these kids, they're out there.
They want to learn this stuff. They want to do it. It's just taking the time and finding the people who understand the technology and I think that that's another thing with STEM or STEAM is it's hard to find the people who actually have, let's say the experience or the real world experience and the drive to go out there and teach these kids. So we've got to.
Patrick, you know, I've got a good anecdote about that. Okay. I had a, yep, I had a student who, he just finished his bachelor's degree, you know, bright sandy paper and I had him for a summer and we were working on a flying wing and as you probably know, flying wings are notoriously finicky in terms of how they fly and how you design them and all that kind of stuff. So what I wanted to do was kind of guide them through a design process, all that and so I actually had them say, okay, well, this is the kind of thing that we're looking at.
Let's do a subscale version of that and let's go take some of this pink foam, this quarter inch thick pink foam and we'll just do a plan form version of that and we'll see where the CZ needs to be and what the sweep angles need to be and stuff like that and we'll just do it in glider mode first and so, you know, they cut out this plan form and of course they're all looking at me like, you know, I'm speaking some foreign language or whatnot because,
you know, they've been taught in school, you know, airfoil, do this, that kind of stuff and so we started working through it and, you know, chuck in this airfoil and it flies and they're confused because they thought you actually had to have an airfoil to fly.
Well, okay, yeah, so a slab of foam is an airfoil of sorts but it's a flat plate and they just couldn't quite grasp the flat plate to fly until they thought. So we started doing that and then we put the, you know, control surfaces on the flat plate and then started doing that, you know, got it to glide to a nice, you know, easy landing and then we put a motor on it and, you know, it kind of had some issues
so we fixed that and then, you know, we got it to where, you know, it would fly straight and level and then it just nosed off to one side and so I asked this, you know, student that had just finished his bachelor's degree, you know, okay, what causes that?
And I get a deer in the headlights look so it's like we call that lateral directional instability and he says, oh, yeah, okay, I've heard of that. I said, now how do you fix it?
And I get another deer in the headlights look. What about a kale?
Oh, oh, yeah, okay. So how big should it be?
And I said, well, you know, it just needs to be big enough to keep it from slicing off anymore. Oh, you know, they've heard about all this stuff and they take the classes and they, you know, can regurgitate the formulas and work homework problems in the class but it doesn't really have any meaning for them until it actually gets put into an airplane and you start seeing these phenomena in real life. You realize, oh, okay, I don't have to analyze that. I don't have to fix that because I took that in this class.
I need to go dig this up and work this problem and now it's a real problem. It's not just some, you know, homework assignment that, you know, a goofy professor just gave. Yes, it's a theory and practice, you know, and I think you hit on a good point. I think you need both of those.
This is why you're doing all that math. Yep. Right. Yep.
Yep. And Jeff, if I can extend. Go ahead. Yeah.
Oh, I just wanted to extend what you were saying there, Mike, is that the, you know, getting them to think and put in practice and getting them out of the box and part of that goes back to the whole STEM concept, Patrick, that you mentioned where, where allowing the students and giving them the space and encouraging them to try new things because that's ultimately what art is, is trying something that hasn't been done before. And so it's good to try to build stuff, you know, sculptures, airplanes is art.
That's always been a kind of a theme of our work here. So sorry. Your turn, Mike. Yeah, Jeff, I was just going to mention to Patrick the thing that you and I just did not too long ago.
There are various student competitions, both at the, you know, high schools, both at the college level and one of them they were looking at, well, gee, you know, we need a good multidisciplinary design challenge for this competition. And so Jeff and I worked up, hey, you know, let's think out of the box here and say, design us an unmanned system that can not only detect the fire but go actually fight the fire robotically by air.
And so we went and looked at, you know, okay, here was a list over the last 10 years of all the wildfires that have occurred in the U.S., you know, particularly the large ones.
You know, where were they, how big were they, how quickly did they spread? And got a lot of good data for that. Said, okay, here's the design challenge. You know, you've got water sources about this far away from the start of the fire.
The fire is growing by this amount per day. And, you know, if you had, you know, landing spots on a grass strip that are this big and maybe the closest real runway or several miles away, you need to design a system to be able to do that. And oh, by the way, the grading criteria would be something like, you know, how many dollars does it take to put out the fire?
Because ultimately, you know, the cost of firefighting is incredible. Here locally, we had, I don't know if you're familiar with the Great Dismal Swamp. It is a large area. It's actually a national wildlife refuge now.
But this Great Dismal Swamp actually has some peat bogs, you know, swampy area. And last year, it caught on fire and it started, I guess, the first week of August. And it was officially put out, I think, the third week of November. So it actually burned that long.
That one fire cost roughly 12 and a half million dollars to fight over that period of time. And I can tell you since my house is just due north of the swamp, there were times during the summer that I couldn't see two blocks down my street because the thick smoke was that bad. It actually impacted travel into Norfolk Airport, the air quality. We actually had a code purple.
I'd never heard of a code purple air quality alert before. But it was so bad, they were encouraging people just to stay indoors, period. So these are the kinds of things that, you know, have a huge, huge impact on people. And, you know, this whole unmanned, you know, particularly the unmanned aerial system, can really make a huge difference.
And that particular fire, oh, by the way, was started by lightning. Yeah, that would, I'm sure, you know, I don't know if you've ever been to Ireland in the wintertime and they burned the turf. Pete, oh my God, if you've got allergies, it's horrible. That must have been horrible, all that Pete burning.
Oof. Oh, it was bad. It was bad. Lots of antihistamine decongestants and everything.
And like I said, there was one day where they told everybody just to stay indoors, period. Yeah, I'm sure that was horrible. But I agree, you know, those are ways to think about it. I definitely think when you inject the art folks into it and the left brain thinking helps with application.
And also, you know, the other thing I was trying to tell the kids at the high school when I was mentoring them, and they'd build a first robot and whatever else. And it wasn't very attractive, you know. There were other, I kept looking to, there's a group out of Moffat called the Space Cookies. And they're a bunch of girls.
And boy, I'll tell you what, they're robots, powder coated. The welding is, you know, something. I mean, it's enviable. It's so nice.
The welding. I was asking the girls themselves, did you guys lay these beads down?
Or did somebody do this for you? And I guess they got a little help from the guys out at Moffat Field. But, you know, you need to, I think, I mean, there's the utilitarian part of things. But it's also good to make your creation look, let's say, sellable.
Something that somebody may want to invest in or something that somebody may want to buy. Do you guys agree with that?
Yeah, I had a mentor back when I worked out in the real world. This guy, you know, his first job was designing a wing fence for the Vought F4U Corsair back in World War II. And, you know, he'd been working in the industry, you know, 40 years and some odd. And, you know, one of his common expressions was looks good, flies good.
Right. You really make an airplane that looks good. Not only is it likely to fly really good, but it's more likely to sell than the other guy that looks like a dump truck. Exactly.
People, you know, I mean, look at, you know, I give Apple as an example. You know, I'm a devotee. I mean, I like Apple stuff. I like turning it on and it works.
I like that. You know, the design is nice too. And I think that people like the design and the technology thing. And I agree.
People gravitate towards things that look better. And that's, I think, part of the message. If you have something, you put that little extra effort into it and it looks more polished, people are more willing to accept it. Even if it works just as good as the dump truck, you know, that's my personal take on it.
Jeff, did you have anything you'd like to add on that? Oh, sure. I think it's also an opportunity for people to express what, you know, what they'd like to see, a uniqueness, if it will, designing for uniqueness. There really is no right answer for any one problem.
And that goes back to the challenge that Mike was describing for firefighting. We tried to make the rules and guidelines while having specific requirements that they needed to try to address to give the students enough space so that they could be creative and try stuff and maybe come up with an answer that hadn't been previously thought of, or at least previously exercised. And so, Sherry, yes, absolutely. If you have some kind of pride in ownership as you build your work, it's reflected to others.
And also, if you kind of stretch the envelope, then it makes it a little unique and, you know, developing a style is important. I agree with that. And I like that concept, too, you know, give them the latitude to approach it. Now, I've over-latitude myself in that department.
You know, I'm trying to make, I mean, you can take it too far, trying to make stuff look good. And I may have put on a couple of too many coats of paint where somebody got a little chubby and I couldn't get her off the ground. That has happened. So there is a happy medium to that concept.
But it looked great until it crashed. It looked great. Well, you know, the good news is if it doesn't get off the ground, the good news is that if it doesn't get off the ground, it looks great sitting on the mantelpiece. Exactly.
That model. Exactly. Well, I tell this funny story, you know, when I was doing the commercial aerial photography before 2007, you know, I was, and the FAA got involved and I was calling it UAV photography. One of the first questions people would ask when they get me on the phone is, hey, can I see the UAV?
And I'd be like, oh, geez, I can't bring this low stick out there. And so I'd be like, well, it's in the shot being calibrated, you know, precision instrument. It's very fragile, yada, yada, yada. So I would spin this big yarn because, you know, when people see the Cracker Barrel, they're a little underwhelmed.
It gets the job done, but, you know, it's not very exciting. Well, you know, it's a style, Patrick. I think the Cracker Barrel did the job and outlined precisely the type of technologies that are needed. It doesn't have to look like a jet.
It can look like a Cracker Barrel. It has a home. It was a nice car. Exactly.
We all like that. That bright red was a safety thing. But well, that and, you know, to show people how, I mean, down to the absolute rudimentary level, what could be done. And that's why I like the Cracker Barrel.
But it was kind of funny. You know, people are like, I want to see the UAV. Where is it?
You know, it's not here. So, you know, I was kind of doing a tongue and cheek thing with the whole it being called a UAV by the FAA and whatnot. But anyway, we didn't even get into that. And that's good.
I had an excellent discussion. I really enjoyed myself with some of the uses that you guys have done and the directions you're going. We've got about five seconds. I will say goodbye to everyone.
Thanks again for coming on. Have a great week. And we will see everyone next week. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick.