Interview transcript

Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about drones. The analyst market predicts a $355 billion drone market by 2026. That’s amazing. What is driving that massive increase?

James McDanolds I think the drive behind that massive increase is the fact that we are now getting to a point where the FAA rules for what’s called Part 108 is supposedly going to be released this year. And what that does is changes the scale and the way that drones are operated. In short, it allows drones to be operated beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight, and it allows multiple drones to operate by one operator or pilot. So what does that do? Well, with our current rules and regulations, you always have to have the pilot have eyes on the aircraft, unless you have a beyond visual line of site waiver. Now those are and far between. Now with standard rules to be able to fly beyond visual line of sight. Instead of me having to fly all the way out to, say, Scott City, Kansas to do wind turbine inspections, we could have a drone parked out there at the wind turbine farm. I could wake up from my bed, walk over to my computer, connect to the drone over the internet, and fly it from my home instead. But not just the drone at that one farm, it could be drones across multiple farms across multiple states. Now you don’t need to have a qualified operator be on location for every wind turbine inspection. You can have them be remote and operating multiple drones, making the operation more efficient. And not just one drone at a time, I could be flying maybe four or five, even 10, maybe even a hundred, doing turbine inspections all at once, which if you think about it, decreases the overall cost of operation.

Terry Gerton It seems like a recipe for attention deficit.

James McDanolds Well it does kind of transform in the past. I’ve been able to fly under a waiver that allowed one pilot to fly up to 10 aircraft at once. It does transition the mentality of a drone operator from just monitoring the aircraft and making sure everything’s working properly and being active, if need to, to being more of like an air traffic controller, but for drones instead of live aircraft and for the drones under your control, not necessarily for all the drones in the airspace. So it definitely changes the mentality a bit and it does take a lot of attention and a bit of multitasking for sure.

Terry Gerton And that’s different from the way we operate today because it’s one pilot per drone and mostly within a visual line of sight.

James McDanolds Correct.

Terry Gerton So this kind of opens up this concept of drones as a service. We’ve talked about software as a surface, but now people could buy drones as service. What would that mean in practice?

James McDanolds So it can mean different things. There’s different profiles that some companies are already working with under what we call a beyond visual line of sight or multi on-crewed aircraft systems waiver. And that means that you can now, say if someone wants to have a drone on a construction site and have that drone do a, what we call, project update photos and it takes photos and images once a week or maybe multiple times a week at that location. Well instead of having to have the operator come with it, you could have what’s called a drone in a box system. So there’s systems out there like a DJI dock or Percepto docking station or Skydio docks. So, essentially it’s this box that you power, you put a power connector to it or provide power to it. You plug in the ethernet or you have an internet wireless modem connected to it and it provides the ability for it to stay powered on 24/7. And you can connect to it over the internet at any time as needed. So instead of having the operator come out with the drone and all the equipment each time they need to do a flight at that location to the service provider, they could set the drone in a box at a location, set it, forget it, and then have the operator connect to that aircraft, fly the aircraft, collect all the needed data, and then provide that data to whoever is purchasing the use of that aircraft as a service.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with James McDanold’s. He’s the director of uncrewed technology programs at the Sonoran Desert Institute. So there are some countries that are already kind of modeling this approach. What should we learn from them in their early adoption?

James McDanolds There’s a lot of things to learn. We are in somewhat different environments for the countries that have adapted this faster than we have. And that is in cases like, Zipline is a good company. They are a drone delivery company and they have nationwide operations in a multitude of countries outside of the United States. They have some operations here in the United states that are under waiver that they’re conducting operations for but it’s not at the same scale. Now companies like those and others that have learned how to operate those drones at scale and beyond visual line of sight and multiple at once can take all those lessons learned and safety lessons learned, because now it’s not just one to one, it’s one to many, and it’s at a larger scale and it is in an airspace system that is now more complicated than the countries that they’ve operated in beforehand because countries that may have operated in maybe have two, three, four international flights with maybe some general aviation aircraft here and there. Now in the United States we have thousands of flights every day in the airspace as well as a lot of general aviation and hobbyist pilots out there. So that’s the reason the FAA has had to collect all this data and I think that is one challenge that will still be left is saying okay we’re going to integrate this as best we know with the data we have. We may need to make further increases in safety changes to make sure that we’re meeting that environmental change in comparison to where it’s been done overseas.

Terry Gerton It sounds like it increases security risks as well. Drones, unauthorized drones could be in different kinds of airspaces or for mega events. You may have drones all over the place and how will the FAA know which ones are supposed to be there and which ones aren’t?

James McDanolds So, I love that question, very good question. Right now, the FAA has what’s called Remote ID, and Remote ID is required for all drones, even ones that are not flying commercially under part 107. And what Remote ID does is put a small module on a drone that broadcasts the aircraft’s name, type, altitude, and location. And if a drone does not have that on board and it’s outside of what’s called a free zone, it’s an area where hobbyists can go that it’s pre-approved to fly out, most likely your aviation models, aeronautics club areas that are made for our radio controlled aircraft line as a hobby. If it’s not within that zone and it doesn’t have remote ID on it, it should not be there at all. It should not be allowed to fly at all, so that’s an identifier. There’s apps that you can see the remote IDs that are being broadcasted by drones. So that’s how currently both the public and the FAA can know who’s supposed to be there and who’s not.

Terry Gerton One thing to be able to identify them, it’s another to be able to eliminate them.

James McDanolds Yes, that is true. And that gets challenging as we’ve seen in conflicts over in Ukraine because both sides have been combating with, you know, frequency jamming and other things as well, but … now everyone’s referred to fiber optic lines and fiber optic cables that can be used to control these without necessarily jamming them. Well, when that becomes the case, the only other option is some form of kinetic or even — there’s individuals and companies that have created drones with netting capture systems where another drone will go up, track this other aircraft and deploy a net to capture it and then it’s hanging from this other drone and it brings that drone back. So there’s been some creative solutions that are coming out for those kinds of aircraft that aren’t supposed to be there. In a situation where obviously you don’t want them to be.

Terry Gerton You talked early on about part 108, the regulatory change that’s coming from the FAA. Are there other regulations that will need to go along with that or other processes to implement it that you’ll be watching for?

James McDanolds Yes, and one of them was just released near the end of last year, and that is the process for drone delivery companies when they want to start up a new operations area. They have to do essentially a site survey, a large-scale site survey to say, okay, what’s our airspace? What’s our ground environment look like? What’s the air traffic around the area? What are the obstacles that we have to contend with, both man-made and natural? That we have to evaluate for safety and then submit as a application almost, if you will, to the FAA to say, okay, we want to start operations here. Here’s the due diligence that we’ve done in order to start operation in that area. So even before anything, even before ground is broken, a safety evaluation must be done for the flight operation that they plan to conduct at scale under Part 108.

Terry Gerton You have said, though, that the real constraint here isn’t regulation, it’s talent. Tell us about what Sonoran Desert Institute is doing to train the folks who may be having to do these kinds of multi-drone controllers or other sorts of new technology management.

James McDanolds Well, certainly. So one of the things that we’re doing, and it’s not just about multi UAS controller beyond visual line of sight, recently on December 23, the Federal Communications Commission actually banned foreign-made drones from being sold in the United States. So now it’s not just about having competent pilots to expand to meet this new commercial need that’s coming into place because of part 108. It’s also more individuals who can build, design, flight test, and validate aircraft that are now going to have to be more built in the Unites States and for manufacturers in the Untied States. So that’s one of the key things we focus on is not just operations of, you know, visual line of sight, but operations and control for multitude of aircraft at once, how to handle that, how does that operation mindset look differently? And then even more importantly, how does one get into developing, validating, and producing on crewed aircraft systems? Because that is definitely a need that we have right now in the industry and we’ve had beforehand because there’s not a lot of suppliers out there or creators out there and it’s not just the drones themselves. It’s the components that go into the drones. Drones are like a cool little puzzle that have a ton of electronics and a ton of software that all come together to make these things fly and usable for different industries. So we try to train on that, not just for the drone itself, but also for those individual components and softwares as well.

The post The drone economy is about to take off fast, a $355B market and a new rule could make Drones-as-a-Service the next big thing first appeared on Federal News Network.