I am always looking for ways to build relationships, plug into communities, get people helping each other,
encouraging the teamwork, and then have an opportunity to build skills.
This pushes all of my buttons, and I never would have come up with this on my own in a million years.
Welcome to another TREX Talk. I have a friend with me, Nathan. It's really good to have you here in our somewhat air-conditioned studio today,
but you just have been outside in the extremely hot sun doing a very interesting drone-centric job.
So do you want to tell our listeners, our audience, a little bit about yourself and what to do?
Sure. Well, first of all, I'm really glad to be here.
That's funny. Yep, going to be back.
So I am a drone pilot by trade, part 1-7 certified, whole nine yards been doing this for about a little over four years now, probably closer to five.
I can't remember the exact year when I started, but it's been interesting. It's been quite a, quite a development.
Right now, I work for a company called Percepto. We manufacture, drone-in-a-box solutions, fully autonomous solutions,
and I serve as their lead demo operator, so I travel around the country doing demonstrations for interested parties.
However, when I'm not traveling, I'm not on the road, when I'm not going all over the United States, I volunteer for a drone department.
Exactly what I wanted to talk about. What you were doing today was checking out industrial commercial sites.
It's very cool. It's probably harder to do when it's 113 degree heat index.
It's much less pleasant. Yeah. But the drone departments that I really want to talk to you about, because until I met you, I don't think I ever heard about a drone deployment.
I understand waste departments, fire departments. I understand roughly how EMS, EMA, and SIR generally kind of works within the NIMS system.
What is a drone department?
Okay. So our drone department is completely volunteer.
Every one of us from our chief to all of our administrative guys, we're all volunteers. We're all here doing this because we want to.
Now, drones have more and more begun to come up in fire departments. Yes. And police departments.
I see police drones all the time, but they're usually inside the police department. Yes. Same with fire, same with other departments.
So you're separate. Exactly. Exactly. Now, inside of a department, obviously a drone is a huge asset for that department, but because drones are still relatively new, learning curve.
Yep. It's expensive. A lot to stay on top of.
Yes. You got to stay on top of the regulation and all the latest technology and similar to phones where you know, you buy a new phone and next year it's outdated.
Drums are very much the same way. You buy a drone, probably by next year. And slightly more forgiving, you know, your drones may be good for two or three years, but pretty quickly it's outdated and trying to stay on top of that and keep up with that.
And then with a lot of departments having limited funding, especially for these newfangled toys. Yeah. For a lot of departments, it's really hard to get the funding to do it.
And then you go to where I live, which is very rural, Pennsylvania, North Central, Pennsylvania. And then there are even less well-funded. And they're not a big department that they can afford the time and the training to make sure that their pilots are recurrent and up to speed.
Yeah. And well-trained and experienced for doing this kind of stuff. So what we're doing is we're taking, there's Ron is my department chief, he's the guy who thought up all this who started this department very much a grassroots type of organization.
And he's a pilot who did a lot of drone stuff before he did this. And then I had four years before I started doing this roughly.
And so we're already coming into it with experience. We're already coming into it with knowledge of the systems. And in our case with our own systems, you know, we didn't have to start from ground zero with, well, what's the best drone to buy.
And you baited the industry, you're already up to speed on the technology, the new models and the regulations, which currently, if you look at the regulations, change a lot faster than the technology, which is the opposite of how innovation is supposed to work.
Yes, so. And the regulations are catching up to where it's the FAA first didn't even know what to do with drones.
Yeah. And so now they're constantly changing things up because and to the FAA's credit, where the FAA is actually kind of unique compared to a lot of other three-letter agencies is that they're actually trying pretty hard to help get drones to fulfill the drones capability.
It's true. They don't feel like they wish that they could shoot every drone on her dog. Yes. Yes.
Even though they are regulating, you know, new regulations come fast and improvements come slow, and for a measure coming.
Yes. Well, interestingly, things like right now we have a remote ID coming in September. Now a remote ID for those who don't know is an airplane.
If you're flying in an airplane right now, it has to have an ADSB in and an ADSB out. So a transmitter that's transmitting its location, heading, etc.
Hail number, identification. Yes, exactly. So that it can be tracked. ADSB is now coming in September for drones.
It's been there for ADSB in, where as I'm flying my auto, for example, I can see other aircraft around me, but there hasn't been an ADSB out.
So the FAA is now doing that, but interestingly, it's because that sort of starts to prep drones for being more integrated into.
Because BB Loss, the company I worked for Percepto is now, as far as I know, the first company to achieve blanket nationwide BB Loss beyond visual line of sight.
Yeah. So as of right now, if you're flying a drone, you're required to keep it line of sight. We now have that weight where we can fly it from our system flies off basically a laptop, you can fly it from anywhere.
You can sit in here in the non air conditioning and fly it outside. Exactly.
I can do that where it's slightly cooler than it is outside. We do have shade. Yes. Yes.
So now with that change, now with the ADSB and now with BB Loss waivers coming is even though in some ways there's more regulation coming for drones, the intent is to allow drones to do more, to go further to fly where they previously haven't been allowed to fly.
Because this kind of stages them to be more interesting, integrated into national airspace. I get it. So it's kind of a mixed bag. I don't like the idea of being able to be tracked, who does.
But I can also kind of see where okay, the purpose of this stuff is of it is to allow drones that do not, this is frankly right now, to stay legal. You're pretty limited.
You find a little DJI Matic Mini to stay last site. You fly it 100 feet and suddenly you're going very hard to see it. Where is it?
And some of these things, DJI has incredible range and you can fly those things for miles and still have shockingly good signal.
And then there's a ton of those drones like Skydeo and Autel and your company where the whole value proposition of the drone is for it to fly itself where you can't see it.
So exactly. Yeah, the regulation finally catching up to some of the technological capabilities. But let's go back to the drone department.
Absolutely. How do you start a drone department? When you go to your local county and you tell them you want to be a drone department and you want to be tied into 911 dispatch and you want to have the ability to run traffic and stuff.
Did they even have a check box for that? Is it only police share fire? What happened? How does that look?
So it's a very, very grassroots kind of thing and it's taken us a lot of time to get to that point and a lot of it actually wasn't so much going to the county as it was where we started interacting with fire departments.
And we started interacting with police forces and we started going and especially what's really cool about having local volunteer fire departments.
This is a little, a lot easier to build that relationship. And that's a big part of it. Yeah.
Is building that relationship with your local departments and being able to say, hey, you know, we have this capability, in this case, the drone, when you have a fire.
Here's all the ways we can help. And depending on where you're at, there are departments who are very set in their ways. We've done it this way forever.
You know, it's cool what you're doing, but we just don't see a need for it. And then there's some with some very forward thinkers in there who start going, hmm, that couldn't be helpful.
Yeah, I see the use for that there. Yeah. Now that is. So again, a lot of, like a lot of stuff we've talked about on previous audio only episodes of the podcast.
We've talked about community relationships, infrastructure stuff like that to some extent. And here in Hickman County, we also have a geographically large county that is very, very few people in it.
And so department budgets are low, but we're close to Nashville. And even in Nashville, where department budgets are high, there are some interesting stories. I heard that I'm not going to say which department, but some department.
Got a delo of some autonomous drones and said, absolutely not. We must be in control of the drones. We don't trust these things, which is kind of understandable. I can understand.
And six months later, they had crashed a very expensive collection of man, man controlled drones and had no drones. So I can see a lot of value in trusting somebody else to make the drones do their thing.
Yeah. So we don't have to trust the drones and you don't have to have these technologically challenging things inside of your department. We're already busy doing a whole bunch of other stuff.
Yes. So what are some of the things that those drone capabilities? What can you bring to a rural department say where you're not doing really complicated high rise hostage negotiations on a weekly basis?
What is it you actually do like day to day?
Yeah. So really, especially for rural areas, a really big thing is searching rescue. Right. You know, it's rural. There's a lot of, there's a lot of woods. There's a lot of space. People get, you know, and especially around me, there's a lot of different state parks that people end up going, getting lost all the time.
Very, very common place and searching rescue is phenomenal use of a drone because you can cover a lot of ground. Now, especially in the east, where we have a lot of tree can and be a lot of tree cover. Sometimes that makes it difficult to see down in the woods.
You still need to search and rescue through down there. But what this enables me to do is to kind of go out ahead with a drone and start looking along creek banks, along roadways, along, you know, some of these more open spaces and just.
Taking up ground and covering ground that now the search and rescue crew doesn't have to cover. Yep. So, and again, more rural often more limited resources. So the crews oftentimes are smaller and the more that we can do to cover that down windows. Exactly. Yeah.
Narrow down that search window. And that's where even just your standard RGB or regular camera drone is very useful.
Having the thermal capability unlocks a whole new thermal is not perfect. Thermal you can't see that person who's wearing that bright yellow shirt, you know, it's not it's not perfect in every way.
But thermal will still help a ton with just being able to move along a wood edge and the sea back into the into the wood line and be able to find people. So searching rescue is huge, huge use case for a drone.
And thermal is great for fire. We have a thing here where we have a lot of woods out the window. We have lots of tree cover. We have a lot of structure fires that become wildfires in some way. So being able to see hot spots and be able to really quickly see if stuff is moving away from structure towards other structures with thermal cameras huge and massively helpful. Yes.
And having the having the thermal even on a structure fire where you're able to look and you're able to see the progression of a fire. If you can get there, rate it the outset and be tracking this this fire right from the get go, you can give the department you're working with.
An idea of where is that fire headed? Where is it moving? Where we get through a task wise. Yep. And we can also use it to just say watch a roof and to say look, this rooftop is getting really, really hot better make sure that your guys are clear that there's a chance it's going to it's going to go and then towards the end of the fire.
We can then look as one problem fire departments face a lot of times is okay fires pretty much out. Let's start sending some guys home. And what they don't realize is that here over in this corner, there's still a hot spot that will reignite. It's still hot. They got it with water, but eventually it can it can flare up again. Yeah. And so having the ability to look over structure. And say, hey guys, this is still hot over here.
And the incident commander can tell his guys, let's go over and we're going to douse that thing with some more water and make sure they don't have to call anyone back for flare up. Yeah.
And then like you said with wildfires being able to track that progression being able to watch that fire and where it's going because wildfires have a tendency to turn fast. Yeah.
In the wind changes a little bit with the train and suddenly your north bound fire, you know, makes a sharp hook and it's an east bound fire and being able to watch that have an eye in the sky.
This is extremely extremely valuable. Yeah. So I was a volunteer firefighter for a while. And because it when county is so big, I rarely got on scene quickly. So my experience dealing with fires early on is very limited compared to afterwards.
And we also have a lot of trailers right here. So if it takes you 40 minutes to get to a trailer that's on fire.
There's there's not a lot of early ventilation that you have to do. It's pretty much solved itself. And so as you're you're stopping spread.
Yes. Exactly. In Eggman County more often than not. But what about what about law enforcement? What are some of the things that you do for police and sheriff and highway and stuff like that as a drone department?
Yes. For law enforcement, actually, a lot of times it goes back to that search and rescue aspect or to that missing persons or to a man hunts.
You know, hey, we got this guy who's on the run in my college rescue, but faster. Yeah, basically search rescue, but that's very exactly. And the person is actually trying to hide from you.
They're not trying to be found. It makes it fun. Exactly. Exactly. It makes it interesting. So that's really the biggest use that we have. Again, because we're in a rural area.
There's not a lot we can do, you know, for police departments when you don't say someone's in the house or you know robbery taking place or whatever.
Small enough houses. Yeah. So most of what we do is that, hey, we need help finding something or someone.
The other thing that comes into play is crash reconstruction. Oh, you're overseeing an accident.
There's an accident being able to get on scene quickly. And with an accident, usually it's just kind of it's happened. It's over with the crashes happen and they got EMS and they got fire rescue and they got all the people there and they take the people out.
But then at that point, you're just we're able to get a bird's eye view and we're able to take images or the guys on the ground are doing traffic management and you can do evidence collection.
Yeah, exactly. We can give them a bird's eye view of here's what happened. You know, you can clearly see the tire tracks that went here and you can see what happened.
So accident reconstruction is another big one. For that, are you mostly just getting skills of video or are you doing full on 3D models of stuff?
3D models is one of the best ways to do that. And then you can measure and get actual forensic type stuff. Yes, exactly.
Now, often with a with a crash, time is of the essence. Yeah, because they want to clear the roadway for sure want to get off the roadway. So again, because we can do it quickly with the drone.
Because it really isn't take very long to get a imagery for for a map and for a 3D model, you know, we just can fly a cylinder around collect a bunch of imagery kind of a dome shape over it.
And then we can whisk that data off through a new program like drone deploy picks for you something like that. Yeah.
And a couple hours later, it's out of 3D mall.
Then they can then pass off and you can pan around and they can look at it.
Yeah, that's pretty it's pretty cool technology. And so I can see a lot of value that you bring to your county, the different departments that you interact with.
But what do you get out of it? Obviously you are serving, you're helping.
You're getting to, I mean, your day job is drones. So you are already getting to have fun with drones. But this is, you know, drones are a very fun hobby that's hard to justify for people who are busy.
And this is a way that you can turn into something that is genuinely productive. What are some of the other benefits that have come out of this for you, for the department, for the other guys around and the county in general?
Well, one of the big reasons I wanted to do it in the first place was I met Ron and, you know, he told me about, you know, what he was kind of doing.
For me, my job involves leaving my community. That's what I do. I hop on a plane or I jump in a truck and I leave my community and I'm away from my community.
Head to the Oklahoma oil fields. Exactly. This gives me a way to when I come home, is it a way to take my experience, take my license, take my equipment and then turn it around and use it as something that's not just fun and it's not just a money maker.
But it's actually genuinely helping out my community. Because, for example, within our department, really right now, we only have two pilots, but it's Ron myself. And then we have several other guys that they're not pilots. They don't fly drones, but maybe they can run the, because we use underwater rovers as well for this.
Okay. Yeah. So maybe they can run the underwater rover or maybe they have their boat license and kind of run a boat, you know, or maybe they know comms and they can help us with communication.
Next question. Yeah. Administrative work. You know, we got guys who really the biggest thing they do is go to the fire department meetings to continue the network to continue to.
Yeah, maintain their allow reach into that exactly because probably one of the biggest aspects of the department, one of the things that has really helped us succeed in the community is building that trust, building those relationships.
Yeah, because we can't just be, you know, hearing them on a hot shot drone pilot that can, you know, whip an FPV drone through windows, you know, and we need to be professionals. Yeah, we need to make sure that they trust us to work with them.
It's a huge aspect. And so having that, those guys that just network, those guys that just, because it's not going to be me, because I'm gone all the time. Yeah. You know, it's hard for me to do that. So having those people who, maybe their skill is just people skills. Yeah.
And being able to take those and use it to benefit the community, isn't it?
I can also see you as being kind of a liaison between departments, like one of the issues that.
Obviously, it is a, it is a joke in and of itself, police versus fire is the source of many actual true memes that have been out of this.
But one of the things that I really appreciated having on our rescue department was one of the local cops. The fact that he did both was huge for relationships.
And he did that pretty much all by himself. But there's a lot of guys like every other police officer in the center of the police department way too busy to do two jobs to moonlight.
But if we had a drone department say who could go to both sets of meetings, keep people posted on stuff, I think that a lot of relationships would be healthier and a lot of benefit would come out of it.
So, yes, have you seen that in your deck of the woods? And I don't want any details because small town first responder politics.
Oh, it's something on its own.
Yes. Yeah.
But, you know, you saying that is really actually one of the biggest reasons to have a dedicated drone department outside of the skill aspect.
But when you cast the question of, well, why don't we just get a guy on our police department who does it or why don't we just get a guy in a fire department because we are our own thing.
It means that we can go between departments.
Yeah. And we make some teamwork happen exactly otherwise because we cover multiple counties. We don't discover.
Tyoga County where I am. We cover multiple counties in North Central Pennsylvania.
And because we're independent, it means that we can work with a lot of different and not just fire departments or police departments.
DC and R, the game commission.
All kinds of independent searcher asking groups.
We got a lot of a lot of different groups that we can and it gives us just the flexibility to do that.
Yeah.
To be independent.
That is, that's huge.
And I can always speak to my own limited experience, but seeing that police officer doing stuff with the rescue squad and the way that it brought groups together.
The few other cross department guys that we had when we would mutual aid a department because there was a guy that we knew do them.
The relationships, even when they were relatively small, relatively infrequent contact.
Still, the level of trust that existed there that enabled teamwork happened was huge.
And the two things that really got me and the rest of my family more plugged into our community here.
One of them was the fire thing and then the other thing was as T-Rex has grown and we've just done more community stuff and hired more people for around there.
That has really helped build relationships too.
But that fire department thing was huge.
And I don't think it's, I mean, it is an interesting question is that the four original T-Rex guys were all on the rescue squad together and joined at the same time and did training together and then plugged into the community together.
So I'm super intrigued by by this drone department thing.
Is there anything else I'm guessing that the folks watching were still getting used to this format where we have a personal conversation.
Very private.
And people are watching.
The people watching are probably curious as to how they could do this and some of the other practicalities and things.
So is there anything else that you want to cover quickly?
Since you're on the road, I know you'll be back and I think that we should dig a little deeper into this based on questions.
But is there anything else that you want to try to just like cover obvious questions that people have that I have that brought up any points you want to cover on this drone department.
Drone department concept because I am always looking for ways to build relationships, plug into communities, get people helping each other, encouraging the teamwork that can exist between guys who may not necessarily work together.
And then have an opportunity to build skills and like this pushes all of my buttons and I never would have come up with this on my own in a million years.
So this is totally my job.
Yeah, I mean, I guess foundationally.
In order to get this started in order to, you know, hey, I have this skill set again.
It could be comms.
It could be you're just, hey, I got good people skills.
Yeah.
You know, whatever it may be is to get into this.
The biggest thing is to reach out.
Find connections.
Go to, you know, if you can attend a public fire meeting or where if you know a guy who's in the fire department, just want to go along or even just one thing we do is we go to events.
Like we're probably, you're following me a fourth of July event that, you know, by the lake that we're going to go to and show our stuff.
You know, go to those events and network and be professional.
Display, you know, show them, here's why you should trust me to do this.
A lot of that comes down to again, not being either that guy who wants to show off all of his drone skills.
And even above the drone skills, you need to, you know, be competent with a drone or whatever you're doing.
But you also just need to be a good trustworthy individual.
I think it helps when you show up and you say, I'm here to help to volunteer to do a thing that doesn't have any glitz or glamour attached to it.
And when people show up and like, I would like to be a reserve deputy.
I would like a bad at a gun and to be in charge of stuff, please.
That has a very different sound to it.
And hi, I'm willing to run into burning buildings to help people.
And I don't want to get paid.
Yeah.
Would you let me?
That's right.
That's right.
Well, on the Y behind it too, you know, because there's the people who, hey, I want to run into buildings because I want to show off how much I am.
I want to say puppy dogs and stuff like that, you know, just being that, like in that humble person that I'm not here
because I just want to play with cool toys.
Yeah.
It's a nice side bonus.
But it's a good side bonus.
Yeah.
But just for me, it was, I just genuinely want to take this.
I don't want to just go and make my paycheck and return home.
And then I do nothing else with my skillset besides play around with it.
I wanted to help others in that mentality.
And form a core group of people around you who all want to work together to help.
You know, again, because we're a department, we work together.
We have different skill sets.
And you can start building that that's smaller community around you.
And then start network networking that was showing us why we as a group can help and want to help makes a difference.
I like that a lot.
So many more questions.
I do really look forward to continuing this conversation.
Absolutely.
And look forward to having back.
But for those watching, I just encourage you, if you want to get plugged in, build community,
do a lot of this stuff that we've talked about at Turing for a very long time.
This is a super cool opportunity that I had never really thought about.
And depending on the assets that you have, the skills, the people that you've already connected with,
maybe this is something that you could consider starting in your county.
Or maybe you take the baby steps and you go to some fire meetings.
And maybe you become the volunteer firefighter.
You become, you know, that point of connection for the guys in your squad that are going to start the drone department next year.
That kind of thing.
So homework assignment.
Go think about how you can do that.
Look forward to some Nathan coming back onto the show to talk more details.
Questions in the comments down below that we would need to answer in the future.
And then oh, I also should say one more thing.
I told my kids the next time you were in town, we were going to fly the big drone.
So they have been asking about you.
And so when they see this video, I have to explain.
Big drone trailer was in the shop.
That's why we couldn't fly the big drone.
Yeah.
It's getting worked on when she's all fixed and pretty dumb.
We'll bring it back out.
So next time we'll fly the big drone.
We'll continue to talk about some stuff.
I do want to pick your brain.
And we can do this in a video about commercial drones.
Yes.
But the drone department is that grassroots personal responsibility thing.
The T-Rex talks about a lot, the community involvement.
Serving and increasing capabilities all the same time.
I love it.
So thank you so much for coming out.
Absolutely.
Telling people about this super cool idea that I am really excited by.
And we'll see you guys the next episode.
Thank you guys.
Thank you.