Drone Invasion or Innovation

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're not supposed to shoot them down. There's only a few agencies that are permitted to shoot them down. Department of Defense, Coast Guard, Department of Justice, Homeland Security. [00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome to Hangar X Studios, where former fighter pilot and host John Ramstead takes us on a journey across aerospace as it enters an historic period of innovation and transformation. Our guests include aviation experts, pilots, financiers, military leaders, and innovators of all types. [00:00:29] Speaker C: Buckle up for another episode of Hangar X. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Welcome to the Hangar X podcast, where we explore not only the future of aviation and aerospace, but everything vtol, drone and uas. And today we're putting out a special edition because we're all hearing about the news in New Jersey and there's headlines everywhere about what's happening in the drone world. And there's a lot of speculation and questions and legitimate questions. And so we decided to bring on two experts in this field and discuss some of the questions that should be arising and that we need to be answering as all this is happening. So, first of all, I want to welcome Tom Sawyer and Johnny Ryan. Welcome to the podcast, gentlemen. [00:01:20] Speaker A: Michael, thank you. Thanks for having us. [00:01:22] Speaker B: So, Tom, you are the founder of Grand Skies. If you could give us a little bit of background on yourself and Grand Skies, just so the audience can get to know you a little bit before we dive in here. [00:01:32] Speaker A: Sure. Grand sky is, was the first commercial drone airport and business park in the United States. It's in Grand Forks, North Dakota. And there's a lot of reasons why it's there. We can go into on another podcast, but fundamentally, we've built out the infrastructure to be able to safely and within the rules, fly drones of all sizes, from the smallest drones of quadcopter size to the largest RQ4 global hawk that the military uses. That's the size of a 737. [00:02:05] Speaker B: Yep. And we were up there, got to tour your entire facility and it is incredible. It is fascinating. And Johnny Ryan, you're up there, you're the director of the Hive. Tell us a little bit about the Hive. You were just on the podcast, so you guys should go back a couple episodes and go listen to our interview with Johnny. But give us a quick update on the Hive, Johnny. [00:02:27] Speaker C: Sure. And I did feel like I left your last podcast wanting to chat more, so that's always a good feeling. But yeah. So the Hive is a, we'd like to think, first of its kind, city owned, community supported UAS tech accelerator that really just focuses on all parts of the UAS mission and anything flying that relates to that and, you know, furthers innovation in the United States for unmanned aircraft. [00:02:52] Speaker B: All right, Tom, let's start with you. This story of the drones in New Jersey and flying over cities, also flying over military bases, has just caught the imagination of the entire country. The news media is covering it. What do you think, in your opinion, is making this so fascinating for everybody right now? [00:03:11] Speaker A: You know, great question. I think it's fascinating because drones are exotic. They're a new technology. They have originated really out of the Department of Defense from being able to help our soldiers and sailors and airmen force multiply and do more jobs and learn more things. And now the technology is becoming commercialized, and so they're becoming more prevalent. And so things like roof inspections are much easier. I don't have to climb up on the roof. I can send my drone up and get really precise measurements. But also, drones are a little bit. Not a little bit. I think they're very misunderstood. You assume that if a drone is near your property, that they're looking at you, when in fact, we just might be using a drone to transit through airspace. You think that a drone is spying on you, that a drone is doing different things when it may just be delivering a package. And so, because people can't really see who's using it, who's flying it, what data are they collecting? What's the camera showing? Are they looking at me? There's a lot of, what's it doing? Why is it there? Kind of questions that get asked, and I think those questions kind of make people feel uneasy about it when they don't know what's going on. When we use drones for our business purposes and we talk to all the people that we're going to be flying around, people tend to be genuinely curious and want to hang out by the pilot and know what's going on and understand it, and they're pretty excited. But when they don't know why it's there, then people assume the worst. And so the pilot or who the pilot is. Yeah. You don't know which way is coming or going. And so people tend to assume the worst when they don't know what's going on. [00:04:49] Speaker B: And you were talking before we hit record about some of the videos you've seen. Some clearly are drones. Some have their lights on, lights off. Could you not maybe make a commentary on what you think is actually really happening in New Jersey? But what are just some of the facts around flying drones legally? [00:05:05] Speaker A: Sure. I did see a bunch of videos, and a lot of the early videos, I can't Tell the perspective. Somebody zoomed in on an old iPhone and, you know, I just see lights in the air and I have no perspective of depth. I have no perspective of relationship to anything else. I have no perspective of relative speed. So I can't say that those are or are not drones or planes or anything else. But one of the things that we, you know, kind of have to really accept as a society is that we don't really have any kind of means to, on a broad scale, detect drones. You know, they're too small for airport radars, so the radar that air traffic control uses is too. The frequency length is such that you can't see small drones. They sit too low to the ground, they fly too low to the ground. They're mostly plastic. They're not metal. They have too small of a cross section. And those radars are not meant to see that. They're meant to see jetliners and commercial traffic and keep that traffic safe. So we need to, as a country probably start considering what investments do we need to make to be able to improve that low altitude surveillance. Right now, it's the honor system that I, as a drone flyer will plug my information in and people will be able to know that I'm flying my drone at this time in this place. Those are the rules. You're supposed to. And you can be fined if you don't. But if somebody has nefarious intent, I don't think they're going on and signing on and signing onto a website and putting their flight information in there and their drone information and then flying around with their lights on. I think a lot of this right now is a little bit of copycat of somebody. You know, I'm going to put my drone up and see if people see it. Yeah, yeah. [00:06:53] Speaker B: Get my five minutes of fame flying my Millennium Falcon drone over my neighbor's house. Now, Johnny, I want to go to you because one of the things Tom mentioned was the drone technology developed in the military is now being commercialized. Sure. And I think there's probably a couple applications we think of when we think of drones. But just getting to know you and hearing some of the work these 28 different companies just in the hive are doing. The applications are incredible. Could you speak to some of the different commercial applications that you're seeing? [00:07:26] Speaker C: Sure. Inspecting critical infrastructure. You know, if you're dealing with power lines or you're dealing with anything like that, it's. There's danger involved as a human, you know, gets in and out of, you know, just any, any maintenance that they need to do on that. Having a drone, in theory, would be safer to. To do those inspections. I think ultimately, you know, a drone would either carry a payload or maybe it carries. Or, you know, it would actually physically carry something on the drone, or it would have a camera, which is essentially a really nice sensor in the sky. So being able to map agriculture, being able to fly over construction site like Tom would have, and see the development of a hangar and 3D map and model with engineering and civil engineering, what needs to change the progress of that? I think there's a ton of very useful applications for that. Even just seeing progress of development, it's like you don't know how many times. And I'm sure Tom sees this, or a drone went in the sky and maybe it goes up once every day and you go look at a project and you think that's. [00:08:24] Speaker B: You mean like a large construction project? [00:08:26] Speaker C: Right, Large construction project. And someone will see, you know, like Tom could see a live feed of theirs and see that was supposed to be done a week ago. What. You know, even though it says that it is, and unless you could actually see and kind of see the iterative changes in development, you maybe wouldn't notice that. I think agriculture now, it's actually fast enough to. To map fields and get the data back where they can make actionable change to how they're working with their crops. And I think the delivery, obviously there's endless ideas people have over food delivery. That's obviously one that's fun, it's relatable, and I think that's great because it makes people more comfortable with just drone innovation in general. But obviously the more pressing use cases would be maybe chemotherapy packet delivery to rural areas. That's something they're. They're testing in North Dakota. And that's something that would definitely be needed and would make it just way more efficient, you know, when in an emergency. [00:09:22] Speaker B: And how about safety, security? I know you've worked on some things that are, you know, either for disaster incident response, things like that. What are some of those applications? [00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you have, you know, there could be networks down. Let's say there's a hurricane and, you know, you could have a fleet of drones that go in the air and basically create a, you know, a new network overnight so that, you know, first responders, people that have just been hit with a hurricane can, you know, use their. Their phones. You know, when everything goes down, you don't have network. That's a huge. I mean, nothing moves when you don't have a network. So being able to deploy, you know, a swarm network would be great. Obviously being able Search and rescue is a huge one. And that, that kind of comes to mind a little bit when I see some of these videos. And really you don't know even when any of these videos were taken. There's no way to validate, you know, with the age of the Internet of which TikTok videos came from this year or you know, computer generated, you know, who knows. But a very useful application is drones at night, shining the spotlight, looking for, you know, a missing hiker or somebody. You know, someone's kid went wandering into the woods and they didn't know it and they're using a drone with a floodlight and a microphone that comes from the drone to. [00:10:31] Speaker B: But you can also put an infrared sensor on a drone audio, massive video capability. Actually any sensor that you would use for any industrial application can be put on a drone. And then, you know, so it, and then you guys have also solved at the hive just some of the these. You're generating massive data that needs to go up to a cloud and be processed. So that's also a big part of the drone world is actually it's really a platform to collect data that then allows better, quicker decisions, whether it's from incident response in a first person, you know, like a school shooter situation, to finding a lost person, to mapping crops and figuring out what's healthy and what's not and exactly how a farmer addresses it. Is that kind of fair? [00:11:17] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a really applicable application that Tom has out of grand sky where they, they launch a drone or you know, a weather drone to how many thousand feet, Tom? [00:11:28] Speaker A: We got to 17,000ft. [00:11:30] Speaker C: 17,000Ft once or twice a day. And it basically gives a direct micro climate, you know, readout of what's the actual climate at grand sky. Not something 10 miles away from a weather station where, you know, there's, there's differences. So maybe that would enable them to, to do flight operations where otherwise they wouldn't be able to. If the weather says no, it's not, it's not good enough. So I mean, those are really unique applications that I think people would be excited about. You know, having more accurate weather, I think excites anybody that's driving to the lake or figuring out their, you know, their family plans for the fourth of July, you know, and I think now it's kind of coming. You know, everyone sees the drones in the news. It's, it's easy to Go kind of negative on what is this, but there's a lot of applications that I think people can relate to and be really excited about how it makes their life maybe easier or how there's some data that they're interested that, you know, we otherwise couldn't collect and, you know, better. The data is in the companies in the United States hands versus others. So I think it's a positive thing. But, yeah, it's definitely interesting. [00:12:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Tom, I want to talk about that, because I know at Grand Skies, you guys have done tremendous, deep work, and there's been massive investments on airspace regulations. You're working with the faa, but whether it's flying a drone in North Dakota to 17,000ft or flying over a populated city, and you'd mentioned before about, you know, you should file a flight plan. But what does the airspace and regulatory landscape look like right now for those of us that don't really understand it because it's different than airplanes? [00:13:00] Speaker A: Well, so actually, there are some different rules, but the goal of the FAA is to be able to treat drones like airplanes with people in them, like crewed aircraft. And so C R E W E D. And so, you know, they are aircraft. And so, you know, one notion is, why don't we just shoot them down? Well, you know, part of that problem is that it's illegal to shoot down drones. They are considered hampering an aircraft, and that's a federal felony. Federal felony. And so, you know, we can't really. You're not supposed to shoot them down. There's only a few agencies that are permitted to shoot them down. Department of Defense, Coast Guard, Department of Justice, Homeland Security. And so the drone regulations have. Are growing, and they're getting more sophisticated right now. For me to fly over a neighborhood, I have to have a waiver. To fly a drone over people, I need to have a special waiver that allows me to fly drones at night. I need to have a waiver that allows me to fly in icing conditions. I have to really have a waiver. And this is one of the hardest waivers to get for the drone to fly beyond the line of sight of the operator and so that operator. So the beyond line of sight operations is the holy grail of the drone industry. And the FAA is working on a rule to allow that to happen more easily, but that is the whole thing. So if I'm flying a drone, it's really basically considered somewhere between a mile and a half and two miles is what I can reasonably see that drone. And so I really can Only fly it that far without somebody else looking at the drone, having eyes on the drone farther away that's in contact with me by radio or phone. And so I'm supposed to keep the drone, you know, within my line of sight. I'm also supposed to not fly my small drones above 400ft without a specific waiver. And so why are drones so low? Well, the basic rule is you're supposed to stay under 400ft. And so a lot of the sightings that we're seeing in New Jersey and people talk about, oh, it was just over that tree line over there, or it's just that sounds to me like a legal drone flight. Their lights were on, they were flying below 400ft. Probably. I'm going to say probably, but I don't know, within line of sight of the operator, which means that's a legal, regulated, properly flown flight. [00:15:32] Speaker B: If they have the waivers, though, right? [00:15:34] Speaker A: If they have the waivers. Fair enough. [00:15:36] Speaker B: So there should be something on record. [00:15:39] Speaker A: If you can find out who was that operator in that drone. Yes, those waivers should be on record. Those are public record that you got a waiver. In fact, every drone company I know, once they get a waiver, they crow about it on social media as loud as they can because they're not easy to come by. You've got to work to get them. And so I think that there's. There are a lot of rules. You have to stay five miles away from an airport. You have to do a variety of things. One of the things for me, and there's a lot of reports that there were drones flying without lights on, I suggest those are more hobbyist kind of remote control aircraft than true drones that the FAA would regulate. And, you know, if you're flying, if you're trying to do something nefarious, why would you fly with your lights on? Why would you be imminently detectable unless you have some purpose for doing that? And so I'm suspecting there's a fair amount of legal drone flights. You asked before, what are some things putting an infrared camera or a LIDAR camera on a drone and doing mapping at nighttime, particularly in the middle of the night, when fewer people might be on a road or fewer things might be obstructing your power line inspection or different kinds of inspections like that, you could have very legitimate use. And I suspect those companies that may be doing that legitimately don't want to raise their hand and say we were flying our drone for fear of the backlash that they might get. Now, at least I might be nervous about that. So I think there are a lot of positive uses, but the goal is to for FAA is to have them fly legally in the United States and treat them like aircraft in the national airspace. [00:17:17] Speaker B: And I want to add a follow up question to that, Tom. So I'm thinking about the FAA's role in drones. And we also have EVTOLs. We've heard about the air taxis. They're coming in into the urban environment. They're going to be, you know, the FAA just passed a new regulation, 400ft and below, unless they have a waiver, short distances. And then like the aircraft we're developing, which is vertical takeoff but longer range. So it's going to go into the regular airspace but then also come into this new urban environment. What needs to happen with the FAA to allow all of this interoperability and capability to be able to mature over the next three to five years? [00:18:01] Speaker A: I think that there needs to be two primary things that happen. The first is we seriously need to up our game as a country on low altitude airspace surveillance. We need to be able to see the other aircraft that are out there. It's not so much that I need to know where I am. I need to know where the other aircraft are, especially around Vertiport where multiple vertical takeoff and landing aircraft will be coming in. I need to be able to know who's coming in. Otherwise we have to turn this over to traditional air traffic control, which risks grossly oversaturating that system because they'll have to track everything. And so I think the goal is to create a system that doesn't tax traditional air traffic control, but makes them aware of what's going on, but lets other pilots see what's going on. So surveillance, we need to put a sensor like a radar on a building, on water towers, wherever it can go, almost like cell towers, stick them on cell towers even that broadcasts a radio signal and detects everything in that airspace and reports it back. So we know when somebody is nefarious and we call those a non cooperative aircraft, though it's not cooperating, it's not turning its lights on, it's not broadcasting where it's not attempting to try to be seen, it's trying to not be seen. It's not cooperating in the airspace. So I think we need to have that surveillance piece. The other piece is we have to have completely transparent communication between drones and other drones. So if you make a system that can help you fly your drone or your evtol, your advanced air mobility air taxi, all the different words we could use. Let's just call it the air taxi. [00:19:50] Speaker B: Okay. [00:19:50] Speaker A: For you flying your air taxi, you are generating 15, 20, maybe 100 different pieces of information. But everyone else flying in the area only needs about nine or ten of those pieces of information. So you should be compelled broadcast that information to a ground station. And your ground station puts it on the Internet or puts it on a web. [00:20:12] Speaker B: Would this be something similar to like ADS B Tom, in aviation? [00:20:16] Speaker A: I think so. It would be. But what we saw very early on, when everybody puts ADS B out, everybody, it's ADS B transmitters on. It saturates the system. And in a high density environment, you'll lose some. And so we need to develop what that protocol will be so that your aircraft can broadcast and Johnny's aircraft can receive that same information and broadcast the same eight or nine pieces of data. So we all know where we're going. And that way FAA is not picking commercial winners or losers. The government doesn't have to take responsibility for doing that, but we can each broadcast that same information and know where we are. Where you're going. I know where you're going and what your intentions are. You know where I'm going, what my intentions are. It's almost like a digital flight plan in real time. That way our airlines file flight plans. We know that plane is going from Newark to San Antonio, and we know what his plan is to do that. And then air traffic control gives it micro variations in that flight plan to account for weather and wind and things like that. But we know where it's headed, and so we need that for the drone industry as well. [00:21:24] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah. Drone all the way across all of these different VTOLs, because we're. They're going to be operating in a space outside of a traditional airport. So this is all infrastructure that needs to be developed with a focus and intentionality. Agreed. [00:21:38] Speaker A: I absolutely agree. I think there are a number of general aviation airports, not a number. There are thousands of general aviation airports across the country that all can serve as outstanding locations for launching and landing these kinds of aircraft. They're generally located in a lot of them in rural areas and some, you know, in suburban areas. As suburbs have grown up around these airports, they make a great opportunity to leverage that existing infrastructure. We don't have to spend all the money on brand new infrastructure. Let's use what's already there. Power, hangers, safety, security, perimeter, runways, landing pads for helicopters. It's all there. Let's reuse it. [00:22:21] Speaker B: Love that. And Johnny, I want to follow up on something Tommy said, or Tommy, Tom said, Johnny and Tommy, you know, Tom said that, you know, right now we don't really have that capability for detection. The frequencies of the radars that we need in these areas. I know you've actually developed that up in Grand Skies in the range that you have up there, I believe. Correct, Tom? [00:22:48] Speaker A: We have developed our own capability at grand sky. And the state of North Dakota has invested over $75 million to date, I believe, in a statewide network to be able to support this kind of activity. [00:23:03] Speaker B: So think about that. That's a significant investment. And you have an area that's, you know, North Dakota, that's not as crowded as some of the other states. So Johnny, as you're looking at all these companies as they're growing, what are your thoughts on not only detection, but maybe drone response? What did you call them? Not unauthorized, the non cooperatives, these non cooperative drones. Because I'm sure both of you, as proponents for drone and the commercialization of drones and for profit drone companies, you know, these non cooperative folks or people not playing by the rules is. We all want to see that. You know, just like in aviation, we don't want people breaking the rules because it gives the rest of the pilots a bad reputation. But Johnny, what are your thoughts on where we're at now and what needs to be done? [00:23:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think the majority of the companies and people that we interact with, Tom and myself, they want to play by the rules. They want to do it right. I think education is a big part of that of, you know, if this is your first drone company or your first drone that you built or, you know, and you don't have a commercial aviation background or, you know, a commercial UAS background, I mean, it's kind of go, you know, learn as you go. And so, you know, connecting the right companies and people to guys like Tom and the network that they have out at the test site, you know, that's. It's more like learning from other people's mistakes really advances it quickly. And I think everyone has a good intention for the most part. I mean, we really don't see companies not wanting to do it that way. I think it's more, you don't know what you don't know. And so if company doesn't realize, like, hey, in order to do this big grand idea that we have, you're going to have to go through the FAA and get these certain waivers. And those waivers come with other personnel that need to manage what's going on. I mean, that's not that obvious to every business entrepreneur. You know, they might have a great idea around drones, but they might not have any experience around drones. And that. And I think it's just education of getting everyone on the same page, connecting them the right resources. And really, you know, everyone in my experience here is if someone wants to learn the answer, how to do it the right way, Tom and others will just jump at helping them figure out, here's who you need to talk to, here's a resource, here's how we've done it here, here's how you shouldn't do it. And I think that's just a connection point there. [00:25:25] Speaker B: That's a great point. So anybody listening, if you're really wondering about how to really operate commercially beyond line of sight, track this, have the right radar systems, the infrastructure, both private and public, because you're on an air force base, reach out to Tom @Grandsguys experts, absolute experts is what I saw when I was out there. And if you're out there and you're trying to build a drone company technology, the software, the data needs around it, contract Johnny up at the hives and hey, let's just do this as we wrap up, I just want to do a quick rapid fire short answer because you guys are so into this industry, but you have from different perspectives. So I want to ask you each the same question. Give you about 30 seconds. Tom will just start with you. If you're just looking, let's say two years down the road and we're sitting there having a conversation two years from now, what is the most exciting innovation that you see coming that's going to be transformational to the space that you're in? [00:26:21] Speaker A: Drones form. It sounds. [00:26:25] Speaker B: Drones form. Okay, hold on. When you say drone swarm, you gotta define that because it just sounds cool. [00:26:31] Speaker A: Well, I can understand exactly how it sounds scary too. But multiple drones operating together in concert with each other, being able to communicate with each other to accomplish a job, whether it's search and rescue, somebody's lost out on a lake, somebody's lost in the woods. Instead of a single drone flying around with a single camera, multiple drones can go out and they can talk to each other and say, no, I've already covered that area, go cover that area. And they can work that. Think of it as, you know, the drone air shows. You know, the, the shows that are going on now, they're replacing fireworks and they're getting really sophisticated. Those are drones that are all pre programmed for a specific job and they all know where the other ones are and what they're all doing. So imagine that now with a commercial application for a variety of different reasons, with the drones all talking to each other. I think that is going to be absolutely transformational in the industry. [00:27:30] Speaker B: All right, I want a drone swarm, like my own personal drone swarm, because it just sounds so awesome. Johnny, two years from now, what do you think is going to be something that's going to be solved or matured that's going to transform your world? [00:27:46] Speaker C: He's like, I can't stop thinking about the drones for him. They're going to come to me with that one. You know, I think just more edge computing where a sensor in the sky on a drone can basically use AI, process it, give information back and not necessarily have to go to the cloud. So maybe an operator has a ground station and they can get their actionable insights right away without the Internet, which would be awesome, right? You don't have to rely, that's a dependency that you're not coupled with. And you don't need network, you don't need the cloud necessarily. So I think as hardware advances, I think that'll be great because that will enable too just a lot of innovation that could just happen out in the field without adding complexities. [00:28:31] Speaker B: Well, that would be transformational because you're breaking that dependency of hey, I got to land the drone, upload the data, which is massive data, process the data, then create actionable insights into whatever that data source versus that thing. It's happening, it's being processed real time. I'm actually now being able to look and go, hey, in the next hour I can go change what I'm doing in this field or set up troops, go this way, whatever it happens to be. But you're talking about much more real time as things accelerate. So that's going to be exciting. Well, guys, with that, thank you for being here. I think shedding some light on what's kind of happening and this trend that's going across the country right now. And I would just encourage everybody out there too, as you hear this one, share it with somebody. Listen, comment, we definitely want to know your thoughts and if you have questions that we didn't answer, put them in the comments and we'll do another episode, a follow up episode and we'll tackle some of your questions. So we'd love to do that for you. So gentlemen, thank you again for your time. This was fantastic and I look forward to our next conversation. [00:29:38] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you very much.