UAS News Podcast — 2013-03-04
Transcript
Alright, that's a little weird, but hey, whatever. Anyway, welcome to the next episode. I'm getting some hectic feedback here, but anyway, welcome to the next episode of the UAS News Podcast. Are you hearing that, Jerry?
Yes, I'm not hearing anything in the background. We got a bad echo. I don't think this is going to work. I don't hear an echo.
You don't? Okay, I do. Alright, well we'll roll on. Anyway, welcome to the UAS News Podcast series where we discuss the news and issues relevant to the global unmanned technologies community.
I'm your program host, Patrick Egan. This week's episode, episode number 40, the on-ramp. Our guest this week is Dr. Jerry Lemieux from the Unmanned Vehicle University.
We have a lot of excellent subject matter for the program today. A way to get a professional career in the unmanned technology sector. So without further ado, we will proceed here. I'm welcoming Dr.
Lemieux back as he is a previous program guest during the Back to School series last year. His Unmanned Vehicle University curriculum and academic program were showcased as part of that series. And we're going to have him back. There's a lot of things happening.
Welcome, Dr. Lemieux. Well, thanks for having me back on, Patrick. I really enjoy spreading the word about our great school.
And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity. Well, you know, there's been a lot going on. We have a lot to discuss. But before we do that, I think it's important for you to probably reiterate your bio and talk about, you know, where you've been, how you got to be president of this Unmanned Vehicle University that you started.
Would you be so kind, sir? Yes, sure. It's a laundry list. I've had about four careers.
And what's really amazing is I've done all four simultaneously. So career number one, I've been a professional engineer. I've worked in government programs to integrate sensors on military aircraft. I spent about 20 years doing back-end work.
Second career, I've been a pilot, was a fighter pilot in the Air Force. And I flew for 20 years for Delta Airlines. So about 40 years and 10,000 hours of flying time. Another sidebar career is a university lecturer.
I've been a lecturer for graduate degree programs in engineering, aeronautical, electrical, and mechanical engineering at MIT Boston University, University of Maryland, and several aviation schools. And finally, I was active duty as a fighter pilot and then went into the reserves as an engineer. So I just retired with about 28 years of time as a colonel from the Air Force. My connection to unmanned systems is that I'm on special committee, RTCS special committee 203.
We're working on collision avoidance systems for UAVs. And I'm also on a European working group 73 on remotely piloted aircraft systems. I also published the first textbook on unmanned systems just recently called Introduction to Unmanned Systems, Air, Ground, Sea, and Space, Technologies and Commercial Applications. It's the first textbook.
We use it in our school. It's available on Amazon.com. Excellent. Excellent.
For the sake of full disclosure, I'm going to tell the audience that I'm a graduate of the three-day Unmanned Aircraft Systems Fundamental Course so I can speak from actual experience and do about the Unmanned Vehicle University offerings. And I have to say I feel plenty of emails and calls from folks wondering about the Unmanned Vehicle University and what is being offered. Most of the time I have to say that I'm almost as confused as some of the prospective students. I get the updates.
I see the postings about, let's say, the VA being able to pay for tuition or folks getting a small unmanned aircraft system was paid tuition, flight training, and some of the other things that you already mentioned. And I think some people are thinking too good to be true. And that's why you're here today, Dr. Lemieux, and I hope to offer the listener perspective on what has transpired in the last 10 months.
So, first, what types of courses are offered at the Unmanned Vehicle University? Is it just unmanned aircraft?
Yeah, that's a very good question. Let me just tell you a little bit about our curriculum. We are a real university and we operate on 12-week quarter terms. We offer a master's and doctorate degree in unmanned aircraft systems engineering.
So, we chose this because these are real jobs. Systems engineers are in high demand. Program managers and systems engineers are in high demand. And normally people have to grow up in companies in order to get the best jobs.
So, there's lots of demand for those guys. We start all the two with a modified version of the fundamentals course that you took as a graduate degree. And it's a general overview of the UAV technologies, applications, and regulations. Students for evaluation, they accomplish technical papers.
Right now, first quarter this year, Dr. Pascoe Marquez is currently teaching a UAV aerodynamics and flight capability course. The students in that course are evaluated with engineering problems, design projects, and take home exams. Next quarter, starting April 1st, Mr.
John Sautter, who has over 30 years of autonomous unmanned systems experience, he's worked for DARPA and the Air Force on autonomous unmanned systems. He's actually connected up a network of unmanned air, ground, and sea vehicles that all have worked autonomously to work together. He's teaching a course on autonomous unmanned systems. In the third quarter, Dr.
Rob Jacobs is teaching a fundamental systems engineering course. In the last quarter, John Miner, Mr. John Miner, who was a former USF, US Air Force test pilot school director, he's teaching a UAV remote sensing course. He's been involved with sensors over 40 years of his life.
This course covers the theory, the application, the operation of many UAV sensors. So that pretty much wraps up the first year of our master's and doctorate program for unmanned aircraft systems. In addition, you asked about just being unmanned aircraft. We also offer curriculums in unmanned ground, sea, and space vehicles.
General Motors has announced the production of driverless cars, so you're going to be able to get in the passenger side and have the car driving around. To provide engineers for these companies, we recently started a master's degree in unmanned ground vehicle systems. Francis Govors is teaching a UTV fundamentals course right now, and the rest of the curriculum for UTVs is pretty well established. In addition to air and ground, we also have an unmanned space systems degree program.
Commercialization of space is now emerging. You heard SpaceX made its second capture today. They're the first, and there's other companies that will follow. These companies will need engineers, and we just hired Dr.
Janaro Russo, who has over 25 years of unmanned space systems experience. He's working on courses for our unmanned vehicle systems engineering courses for space, and he's also developing a course in spacecraft system design and performance and space systems project management. That wraps it up. You there?
Hello? Can you hear me now?
Yes, I am, and that's pretty interesting. I'm having some technical difficulties here, obviously, but anyway, that was pretty interesting. You know, I've seen a lot of updates in the email box and some traffic's on the sites, and so I'm kind of interested in some of the latest developments for the university, if you will. Sure.
Again, you know, you're correct that a lot's been happening the last 10 months. We recently obtained a license from the Arizona Department of Education, and that license gives us the authority to grant degrees in unmanned air, ground, sea, and space vehicle systems engineering. This makes us the only school in the world to offer technical degrees with majors in unmanned systems. We're also the only school to offer online degree programs.
That's how we differ from the other things that are emerging out there. The courses are technical. They focus on unmanned vehicle design and engineering, and we also provide systems engineering and project management courses as part of the curriculum. We're training future leaders in this industry.
Graduates are going to work in very high-paying jobs as program managers, systems engineers, and researchers, and the average salaries are between $90,000 and $130,000 per year. We've also just been granted a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That gives us exclusive rights to conduct online, unmanned courses, seminars, and web conferences on unmanned air, ground, sea, and space systems.
It's a very significant development for the school that's been in the works for over a year. Another development is we are starting to partner with companies that work in the unmanned systems industry. One we just signed an agreement with is C.T. Johnson and Associates.
They manage unmanned programs for electrical realm. They're offering our students internships. They're in San Diego. They offer employment as program and project managers, cost account managers, unmanned system integrators, flight test systems engineers, and many other opportunities.
So when you sign up for the program, you're eligible to apply for employment while you're studying at the school. Another development is we established a publications division in the school called Unmanned Vehicle University Press. So there are very few textbooks out there, as you know, on unmanned systems. So our instructors have to create the course content for the courses from scratch using their experience.
So I already discussed the first book that we published that's out there on Amazon, and we plan to publish more. But we've taken some of our courses and recorded them, and we published them on DVD. They're also on Amazon.com. The first one is the one that you took in the fundamentals of unmanned aircraft vehicles.
We've also got a small UAV design and operations course, and we just put up a police UAV applications course on DVD. The two courses we're currently working on are one for UAV firefighting and a second one for how to prepare a certificate of authorization step by step. So that will be out there within the next month. We're also conducting a special promotion.
Again, as you know, there are not many books out there, so to encourage publication, UVU Press is going to publish your unmanned system book for free. Authors receive a royalty on every book. If you want to learn more about this opportunity, you can visit our UVU Press website. The address is uvupress.com.
The last thing is we have partnered with Markzwa's Aviation in the UK, and we are offering an official journal of the school called the International Journal of Unmanned Systems Engineering. It's the first journal dedicated to unmanned systems engineering. It promotes applied science, technology, and operation of the vehicles, and it provides a platform for authors and researchers to communicate their latest findings. We have an editorial board that has very significant membership in the unmanned system community, and they provide a peer review of the research papers that are submitted.
We work with the authors to get it published, and then we get it out there. Wow, that's pretty interesting. We covered a lot of real estate there, but I would like to ask about UVU Press. Are all those available in hard copy, or is it just a soft copy thing?
Basically, the courses are recorded in mpeg-4 files. You purchase online, and then you get a DVD, and you click on the videos. The topics are normally an hour each. You click on a video, and you watch a topic associated with the main point.
The average course is somewhere between 12 and 15 hours of videos. That's a good idea. We'll have to consider the hard copy version as well. I just noticed that some people, depending upon their age, like hard copies, so that they can yellow line, and some like just soft.
We do add some bonus material in there. In addition to the videos, we have quite a bit of information about the school. We'll think about providing the hard copy as well. That's a lot of work you're talking about there, the books, the journal, everything you've been doing.
Do you find it hard to find time to sleep? Yeah, well, another amazing thing is we do this all around the world. We have students all around the world, so there's a lot of time zones that we have to accommodate. You're right.
This is a pretty demanding job. I'm starting to get some help. We're setting up a customer service department here in the next couple of weeks. We also are working with 60 Minutes and ABC Nightly News to help them understand what's going on with the school.
They should probably be airing some specials here by the end of the month. Excellent. That's excellent to hear. Okay, well, all that sounds pretty exciting and like a lot of work, but I guess when you're blazing the trail, you've got to create all this stuff.
So let's focus on the unmanned aircraft system part of this thing. I read in one of the updates that every student's getting their own small UAS with paid tuition. Could you maybe elaborate on that?
Sure. Another company, I mentioned CT Johnson, they do the program management and some research and development. But another opportunity that we just signed, we just signed an agreement with Kalberg Corporation. They're a UAV manufacturer and a public company, and they are giving each one of our students a vehicle when they become masters or doctorate candidates or they sign up for the professional certificate program.
They get a vehicle kit to put together and then we can actually run them through our flight school and teach them to fly. Another effort we're looking at is integrating the vehicle into the curriculum. So we have a UAV aerodynamics flight stability course and a UAV flight test course that we may be able to establish some kind of experiment that the students can do and then they can write a report. What the round-hour aircraft.
And so that's just part of the tuition. Exactly. It's donated by Albert. They're kind of a new company.
They're going to become a big company, I think, pretty quickly, as I understand. They just received an order from the Middle East for 2,600 of their high-end vehicles. So when you do the math, it's a $100 million company from where they are now. So that was one deal that they signed and they're looking for many others.
They want to get their name out there. So it is kind of a free advertising for them. They want to have our students work with their vehicle and hopefully get their name out there. Well, that looks like a good resource for pilots.
Exactly. One of the other services we offer is outsourced pilot training. So there's companies out there that want to just do manufacturing. They don't want to get into the training business.
So they can have their customers come to us and we can actually take their vehicle and develop a pilot operating manual for it and then bring in students and give them the manufacturer training. If you look at the new FAA guidance document that was just published, in there it says that the pilot has to have manufacturer training in normal, abnormal, and emergency procedures. That's a requirement for a pilot to operate in a COA. So that's something that we can provide.
Excellent. So do the students get flight certified on this UAS?
Yeah, as much as you can say certification, we have a program that they go through and we give them a certificate at the end. This is not obviously something that's regulated by the government. It's our own custom training. But it really provides in-depth simulator, online ground school, and flight training that gets a student to the point where he's safe and he's not going to crash.
You know flying is a skill and it takes time to get proficient. So they need to get more experience once they leave the school because it's such a short course to make sure they're proficient when they go do an interview. And are you incorporating some of the work that you're doing with RTCA and the EuroCAM?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. The Helbert CEO, I met with him a couple weeks ago, and he says he wants to help establish the standards. Because that's what we're working on in RTCA, the standards for the collision avoidance systems or they're called Sensen avoid systems that we're going to put on the UAVs so that they don't run into other airplanes. So he's very interested and one of the problems that we're having in RTCA right now is that the manufacturers of the systems are not providing data.
They're providing data that the data is private. And so we've been lacking. We've been doing lots of simulations. We've been looking at accumulated data from the radars around the country, but we don't have any source for actual data.
So two recent developments, with Helbert I told you, they actually have a multi-sensor system that fuses together the information to provide a Sensen avoid solution. And then General Atomics just announced they're putting a combined short-range radar called Do-Regard and ADS-B on the Predator. So you're seeing these companies in the past, they didn't want to make an investment because they don't know where the standards are going to go. So now you're seeing a couple companies out there, they're just saying, hey, we're not going to wait anymore.
We're just going to get something out there. And I believe that GEA is going to provide some data to RTCA. So now you have two sources, and I'm trying to lead the coordination of the Helbert data to provide that to RTCA. But then that will give them another way to verify their simulation, constructive simulation.
You want to do simulation and then you also want to verify that simulation with real data to make adjustments so that you get a good simulator. So that's kind of how we do things in industry, when we do simulation, to make sure that it's correct. Right. And that's interesting that you guys are feeding that info back in.
And that was one of the issues I had with some of the standards work is people that were involved, how everything's proprietary and very hard to get data that way. Right. Right. Exactly.
All right. Well, that's pretty interesting. And I'm glad to hear that you're putting that work, some of that back into your curriculum. And before we move into the second segment, and we do have a caller, we're going to, let's say, pay the rent here.
And today's podcast is sponsored by Hood Technology, experts in advanced EO IR gyro stabilized four axis imaging systems for small UAS. The company offers low swap payloads integrating EO, MWIR and lasers to provide unparalleled long range imaging from moving platforms. Visit www.hoodtech.com for more information. H-O-O-D-T-E-Z-H.com.
All right. Now, segment two, I wanted to kind of talk about a linear rundown. And let's say this scenario. I'm just some guy off the street.
I have no background in unmanned systems, but I've seen a lot in the news about them and want to get into this exciting career. What opportunities do you offer a guy like me?
Yeah, I spend a lot of my time on the phone with people exactly like that. Where do I start?
I'm really interested in this as a career field. I want to be involved. I want to get a job. I want to start a company.
All kinds of reasons. But most people don't have a direction to go, so that's what we provide. For that kind of individual, I would recommend that you start with the UAV Fundamentals course. The course that you took now is our most popular course.
We're actually taking it on the road and around the country now every month. We have it in a different location. But if you can't buy the, or if you can't make it to that live course, we've recorded it and it's on DVD at Amazon. So this course, the Fundamentals, gives you the big picture.
It describes technologies, what's going on in the industry, the state of regulations, and many, many more topics. So once you're through that course, you're going to be very familiar with UAVs and where the industry is and where it's going. If you're interested in starting a career with that kind of background that you described, I would recommend you take the UAV Professional Certificate Curriculum. That has three technical courses and a project management course that's oriented around UAVs.
So you can get a job as a UAV project manager and make up to $80,000 a year. So some of the other things the employers are asking for, in addition to technical training, they like to see hands-on as well. So a package with the Professional Certificate and the pilot training course would really do a great job to prepare you for a career as a manager and possibly as a pilot in the industry. Okay.
Well, let me go one step further before we bring on the caller, because I think the caller is one of your students. But one more hypothetical. I'm the next guy. I've spent several years in the military.
I have a BS in engineering. I saw some of the systems while on vacation in the mountains of the beach. What do you have for me?
Yeah, that's great. You know, the master's and doctorate degree programs are math intensive. So you really need to have a degree in engineering, science, or math in order to get into that. So for you, yes, I would recommend the master's degree or the doctorate degree in systems engineering.
So the master's degree has eight online courses. Six of the courses are technical, and there are systems engineering and project management courses added on the other two. For the doctorate degree, you take ten courses and you do a doctoral dissertation. Once you choose your topic for your dissertation, we assign you a professor that's an expert, and he'll mentor you to get you to publication.
The graduates of these master's and doctorate programs will work as program managers, systems engineers, and researchers, and the salaries are between $90,000 and $130,000 per year. You can go to any website for jobs and type in UAV engineer or UAV program manager, and you'll see lots of jobs are starting to come up. So that's where we're oriented towards, preparing people for jobs. We start with a job and we work backwards and develop a curriculum that the employers are going to be satisfied with.
Well, that's exactly why we have you on. How do I get a job in this industry?
Okay, I'm going to bring on the caller, and I believe this caller is one of your students. Hello, caller. Yes, Patrick. Hi.
I am one of Jerry's students. My name is Commander In-Ha. I'm in the Navy. I'm currently stationed at the Naval War College in New Port Worth Island, and I'm currently on week eight of UAE 601 Unmanned Aircraft System Fundamentals.
And I am just astounded about this course. I'm taking this course for my personal knowledge. I think I've been engaging Jerry over the past year, waiting for the course to be accredited nationally so I can get tuition assistance to fund it. But it's not there yet.
It's forthcoming, but I think it's an important field, and that's why I'm doing this on my own dime, as you say. Are you, say, let's fit the second hypothetical?
I'm sorry, say again? Did you fit the second hypothetical that I had mentioned?
Oh, yes. I'm a submariner by trade, and one of the requirements for the PhD program is a Bachelor's in Engineering, and I was a Marine engineer. And I got my Master's at the Naval War College in National Security Studies. But as a military person, I think the UAV field is most important and also growing, but the military will lead the way for the civilian sector, in my opinion.
Right. And I think that the Navy, I mean, if you're doing that as a career stand, a good chance to excel in that field. We've got a lot of ocean, and let's say persistent surveillance. I've done some work with the Navy for that.
There's plenty of room for expansion there. Yeah, we're just, the Navy is, I'm not supposed to be for the Navy, but we're just starting to scratch the surface of unmanned vehicles. And of course, we have the Triton, which is comparable to the Global Hawk, but I guess either it's the Air Force and the Army because of the overseas contingency operations going on. But the Navy, I think, is on track for a 2018 all-carrier UCAS unmanned combat air system fleet squadron.
Great. And did you just find this field kind of fastening, or do you see it as the future and I got to get there first?
Well, it's all of the above. And when I was talking to Jerry initially, when he was questioning why I was taking this course, I told him I kind of equated it to the tank in between the World War II periods. We had some success in World War I, but we didn't know what to do with it. And we were experimenting with it.
There's no current doctrine. We're trying to fumble through our way, but I think it's going to be a game changer like P.W. Singer outlines in the book Wired for War. We just haven't investigated enough or have enough progress yet on it because it's so brand new.
But getting into nitty gritty that Jerry's course, System Engineering, talks about, it's probably the best knowledge to get out there, how to integrate the UAVs overall. And he covers all the topics from physics to aerodynamics to building a system to meet requirements to RF spectrum. I'm only a week 8, but it's just phenomenal, the amount of material he covers and the overview he gets in this course. Yeah, I felt the same way about the three-day executive course.
There's a lot of information in there, definitely something you could use, especially if you're going to get into this field. You would actually learn enough to be able to go in and have a conversation or attend a meeting and talk about this. It's probably not as in-depth as the program that you're in, but do you feel like, are you a little overwhelmed?
Is it something you understand, full steam ahead? I'm overwhelmed in some areas because I haven't had a hard engineering degree for over 15 years, 20 years, I believe. He's talking about RF spectrum, but he presents in a way that you can scratch your itch, you can get the big picture, and then you're up to you to go down into details if you want. But as a systems engineer degree, you don't have to get down to that minutiae.
You just have to understand how to integrate that into a working system, and then you'll parse the work to other engineers or other task forces. But like you said, you're correct, it's totally a cross-domain system, and you have to touch all these different fields to integrate a workable UAV system. Oh, for sure. I notice that any time I have a technical conversation with somebody about unmanned systems, man, it just goes really long because there's so much in it and so many acronyms, which that list seems to keep growing.
Do you find any issues with that, or are you picking those up? Well, I picked online because obviously I'm doing this on my own personal time, but yes, I am. There's a couple of weeks, it's too far technical and deaf for me that I haven't covered it, but at your own time and your own pace, you can delve more into that. But it's still an online course, and they still have to meet certain wickets of paper every other two weeks and questions throughout the week.
But my personal situation, I've got a family of three young boys, and it's very in the profession, obviously. It's an online course like this allows me to somewhat manage my schedules and get a degree. All right. I think it's a good thing because there's deployments and people are all over the world.
I don't know where I'm going to be next week, so I don't think the brick and mortar would work for a guy like me. And that kind of leads us into the next question I have for Jerry. I know there's a lot of people in my position, so you travel around and teach some of these courses, and so do your instructors. Possibly you could share with the audience the places you've been.
Sure. Last week we were in Washington, D.C., and this week, today, I'm actually driving to Las Vegas, where we're going to do another three-day course. In April we'll be in San Diego, and May we'll be in Los Angeles. The president of Cape Cod Community College called up, and he ordered a couple of our courses.
So we'll be there in June. We'll be up at your site in July, and then at the AUDSI conference in Washington in August. So we've got all the dates and locations listed on the website. So I do want to say I'm really happy with the response I got in Washington, D.C.
It's the first time that students stood up and clapped for a talk that I gave. So they were very happy with the content, and I was very happy with their response. Yeah, that's a nice affirmation that they were able to come up in a bad, pretty shabby way. You know, were able to come up in a bad, appreciate what you've done.
You know, I definitely feel that there's value to what you're doing. Again, I'm really impressed with all of the good news that comes out here. You know, you trademarked your university. You got the small UAS for people.
You've got classes in all of the different unmanned fields, including the space thing, which I think the opportunities with space are huge. I'd like to even myself get more involved with that and work on that. But so much happened so fast. I was wondering if possibly you could mention to the listeners website addresses, maybe a couple of them where they could get more information on the programs and some of the things that are happening.
Yeah, just to address a couple of things you mentioned before I do that. Really the school is what makes the school is the faculty. Every guy that I have is a world expert. They have 25 years of experience in unmanned systems.
When everybody else thinks it's new, these guys have made a career and they've been working on various topics like autonomous algorithms and genetic algorithms for having the UAVs think on their own. You know, something is going to happen and it is actually happening with X-47. But if you want to learn more about the school, the address is uxvuniversity.com. That's uniformxravictoruniversity, all one word, dot com.
And if you're interested in publishing a book, the UVU Press address is uvupress.com. And that's again more of the books. And then also you have all of the courses on DVD there available?
Those courses, the courses on DVD are on amazon.com. If you go to Amazon and do a search on UAV fundamentals or even just UAV, it should pop up. Most of the DVDs have the university seal on it. You'll see when it comes up on Amazon.
But the basic courses there are the fundamentals. We've got one on small UAVs. We've got one on police applications. And then the one for developing the COA should be out there within the next three weeks.
Oh, excellent. So you put something together on how to apply for a COA. Exactly. When you do the COA these days, previously you had to fill out paperwork and put together documentation to apply.
Now it's online. So we go through each page of the FA online website and show you how to fill in the squares. And also we show you examples of things like the specifications for the vehicle, the lost comm procedures, the emergency procedures, lost link procedures. All of those things need to be addressed.
And we go through examples in that course to show you how to prepare that documentation. Once the documentation is complete, you have to upload files to specific places on the site in order to submit the complete application. This is kind of an aside question on that. And I think this is interesting because this is really something that's useful.
How long does it take, let's say, to run through that course for the COA application, if you don't mind? You mean to take the course or to actually apply for the COA?
The course. Oh, the course. Well, we usually plan to be 16 hours of videos. I'm sorry, that's the other courses.
For the COA course, that should probably be about two hours long. Okay. So it's going to be at an affordable price to make it so that anyone who's interested in applying for one of these can just watch this two-hour video. And then you can freeze it, work on documentation, come back, play other parts until you have a whole package put together.
So it's really going to be step-by-step instructions on each page and each document. That's an excellent idea and a real value for the community. Although, on the other hand, I think you're knocking some of the consultants out of the box with that one, Jerry. Yeah, it's not a secret out there that it's a mystery.
How do we get one of these UAVs? And the other thing is you can't even really log into the website until you have to call the FAA, and they have to create an account for you. So if you're a commercial company, obviously you can't get COA. You have to be a nonprofit or government agency.
So that's the first step. And then once you have that permission and you log in, then it's like, well, how do I prepare this documentation?
It lists very briefly that you need specifications. Well, what does that specification document look like?
What is a lost communication procedure? Most organizations that start into this, as you say, they probably have to hire a consultant. And hopefully this is going to help. Well, I think so.
Yeah, your lost link isn't just throwing the radio in the bushes. You need to be a little bit more robust in that. I think that's an excellent idea and almost a community service. So if you roll forward with that type of, let's say, thinking or ethos or process, I think there's a lot for the Unmanned Systems community to get from your university.
And another reason that's what I wanted to have you on, I think, like I said, people are interested in knowing what you're doing, just like the unmanned technologies that we were talking about. It's so wide and varied and there's so much backstory. I think it's hard for people to just digest the emails or maybe the posts on some of the different social sites and say, wow, you know, that's really a fit for me. And that was what was kind of behind today's show, was that we would get you on here and you would be able to expand on those concepts, which I think we really did.
Now we got all the website addresses. We've got a good overview of what you're doing and kind of some of the stuff that's coming on. But do you have any long-term things you'd like to see happen that we can talk about for a minute or so?
Well, long-term, obviously, we're working on accreditation so that people can obtain financial aid from the government. We do are very close to having approval from the Veterans Administration where the VA will pay 100% tuition. So anyone that was formerly in the military or is in the National Guard or Reserves can take our curriculums and have it paid for by the government 100%. So we are taking the qualification letters from the vets right now.
We anticipate that approval within the next month. And when that happens, we'll get the word out and hopefully we can help out people that are in the unmanned systems community. I read a statistic the other day that over 10% of the Air Force personnel is involved in unmanned systems in some way or another. They leave the military and where do they go to work?
We provide an excellent continuity for them to get technical training so they'll have operational experience and technical training when they finish their curriculums. And that's a pretty good package for a job with companies like Mortimer, General Atomics. Those are the kind of guys that they're looking for. I'm actually meeting with one of the directors at General Atomics next month when I'm in San Diego giving a three-day course.
So you asked about goals. One of my goals is to have the companies review our curriculum to make sure that we're producing the right kind of people for their companies. I like that. Yeah, we're going down that path.
I would like to see more, I would like to partner with more unmanned companies. We just started a couple and they look to be pretty successful. But I'm always looking if there's companies out there that want to either have some of our students work as interns or if you're a manufacturer, have us take your vehicle and use it for training the students or outsource your training to the school. Those are opportunities as well.
So there are so many things you can do in this industry. And when I started the school, I had a laundry list that was pretty long. And I had to choose certain things and focus on those areas. And the area we chose was graduate education and undergraduate education to get people ready to prepare people for jobs.
Well, all very interesting. We actually ran long, so the show's over. It was good having you on. Thank you both for being on.
And I guess we'll see everyone next week. Thanks, sir. Bye-bye.