Drone World Expo in San Jose got off to a cracking start on Wednesday with a fully-packed room of attendees who turned up at 9 am for the Keynote: ‘Avoiding the Traffic Jam: A Government and Industry UTM Update’. The high-powered panel featured David Famolari, Verizon Ventures; Marke “Hoot” Gibson, FAA; Parimal “PK” Kopardekar, NASA and Dr. Dave Vos, Google X, and Gretchen West, Hogan Lovells, moderated the discussion.
The panellists addressed various topics around the challenges with implementation, timelines, industry involvement, and progress and successes.
Verizon Venture’s David Famolari stressed the need for open protocols to speed up industry adoption, while PK from NASA explained that the agency is developing performance ratings for unmanned systems, which will determine where they can be used. This will lead to the creation of a guidance system for operators, end-users, insurers etc.
Some eight other countries have now expressed interest in following NASA’s approach.
“Being first to scale is more important than being first to market. Unmanned aviation will overtake manned aviation ‘in a hurry’ and the NASA approach to regulation will scale more elegantly” PK concluded.
Only 7 weeks in the job, Hoot Gibson observed that the FAA is good at safety in traditional aviation, and it is now embracing fundamental change in operations that require changes in organisation. He is undertaking a strategic review of how they are organised in recognition of the enormity of the challenge ahead.
Google’s Dave Vos is looking for progress in near term – months not years. He acknowledged the need for resources and willingness to achieve progress and is excited to see traction with industry and agencies getting the resources to drive change. He encouraged everyone to ‘Dream what you want’ then work through the safety case. He also issued a call for self-regulation – the shorter development times for machines (Google recently developed a new product in 3 weeks) means that there will be huge amount of equipment to be certified and it will be difficult for government agencies to keep up.
Gretchen West reminded the audience that he industry is addressing a whole new community of users. There will be an estimated 1 million new users over holiday season – equipment is being sold to middle community between hobbyists and professionals who don’t realise that these are aircraft.
The challenge that we all face is to reach out to them and create a system which is easy to understand and simple to apply and that needs to happen soon.