a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Airspace as the Next Internet-Like Platform

Episode Date: May 18, 2016

One of the most important lessons of the internet age is what happens when we give people -- including companies, developers, engineers, hobbyists, and yes, even a few bad (or dumb) actors -- a new platform, along with the freedom to innovate on top of it. For example, who could have predicted how profoundly the internet would change our economy, given how it started off as a research project -- one where commercial applications were actually frowned upon in the early days? Now, the U.S. is on the cusp of opening up another such platform for commercial and social innovation: airspace (think drones, the non-military kind). There's so many use cases for drones that we already know about, but what about new business use cases? And then, on the policy front, how do we calculate the risk of innovation on a platform made up of atoms (drones) vs. bits (the internet)? What are the pros and cons of registration? Because even though drones are like flying smartphones controlled by software, they're also hard objects that could fall out of the sky ... or go places where no one could go before, for better or worse. The guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast -- continuing our D.C. and tech/innovation/policy theme -- share their thoughts on safety, privacy, paper airplanes, and what they think are some of the most exciting things now possible in airspace. Joining the conversation are Washington, D.C.-based Mercatus Center tech policy lead Eli Dourado, along with graduate research fellow Samuel Hammond; Airware founder and CEO Jonathan Downey; and SkySafe CEO and co-founder Grant Jordan.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and C podcast. I'm Sonal. And today's topic, continuing our DC theme, is drones. And more broadly, policy and airspace as a platform for innovation. Joining us for that conversation just to really quickly do the intros, we have Eli Dorado, who directs the technology policy program at Georgia Mason University's Mercatus Center. And he's here with Samuel Hammond, who's a graduate research fellow in that program. And they've done a lot of research and policy reports around drones. And then we have Jonathan Downey, who's the founder and CEO of Airways. Airware, which provides operating systems for commercial drones, so enterprises can take advantage of aerial data for business applications. And we also have Grant Jordan, who's a CEO and co-founder of SkySafe, which is a company that provides security for airspace, for example, by taking control of and safely landing rogue drones. And by the way, those are both A6 and Z companies full disclosure. We have another drones investment, Skydeo, which focuses on onboard intelligence by giving drones the same visual awareness and agility of human pilots, but they couldn't join us today. So those are the intros, and now let's just get started. I think the place to start off is, you know, Eli, you wrote an op-ed for me a few years ago, where we talked about airspace as the next platform for innovation. And I thought that was a really eye-opening concept for me. And I think we need to just break down what each of those terms mean. Like, what is airspace? Why a platform? And why is it the next platform for innovation? Well, yeah, when I wrote that op-ed, I think it must have been about three years ago when I was first starting to get interested in drones. The thing that I noticed immediately was that drones are completely legal to use for hobbyist purposes and completely illegal to use for commercial purposes. And it reminded me of the Internet back in the 1980s, right?

In the Internet in the 1980s, it was this research program that the government had. But there were guidelines that, you know, MIT had an AI lab. And the guidelines for students were like, you may not use this for any commercial purpose. you know, we could get in trouble with the government. It's just illegal. And I thought about the people running this program, they didn't mean to, like, hold back the internet. They were very, I'm sure, very well-intentioned. They wanted this to succeed. And they weren't thinking about how much holding something back from commercial operation was likely to affect the success, right? If they knew where we were today, they would have allowed commercial use from the inception.

right? And so to me, I was just thinking about what would people do with airspace if they could use it for commercial purposes? If it wasn't, you know, we've had remote-controlled airplanes for decades. People, you know, hobbyists use them, you know, so in that sense, consumer drones are nothing new, but you can't do anything commercially. And so what would people do if you could use it commercially? And Jonathan, I think this is something you can weigh in on because you are the founder of a company that is doing software for commercial drones. Yeah, happy to. And, you know, I totally agree three years ago around the time you wrote that article. We looked at the global landscape for commercial drones. And most everyone at that time was thinking about consumer and the hobbyist drones. And they were thinking about large military aircraft. But this idea of using drones for commercial applications was relatively new. And when we looked at the landscape, most of the companies who were doing anything meaningful.

meaningful in the space, were international. They were in Australia. They were in France. They were in the UK. There were only a few countries where they either said, you know, hey, we're not going to regulate this at all. We're going to allow it. Or they said, we're going to have a process by which you can be a commercial operator of drones in the UK and France. We're really leading the way there with hundreds of commercial operations years ago. And many of the companies in the space said, well, we're just going to ignore the U.S. or if we are in the U.S., we're going to start all of our sales and operations and research and development outside of the country. And only, now with the Section 333 exemption process and hopefully soon with Part 107, do we see a lot of

those companies that either started internationally expanding their operations to the U.S. or a lot more of these companies that are in the U.S. starting to get some commercial traction. What is section, what was the regulation that you just cited? So part 107 is the new proposed small UAS rule and it's, it will sort of. By UAS you mean unmanned systems. Unman aerial systems. Right, this is the FAA term. Right, which by the way.

Cool people just call them drones. Right. So that includes drones, which just for a quick definitional thing on drones, because I think people actually still confused by this sometimes. I notice this in the early days of this community, an online community about drones, which is that drones are different than RC copters in that they can fly waypoints. And so they can follow like a pre-programmed path and that you can, they're not like remote controlled basically in that context. So the terms do get like blended and so on. But yeah, I would agree that what we're interested in here is some partial or full autonomy at some point. Right. Okay. You're going to eventually be able to just tell it what you want it to do and it does it. Okay. And so back to section, whatever. So the Part 107 rules, back in 2012, Congress, actually with some foresight. Actually, with a lot of lobbying from large commercial industries.

A lot of lobbying, but good for Congress. They passed a provision of the FAA reauthorization bill at the time to require the FAA to come out with commercial drone rules by September 30th, 2015. which was, you know, several months ago. Came and went. Came and went. They're still not out, but they're coming. It would probably be sometime next month. There will be some permanent commercial drone rules.

And in the meantime, as Jonathan said, we have these 333 exemptions that basically allows people to sort of negotiate or apply with the FAA to say, I want to operate commercially for this purpose. And the FAA might allow it or might not. And what are some of the purposes and use cases that you guys are seeing, people put to, I mean, what are the, not, why would they want those exemptions, basically? Yeah, so the Section 33 exemption process was created last fall, and now just, you know, nine months later or so, there's over 4,000 granted exemptions in the U.S. for commercial use of drones across a variety of different industries, but we're seeing a lot of exemptions

and our own customers using drones in the insurance industry, in agriculture, in utilities, in all types of industrial inspections, oil and gas, land management, forestry, wildlife conservation. You know, that's one of the things that I think is so interesting about this industry is just the wide variety of applications and use cases. They're really endless. We're hearing about new ones all of the time. And I really think, you know, it makes that analogy to the early internet, you know, very, very real in that it was designed and developed, you know, with several, you know, really important use cases in mind, but ultimately when it was kind of released into the wild and, you know, not just people, quote unquote, with authority to develop it, but really all kinds of people

everywhere were adding capabilities to software into the internet is when we really saw this, you know, bloom in all the different uses for it. It's totally the case that we don't even know what the real killer apps for drones are yet. You know, I think there's a couple spaces that are kind of obvious that we've been thinking about so far of, you know, delivery and inspection and all these sorts of things, but there's so much potential there. It's kind of crazy. You know, I think part of a lot of our focus

is on thinking a little bit further forward about the aerospace management aspect. You know, I think using commercial drones early on in the process is pretty easy when they're still very expensive, when the sorts of companies that can use them are still very limited. You know, much like security

in that early internet, right? You know, when the internet is just, a connection of a bunch of research centers and government, then it's not, you know, security's not really that big of a problem. Everybody on there is trusted. Everybody on there is doing the right thing. But as those barriers to entries start coming down, as, you know, anybody with 500 bucks can be flying a drone, suddenly it becomes kind of a different story. And suddenly, you know, people who don't really know the rules of the road, who aren't really sure what they're doing, or have actual malicious intent, they kind of start coming to the party as well. So you guys are kind of

getting ahead of that. I wanted to you step back for a moment and think about, again, this we're all really reinforcing this concept of airspace as a platform for innovation. I think it's actually kind of shocking to think about what it means to be able to do things in the sky. And I just want to take a moment to pause on that. Yeah. And I think people don't realize that like cell phone tower inspections is like one of the most dangerous jobs in America. I mean, people that OSHA called it. The number one most dangerous job. And that's going to be, yes. Why? Just because it's So high up. There were 14 deaths in 2013 alone tower climbing.

So there's not that many people who climb towers, right? So this is a fairly high percentage of the people who do this for a living. These are high towers and people fall or something goes wrong. And that's one that's gotten a lot of publicity recently. There's a lot of other jobs that are really dangerous as well for two-story steep rooftop inspections of residential properties, whether it's during the underwriting phase, whether it's during the claims phase. can also be a pretty dangerous job as well. And many companies, it's kind of an opt-in job.

They don't assign it to you. You have to kind of ask to be that person climbing up on the roof. Oh, really? Because it's that dangerous. Wow. So there's clearly a lot of dangerous cases. What are some of the, I mean, oil and gas, what is some of the, that's what I hear about all the time as an industry that needs drones.

Like, why is that? Flair stack inspections for both onshore and offshore infrastructure and oil and gas, also oil derricks need to be inspected, and oil platforms need to be inspected for corrosion and damage on a regular basis. And a lot of these inspections, you know, similarly are very dangerous to do. Or with the case of flare stacks, often the infrastructure needs to be shut down so that people can actually climb up on it. But with a drone in an aerial perspective, it gives you a completely different way to assess the status of the infrastructure without having to shut down critical equipment. So we've kind of out.

outline some of the more dangerous jobs and use cases that drones can help address. Now let's think about sort of some of the things that there are opportunities you wouldn't have had if it weren't for drones. Because when we talk about all those application use cases, insurance, agriculture, etc., in a lot of ways we're talking about disintermediating existing alternate approaches that are expensive or prohibitive or difficult or unsafe, you know, like having to do ladders or oil and gas inspection, things that are just impossible. I think it's especially interesting on the creative side, Like what you can do with photography, aerial Hollywood filmmaking and some of the really creative aspects of this because to me the internet wasn't just a commercial platform. It was a creativity platform. And I'm curious to hear what you guys are seeing on that front as well. I'll just say first of all that the qualitative park gets missed in like FAA cost benefit analyses. So how do you put a price on a vista that you haven't seen before?

Exactly, especially when you don't know what it's going to look like, because that's a whole point of, again, not to be platitude-ish, but that's the whole point of innovation. Like, it's supposed to surprise you in terms of what's possible. Like, we can list all the use cases we want in this room, but we truly have no concept until we see companies and people start really inventing things around it. Well, yeah, I was actually going to say on the creative side, one of the things that I think is some of the most interesting stuff is on filming, just being able to do shots that used to require helicopters, that used to require, you know, know, tremendous amounts of coordination and time and money. And now it's just like, you know, a drone just allows that so easily. So kind of the entry level for what used to be a helicopter shot is like nothing now. Well, and whether it's in Hollywood and taking shots that were previously from manned helicopters or whether it's the utilities industry, you know, getting, you know, high resolution photos of power lines from what used to be manned helicopters, that's the starting point. But then it gets really interesting when you start understanding what wasn't even possible

with manned helicopters and now is becoming possible with small aircraft, including, you know, new shots in Hollywood that previously, you know, you can't get a helicopter within five and ten feet of a person and kind of circle that person, but you can do that with a drone, especially as these things are becoming smaller, safer, lighter weight. Right, or even shots that transition from inside to outside. Passing through windows and so on. I don't know, a Hollywood expert, but I imagine in the past they do a shot that pulls into the window and then there be some hidden cut. And then reset the shot from inside. Now you could presumably just open the window. The corollary for a lot of these industrial inspections is the ability to do things like fly underneath a bridge, fly underneath an oil derrick. Right. The top side of some of this infrastructure was always accessible with manned helicopters, albeit at a very expensive price tag.

But now you can go inside of buildings. We're seeing companies do inspections of the insides of everything from, you know, oil, large oil containers to even large gas turbines. What's interesting to me about the Hollywood application is that they actually were some of the earliest adopters and they adopted it even before it was legal for them to do so. So Hollywood is like the great— Follows its own rules, God damn it. Hollywood was like the Uber of drones and sort of like the—they're just going to do it

and ask for forgiveness and not permission. So that was one thing, I think. Hollywood helped with— Yeah, well, and also Hollywood actually helped. a lot on the 333 exemptions, right, because they kind of had some of the biggest immediate incentive to get commercial use approved. And also, what I thought was kind of cool is, you know, they paved the way for the use of drones in filming because they already had all of the safety procedures and flight manuals and things that they'd been using for manned helicopter shoots

for years. So they literally just took those and shifted them over and, you know, called it, this is the manual for shooting with drones. And that's what kind of lets you get the 333 exemptions for shooting so easily now. So we discussed some of the innovation arbitrage around drones. When it comes to Canada, some of that was also film because there's film industries in Toronto and Vancouver, and they could make shots and not have to worry about asking for forgiveness. So it's interesting you reference innovation arbitrage because the example you shared is basically, and this goes to what Jonathan was saying earlier about some of the innovation happening around the world,

is that when certain places have more regulatory flexibility, it then draws that industry correspondingly. And I think the reason this causes U.S. lawmakers to freak out a little bit when they hear Amazon saying, hey, we might start developing drones in Brazil or another country, it actually becomes correlated to a direct loss of the economic opportunities that are provided as a result of this. I mean, I'm thinking of the Internet example. It'd literally be like saying, you know what, we're not going to let commercial applications happen on the internet.

So let's develop them in China and India and Brazil and South Africa. And, you know, I'm just listening to the bricks right there. But that is kind of the risk to me at stake here when we talk about this. Because I think, again, people are really underestimating how much is possible in the air. Like we're, I don't mean to be cheesy, but drones excite the fuck out of me because, I know they really do because it's insane to me that, you know, we talk about man. and like women, humankind, wanting to, like, fly. And now we're talking about a whole new level of excitement to be able to reach into the air and do things.

I mean, don't people get that? This is a really big deal, for God's sake. Adam Theoria of the Mercatus Institute and I have a paper forthcoming called Global Innovation Arbitrage. And drones are a major case study that we look at. Why did you guys pick drones? Well, we picked, you know, drones. We picked genetics.

So there's these big things where, first of all, they're major emerging tech, and they're very much in the news. I picked drones personally because as a Canadian, I was seeing drones in the industry take off in my home country. And so we actually focused on Canada and Switzerland. And the Swiss government has taken a very risk-based approach to drone regulation. So is that a bad thing or a good thing? A good thing. They're actually evaluating the risks and moving forward accordingly as opposed to just blanket bands or... Right.

And it's flexible for that reason. So there's very few, for example, in Switzerland, very few bright line restrictions on what you can or cannot do. They'll have guidelines about, for example, going beyond line of sight. But those aren't written in stone such that if new technology makes that safer, that they can't be revised sort of on the spot. Right, because the current law, if I'm not mistaken, at least locally I know that you do have to keep drones and then your

visual line of sight. And that sort of seems to defeat the purpose of the very purpose in certain use cases, like if you're a farmer mapping your fields, is to be able to go beyond the line of site. So when I reached out with to the Swiss government on this and this is another analogy with the

early internet, I was really asking them for an estimate of how much commercial operation is going on in their country. And the reply I got back was, we're not the United States. We don't keep a tab on every single commercial entity. So it, uh, fascinating. And sort of like the early internet, you could look up every website in like a phone book, right? Um, that's sort of the mentality that still exists in the U.S. with drones and in Swiss, the Swiss and the Canadians, um, they're, they're comfortable not knowing exactly how many commercial operators there are.

Right. And in fact, isn't part of the problem. I mean, in the current state that the regulation process can be prohibitive? I mean, the registration could be really expensive for small operators, or I don't know enough about it. Like, what's the... Well, there's a consumer registry now, and that registry, it's not expensive. It's $5, but it could potentially stop people from taking that step. There's, I think, a lot of lawbreaking going on right now because I think there's something like a million plus consumer drones and only 400,000 have registered.

So we've created a new law that has turned us all into a nation of lawbreakers. But then the other thing is this isn't the registry is not very well tailored to the actual risks that we face. You have to register a drone if it's more than 250 grams, which the FAA helpfully points out. Which, by the way, how much that is in pounds? Well, the FAA says this is two sticks of butter is what the FAA says. Oh, really? Yes. Oh, my God.

So two sticks of butter or bigger, you have to, so it's like half a pound, 0.55 pounds. So if it's, um, if it's, if it's that big, you have to register it, right? And, and one of the things that we're looking at is how dangerous is it, you know, to have something, you know, a more flexible standard that goes up to like two kilograms, which is what's used in, in a lot of other countries. How much is that in pounds, two kilograms? 4.4 pounds. And so this is not, this is just the weight of the drones and selves. It's not including any kind of pay. Like for commercial applications where you're doing delivery, it counts a payload. Okay. So let's take a step back for a moment and just talk about the safety implications of drones. Because what's different, obviously, with the internet and drones and any airspace objects is that they are flying, we call them flying smartphones or flying computers. We think of them that way. But they are flying objects that can follow the sky and like hit your head. They can get your tree. They could kill your cat. I mean, I don't mean to be frivolous about it. But these are realities. So let's talk about the safety implications.

of drones? And what are some of the concerns that people have and that you guys who are really involved in this space have heard? Well, I think there's two things that people are worried about. And one is, as you say, falling out of the sky, hitting people on the head. And to me, that is something that we can probably deal with through the tort system, just in the same way if you hit somebody with your car, like they sue you. Maybe the insurance company. It's a great example. It's an example, though, that requires liability insurance. to drive on our public roads, and that requires registration of your car. So I might be the odd person out here, but in the same way that you more or less have

to have a Mac address to get on the internet, there should be some mechanisms by which we identify the other people who are flying drones near us or flying drones. Yeah, I was having dinner about a year ago, actually, in Berkeley, and a drone flew right into the side of the restaurant, crashed, and then just about fell on top of the head of this girl who was standing there. you know there's a lot of people out there doing dumb things with drones there are some people doing dumb things and and i think we can keep the registration requirements and things like this very very basic and lightweight but structured in a way where you know the person has an incentive if

if there's some identifying marking on that drone that's going to say whose drone it is people are going to be incentivized and maybe think twice before they you know fly their drone into the side of the building or, you know, above New York City. So you're saying associate some sort of identity or location. That's the idea behind registration is that if you're flying this drone, especially in a public space and something goes wrong, people will be able to identify who's drone in this. But then is it really 250 grams? That's the right threshold for that. I mean, I'm not worried about 250 gram drone. Two sticks of butter falling in your head. I hate to tell you. I'm not too

worried about that personally. I think that that 250 gram allowance could be called the paper airplane allowance. Right. Well, actually, under federal statute, paper airplanes are aircraft. Wait, are you serious? Yes. So paper airplanes are at the FAAA. So every time a kid, like, folds up a paper airplane in the classroom and kindergarten,

they're like breaking the law. Well, they're not registered. The FAA is forbearing on enforcing the standards. So discretion. The registration standards on paper airplanes. Oh, my God. So they, they, they would, FAA would say that they have the right to, to regulate that if, I mean, they would be embarrassed to say it, but they would, they would say that they do. So, Grant, when you guys, you know, started thinking about this, the thinking far ahead about like, okay, the same way the internet needed like security and the drone, airspace will need security in this way where you can essentially enforce, so to speak, the anti-drone, what was, what were the scenarios that were coming in your guys's minds that you came up with this?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's, it's kind of interesting, too, because. when we first started working on this and thinking about this, you know, it was still pretty early in the space, and we weren't really seeing drone incidents occurring. You know, whereas now it's like literally one a week, if not more. But I think to me,

the big difference is that there's kind of a gap in airspace enforcement, right? Like if you're talking about commercial aviation, civil aviation, you know, at some point, your enforcement of airspace restrictions, there's kind of two things that come into play. one is just the barrier to entry to be involved in aviation at all, right? You know, the amount of training required, the amount of money required up front with

planes and fuel and all of that. But then, you know, in addition to that, it's a question of, at the end of the day, there is an enforcement mechanism up there. You know, you have your plane registered with who owns it. The FAA can come and cite you, can take away your licenses, things like that. You know, they can track you down. They have transponder requirements. And also, you know, at some point, if you fly,

in a restricted airspace, the National Guard will literally, you know, fly an F-16 up next to you and tell you to land. Shoot you down. Like, top gun, sorry, I don't mean to get all dramatic. But, but, you know, the F-16 and the National Guard doesn't really help when you have, you know, just a quad-copter flying somewhere. That's not really

an appropriate level of response. But, you know, the spread of drones on the consumer side really kind of brings in this level of, it kind of changes the rules in thinking about airspace security, facility security, things like that, you know, when we talk about, you know, how it redefines various ways that we think about things, you know, if you're thinking about perimeter security of something like a power plant, like a nuclear power plant or something, or a prison, for example, there's a lot of assumptions we make in building a security perimeter about, you know, fences, right? But now that you have drones, you know, an eight-foot fence versus a 20-foot fence versus a two-foot fence, it's pretty much equivalent. It doesn't really matter. You know, you can fly your drone over and deliver your contraband kind of regardless. regardless of the height of the fence.

So it just kind of breaks down a lot of our traditional security models. And so you're thinking about it more in the sense of how to, because I know there's geo fencing where you can actually like fence in a region that a drone is sort of contained to fly,

but you're talking about when you can't control the perimeter, so to speak, and military part of the problem, the problem at the end of the day with something like geo fences, right? Which obviously totally necessary, totally step in the right direction,

but you're trusting the device. to essentially police itself. You know, you're saying, drone, don't fly here, and it's going to abide by your rules. And that's really good for eliminating kind of the initial low-hanging fruit of the people that are going to follow the rules.

But, you know, I mean, a really good case and point is literally anyone flying a drone right now within a 30-mile radius of Washington, D.C., right? Right now, in order to do that, you need to essentially override those controls because that 30-mile radius

is a no drone zone. which also incidentally is kind of confusing if you are a you know an RC hobbyist who's been living near DC for decades flying RC planes but now you know because it's a quad rotor instead of a traditional RC plane now it's not okay to fly there it's kind of a confusing set of rules right so you're thinking about the enforcement aspect well I want to think about the other safety issue or is that the other one I was thinking of was collisions with planes in the air that's the one that manned planes and So this is something Sam and I have done some research on. And we use as a sort of parallel phenomenon, planes hitting birds. So there's actually many orders of magnitude more birds in the airspace than there are drones. And so, you know, what sort of conclusions can we have? And the FAA actually has 25 years of data on sort of voluntarily reported bird strikes. And so we looked through that.

What did you guys find? birds are pretty safe okay thank god i love birds so uh so uh we do we do hit uh birds uh all the time uh sometimes they cause damage sometimes they do cause injury or fatalities but um in the context of just the the massive massive number of birds and then all of the all the flight manned flights that we have it's actually a very low rate at which they cause any threat to humans. And how does this play out with drones?

So what we think is that the evidence seems to show that for small, you know, one of the things we do is we look at individual drones versus swarms of drones, because birds, they fly and flock. So we look at the subset of bird strikes where it's just a single bird. And then we look at the species of the bird and assign it a weight based on the average mass of the species. And so what we found is we looked at the 2-kilogram threshold since that's what's used in a number of countries. More than a stick of butter.

More than a stick of butter. And that's what's used in a number of countries for the threshold for what can be unregulated. And for a 2-kilogram drone, I think we found that there might be an human injury once every 187 million years. Continuous flight hours. Of the drone. And then if you look at commercial jets, it's even smaller. I mean, it's, I think I got, I think the last number that we got was 41 billion years of continuous operation, which is, you know, three times the age of the universe. So pretty, pretty safe.

I'm not very worried about a small, like a two-kilogram drone taking out a 737 or anything like that. Right. Well, I think that one of the funniest videos I've seen on the internet, and I'm sure you guys have all seen it, is this one that's kind of goes viral every now and then. And there's always a different version of like of an eagle battling a drone. Michael versus drone, kangaroo versus drone. Oh, there's about the other animal. The kangaroo wins. Oh, that's great.

Yeah, I mean, we've learned about birds that they're more territorial than a lot of us knew. I guess scientists knew this, but the rest of us didn't realize how territorial birds are. Well, then the third category of safety that I think has come top of mind for a lot of people is privacy. So one example this weekend that that was really interesting is the New York Times decided to fly and use drones to see the mass graves that were being unearthed and they weren't allowed to look at them. And I thought it was great. I saw that, oh, I think someone on Twitter Jenner worth them or someone said, hey, and we sent in drones.

And I'm like, yeah, that's great. And then I was thinking of the counter example of that at an individual level where you might have a star who wants her privacy. And she doesn't need to be spied on by, you know, paparazzi. And they're going to use drones just like anything else. And so what are some of your thoughts on that use case and that concern? I think this is a case where, you know, technology can really be a significant enabler, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you know, if you had asked everyone whether they were willing to carry around with essentially a GPS tracking device in their pocket, people would have thrown their arms in the air and said, absolutely not. Totally.

But with a couple, you know, technology additions to your cell phone and the allowing you to turn the GPS on and off and delegate which programs have access to it and when they have access to it and opt in to allow 911. one, to have access to your GPS position. You feel safer. People are quite comfortable. They actually are happy to have that on them. And now there's a variety of different applications around, you know, enabling people to run by themselves and alert someone if their GPS position ever stops for five minutes or more. Parents use it to track their kids for safety.

Parents are using it to track their kids. So all of that, I intend to just be kind of an example of. I think the same thing is playing out here with drone use, which is to say, yes, this is a technology that could be used to invade people. privacy. But with some basically, you know, technology controls on it, it can also add a tremendous amount of value to society without invading people's privacy. And so there are technology mechanisms to, if you have permission to fly over property A and property A but's property B, it's relatively easy to make sure that photos that are taken over property B are immediately

deleted or are never taken at all. Or photography is only taken over the property that you have permission to fly over. You can do a lot through technology. You can. And you can have geo fences that allow for you to only fly within the bounds of properties that you have permissions to fly or Section 33 exemptions to fly over or the permission of the property owner. Right. And besides technology, there's also existing laws that cover so much of this, like the peeping Tom case. Like, why do we need a new law when there's already something? You know, I've heard policymakers say, well, what if this like goes up right next to my bathroom window and looks in? And the answer is there's already a law. against this. It's probably a state or local law. And it would just be enforced in exactly the same way. So does it need to be, I think, a drone-specific rule for that? These types of law should be technology agnostic. It shouldn't matter whether it's binoculars used or whether it's a drone used or a ladder.

I like that idea that it should be technology agnostic. But in terms of how the law should evolve, as long as we're treating drones as any other kind of airplane, I wouldn't recommend this. But if a drone is trespassing over your property, you choose to shoot it down, it's like treated as shooting an airplane, which is like 25 years in jail or something like that. I don't actually need a penalty. But this is, so don't, you know, don't shoot down a drone right now. Don't be the test case. Right. Well, I guess, yeah, as far as test case, I mean, that's part of the question here is that regulatory-wise, we don't really know where we stand on that piece, right? You know, so far we have one piece of case law of in Kentucky. Apparently you can shoot down a drone with a shotgun and you're fine. Well, the FAA, I think, has issued, has issued, they have preempted that and they say, this is a federal offense and it is shooting down an airplane and it's the same. Yeah, it's pretty clear, both from all of the past laws that exist and then right now there's language just to reinforce it in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2016, just further clarifying the federal government and the FAA's ability to preempt all state and local laws as it pertains to the national airspace. Great. I'm just surprised it wasn't Texas and it was Kentucky. So what excites you guys? I mean, we're talking about some of the, we just switch gears from the safety topic again and go back to like what's new and exciting. So talk to me about what's interesting to you guys. You guys are on the forefront of watching the trends in the space. I want to hear what's new and interesting.

I guess from our perspective, right now in the United States, we're still at this stage where the military has been using drones or using them every single day. You have millions of consumers literally who are using drones, you know, in many cases every single day. And the major commercial companies have yet to really step into the fray and move from testing of the technology, which is where most all of them are at today, to actually using it as the way they do things for whether it's, you know, the insurance industry underwriting claims, catastrophe response, or utility inspections, replacing climbing up towers and manual flights with helicopters, with drones. So I think that's the thing that's most exciting to me and something that I also expect we're going to see in the next 18 months.

the commercial companies actually move forward with, you know, commercial drones and aerial data as a way of doing business. I'm super excited about airspace integration and about, you know, us getting to the point where we can actually have, you know, large quantities of commercial drones in the airspace, you know, kind of interacting with, you know, commercial traffic, you know, routing correctly and things like that, you know, and it's the kind of thing where it's going to take a concerted effort

by a lot of different groups coming together. You know, you can't have Amazon using drones plotting their own paths and Google using their drones and plotting their own independent paths with no interchange of information between them. Like, you know, the NASA UTM program is working on a lot of that stuff.

And I'm super excited about that, you know, super excited about transponders on aircraft, you know, things being registered properly, you know, actually having accountability. And once we get to that point where we've got integration, where we've got accountability, then that just like opens up the door

to all these different uses and being able to have a point where a company, you know, can sit down and say, how can we use drones? Okay, this is a thing that would help us. And then there's just a known path to actually use them correctly. You know, right now we just have so much gray area left in that system. But once we get that cleared out, I think it's going to be great. Yeah, I'm excited about the entertainment side. So I follow some of the hobbyists going on around first person view drone racing. And these are people who put on goggles and fly drones around tracks. And I think it's just, I think we're only a year or two out before this is broadcast on

ESPN because just it's some of the most exciting things to watch. Oh my God. Hell yeah. Just the few groups out there that have started doing drone racing and have really kind of tried to address how to make watching that exciting. They've done an amazing job. You know, like watching Drone Racing League and a few of the others. Like, it's going to be super sweet.

I also, I've been a little disappointed in drone racing just because now that I've started watching these guys that are doing it now, these guys and girls, the, they're already so good. I've already had to, like, you can't keep up. I, I've already dashed my dreams of becoming a professional drone racer because I just, I clearly am not good enough, even for this early stage of the sport. And the other thing, going along with the drone racing, which is all first person view, I mean, I mean, just imagine putting on. like an Oculus Rift headset and just taking a drone up and looking out of the drone's camera and just being, so you get to, like,

it's like being a warg on Game of Thrones, right? It's like, it's, you're, get to experience flight as if you were a bird or, you know, I guess as if you were a drone. It's, it's, I think it'll be like really fun. I love that. It's like the e-sports version and now we have like drone sports kind of,

like a different version of like digital sports. And I'd love to participate. I love to. get in on that, but I live too close to the White House. And then I think pushing it forward a few years, why do these all have to be unmanned systems, right? Why can't you have an autonomously piloted aircraft that carries a human, right? Why don't, why shouldn't we get human pilots out of the cockpits, just as we're getting them out of, you know, away from behind the steering wheel and cars? You know, you could imagine

a world where robots are flying us around, and that's much way cheap. and you don't have to carry a pilot, you don't have to pay a pilot. Maybe we could have air taxi systems that are economical again. Maybe, I mean, just huge safety benefits. I think in general aviation, something like three quarters of all of all accidents are pilot error in commercial aviation. I think it's about half. And so, you know, safer. What can we do to redesign airspace that we're working on, the FAA is working on a next-gen airspace system where there's more machine-to-machine communication. And so you can have better routing. Well, what does that look like when that gets adopted? And how does that improve? That's actually was one of the

interesting quick sidebars about Jonathan's notion of identity or some kind of registration tied to like an entity. What was interesting to me when I immediately thought of is like just like IP address and the internet, like you essentially can have all these drone nodes communicate with each other and route information as a result of that. Yeah, and some of the plans are actually very similar to how the internet is structured in terms of public key infrastructure and sort of using like SSL certificates. Right, exactly. There's no need to reinvent all this technology just because it's being used with drones.

Right. Yeah. And then I would say the last thing that I'm excited about that's in aviation generally, but it's perhaps somewhat unrelated is supersonic because we haven't, we've had a complete ban on supersonic in the United States over land anyway since 1970. We haven't had a supersonic jet since the Concord, a commercial supersonic jet since the Concord. And what does Supersonic do for us besides make a loud boom? You could go cross-country in two hours.

Right. Right? So I could come from D.C., fly in, record a podcast with you, and then fly home. It's like the hyperloop of the sky. Yeah, hyperloop of the sky. I love that. I'm kind of excited by the art aspects. And when I think about this in the context, when people think of swarming drones, I love

drone swarms. I think it's amazing to see this orchestration of multiple drones in the air. And people viewed it as a very menacing thing, but I think there's something very artistic and elegant and beautiful about it. But the other thing that really excites me, when I think of movies, like, you know, when they redid the first three Star Wars movies, which were just awful for the record, as everyone probably in this room agrees. I love the visual, though, of the fact that you had all these aircraft in the sky and that people could jump from one aircraft to another. And that there's this, and even in this movie The Fifth Element, which is this really lame, fun movie, there's this amazing scene of people literally doing the same kind of thing, like they're in the air. And there's layers, not just like one layer, but there's layers of aircraft in the air. And it just gives a sense of actually living your life in the clouds, you know, where you can actually have like cafes in the air. You can do things in the air. I know that sounds a little crazy, but to me, when I think of airspace, I just think it's amazing to me that we can now build upwards in ways that we couldn't before. Well, thank you guys for joining the A6 and Z podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having us.