UAS News Podcast — 2012-07-11
Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's show. Welcome to another installment in the series of podcasts where we discuss the issues and news that are relevant to the global unmanned aviation community. This week's show is supposed to be chock full of airspace integration information.
We are supposed to have a conversation with Peter von Blienberg, the president of UBS International. We're having a little bit of trouble bringing him on with Skype. For some reason, I cannot Skype him in and I'm waiting for him to call in. But it promises to be an interesting show if we can get this all working.
Jamie, you out there? Yes, I'm here, Patrick. I was wondering if you were going to be able to get the Skype connection made in time. Yeah, you know, we're not.
We're having issues. I have Peter on Skype, but I cannot Skype him into the blog talk radio thing, which kind of stinks because he's in Paris. All right, here he is here. You want to Skype him in or we're going to get him.
And Peter, are you there? I've got you on a telephone. I've got you on Skype, but the Skype apparently is not going through. The telephone is worse than Skype.
You're better on Skype even though your picture is there, which is lousy. Yeah, this is true. Now, well, for some reason now I can't Skype. So we're just going to have to do this telephone and we're going to do some cheerful banter and whatnot.
But I want to get right into it because I know this call is going to be expensive. Okay, well keep your Skype on because there I can hear you correctly. All right, let's see if we can do that. Anyway, you know, I'm going to go here and I'm going to just tell people, you know, I've known Peter for a while.
Peter is the president of UBS International. And basically, we'll jump right in here. Peter, could you kind of tell folks how you got into this thing, maybe a little bio about yourself, please?
Well, it goes back a number of years. I've been involved with UBS now since 84, 85. At that time I was involved with the development of the first French UBS that went into service with the French Army and that those guys actually took along with them to the first Gulf War. I stopped that and then went back to working for myself and came to the conclusion that it would be of interest to bind the European community together to attack the problem of UBS and regulations.
At that time, regulations were not sexy. Everybody thought I was bonkers and that I didn't have a business case. But as things went on, more and more people got enlightened, understood, came on board. And then at a certain point, we also created UBS International, at that time Euro-UBS.
That evolved as time went on and we actually got a substantial amount of non-European members becoming part of Euro-UBS. That principally had to do with all the work that we were doing with the authorities to progress rules and regulations. It then became apparent that the non-European members of the association should have the same rights as the European members because up until then, only European members had voting rights. We changed all that and we also changed the name to UBS International like it is now.
We now have members in something like 37 countries. These are corporate and governmental members. It's not only corporate. That's pretty impressive.
The other thing I wanted to talk about, and we'll cover this briefly, but I try and tell people about your show and this year's version was RPAS 2012. And I heard it was a very lively show. I wasn't able to make it. Could you recap it for the audience?
I think the subtitle of the conference says it all and that was the Global RPAS Regulatory Forum. There were a whole bunch of regulatory authorities from all over the place. The IKAO was there. The European Commission was there with Director General Mobility and Transport as well as Director General Enterprise and Industry, Eurocontrol, EASA, ESA, and the ESA.
The European Civil Aviation Conference, CSAR Joint Undertaking, the European Defense Agency. These are all the major players in defining rules and regulations for UAS. But there were also others from Australia, from India, from Norway. We even had guys from India, Greece.
The Frontex Agency, which is the European Union Agency for Border Protection was there. They're very finely attuned to the services that UAS can bring to them and they were explaining to the audience what they were actually looking for. It was a large mattering of countries and authorities. What was really interesting was that at the conference we were approached by the Russians as well as the Swedes and the Indians with the request to help them set up national organizations to, in cohorts with UAS International, promote the use of UAS in their countries.
But what was even more critical is getting the civil aviation authorities on board, specifically in India and in Russia. Do you think that's how you draw these types of participants in?
Like I said, I told people if you want to play in the unmanned aircraft sector, the RPA sector, you need to go to the show in Paris. Like the people that you were just talking about and the titles and whatnot, if you want to get in this game and you want to be able to have access to the civil aviation authority people or top tier people from companies, they're at the show. How did you begin to draw these top tier folks in?
Well, we go out to them. We inform them. We keep them informed on what is going on in the field of rules and regulations and standards. Each time we explain to them that to be able to play, the country has to get itself together and they have to have a national voice.
The national voice is important because it helps bring the community together on a national level but it's also important to be able to express the country's opinion at ICAO level. Now, in all of this, it's always a dual directional educational process. Just like in your country and like in mine, the authorities don't always understand the industry folks and the industry people in most cases don't understand the regulatory guys. They don't speak the same language.
They don't have the same background and in many cases, industry doesn't have the required aviation experience. So the educational part is very, very important. Now, hooked up to that is also the language part. That is something that you guys don't have because you all speak the same language except the 50% of the Americans who speak Spanish.
In all of these other countries or the majority of them, English is not the mother tongue. There's a very clear educational process that we push to get all these people to speak the same language, use the same words so they can actually effectively communicate. Right, and I would say that UVS International is definitely a clearinghouse for information and I also speak to the yearbook that you do, the RPAS Global Perspectives. Could you give us your website address, Peter?
We've got two. The association website is www.UVS, Uniform Victor Sierra, dash, and the website is www.UVS.com. And the document repository website is www.UVS, Uniform Victor Sierra, dash, info, info.com. And the yearbook is linked to that, right?
They're available on both sites. They're openly accessible. The entire text is there. Okay, excellent.
And I would suggest that people go onto that site, sign in, read the articles in the yearbook. They're actually pretty good. I don't want to toot my own horn, but I like to participate in that. Also, I think if you were looking for information, pictures, whatever else of systems, you need to get on there and look.
There might be a thing to add to that, Patrick, and that is the objective of the yearbook. Okay. We try to have as many stakeholders as possible express their opinions in it. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with what the community wants.
There are critical articles in there, but from the beginning, we have gone out from the basis that all the stakeholders have to be involved. So the international or the European, excuse me, Aeromobilist Association, they're in there as the airline pilots association, who obviously don't always agree with what the UAS industry would like. But it's important that all these people come together and have a place where they can express their views.
And this book goes out to, we print 10,000 copies, but what is even more interesting is that the entire text is available on more than 500 governmental intranets.
I'm not saying websites, intranets. Right. Well, I know that it's kind of funny in my travels and I get all around the country and the world. It surprises me how many offices I go into and people have a copy of that yearbook.
And I use it kind of as almost a calling card for my travel. And I use it kind of as almost a calling card for myself. But now I've noticed the others. I was at your show last year and I've noticed what I think is a little bit of a malaise in the integration community.
And I don't know if that's as a whole or just the Americans. What do you think?
Well, I think you guys have your challenges. We have ours in Europe and the rest of the world has theirs. If I compare Europe to the U.S., on your side you have one country. On our side we have 27.
And they don't speak the same languages on our side. So we had to form a community. That has now been done. But we also ran into the same problems that you've run into, and that is that we need political backup to make all of this work.
And that was something that we initiated a number of years ago, because in Europe that means the European Commission and the agencies of the European Commission. That has now been accomplished. They're on board. They understand the problems.
But what is even more interesting is that they understand the interest of giving UAS access to European airspace. All of this is, of course, based on presenting viable business cases. But over the last year with the European Commission UAS panel, which they put together to find out what the status was in Europe and how best to progress, it became very clear that there are an enormous amount of viable business cases out there. But the breaking point is rules and regulations.
They also found out that the majority of the new technologies are coming out of small and medium sized enterprises. These small and medium sized enterprises, if they do not have a business motive to continue, they're going to go elsewhere. And that is something that the Commission didn't want to encourage. So they came to the conclusion that it would be best to back up the small and medium sized enterprises by making it easier for them to not only sell UAS but also operate UAS.
It has been clearly recognized now by the European Commission that a whole new business branch consisting of UAS operators and operators, I use the word in the ICAO sense, that's a company employing pilots who fly unmanned aircraft. And that business base is going to grow substantially, but it's going to grow incrementally. And this is where I come to the major difference between the U.S. and Europe.
The FAA seems to want to tackle big, small, giant UAS all at the same time and come out with one big scheme that is going to make it possible for all these UAS to fly at the same time. Whereas we're taking, when I say we, I mean Europe, is taking incremental approach where we're going to start with the smaller ones. And then as the community gains maturity, as the authorities become less frightened of UAS and we actually have statistics that we can draw on showing that there is an industry maturity, a product maturity, we will climb in altitude and in distance.
And that is now going to be implemented by Europe. The European Commission has just started the first meeting actually took place last week, something called the European Steering Group. In the Steering Group there are a whole bunch of guys from different director generals, which is for the Americans who don't understand the same thing as a department of commerce, department of industry. But there are also the research organizations are in there, but also agencies like IAZA and Frontex.
So the agencies at different levels. And of course industry is in there. And these guys are going to, and by the way, UBS International is part of this. We're one of the team that is leading all of this.
And we will be drawing up a roadmap of how all of this is going to be working. That roadmap will be finished before Christmas of this year. And immediately afterwards the implementation of that roadmap will start. And we hope to have things flying, that's the objective anyway, in a fairly reasonable amount by December 2015.
Well, I think you make some interesting points. I would agree with you that it seems like the moneyed interests here, the DOD guys, are the ones driving the effort. And I call it the ugly stepsisters trying to stuff their foot in the glass slipper. I did want to talk about that part of current events.
And I don't know if you saw that, what was it, the industry code of conduct. I wanted to get Gene's take on that first. Gene, did you see that?
I did see that, Patrick. And it was interesting to note that there was a lot of common sense statements made. And some of the statements were very familiar of the sorts of standards that we tried to present many years ago when we started trying to push UA into the national airspace. It's great that an organization as large as AUVSI would take up the ball and run with it because, as Peter says, we have to have the political backup.
We have to have that support to continue and to build the confidence that we need that UA's can be positive and they can be a tool. So I'd have to agree completely with everything that Peter has already said and their approach is on the European side. It's very parallel to what we're doing. Well, and one other thing, Peter, I didn't really introduce you to Gene.
But Gene Robinson is also a board member of RCAPA and has been around for years. He actually just wrote a book, First to Deploy, and it's basically an account of using small-engined aircraft systems for search and rescue. Right. But I wanted him to speak to that.
Did you see the Code of Conduct and do you have any comments? Well, yeah, I've seen it. I've read it. The surprising thing for me was that in the subtitle it said, industry code of conduct.
I think it would have been more appropriate if it had said, American industry code of conduct. Probably. If we and the rest of the world are not consulted, it's not going to be the Americans that are going to speak for us. And actually, I think they made a mistake by not consulting the rest of the world.
It would have been a much stronger thing if it had been. Now, nothing in this code of conduct that I have read is really surprising. But again, it has to be something more than just this. Everything that is stated here, we've been trying to do for years.
So why is this coming out now? I would like to see more active participation of AUVSI in the actual work that has to be done. And I don't see them anywhere. Well, I will say that I think that the impetus for this, you know, we're really under fire over here in the states with privacy.
And the American public, I think, is kind of seeing that this technology can be abused. And that's an issue. And I think that AUVSI tried to put something together and out in a timely fashion. I do agree, you know, and it was kind of one of the things that RCAPA had done, where we have kind of a best practices or whatever.
Let's back that up with some, let's say, industry-based standards and some ideas behind what's in that. And I'm hoping that they come up with something a little bit more in-depth. I think it was a good start, like you said, maybe a little bit more inclusion or, you know, from an American perspective. But I think that that was the impetus.
Now, again, you called in, so I kind of want to keep rolling. And you did touch on some of these issues that I wanted to talk about, like the current IKO development and what's going on there. I want to speak about what's happening with the European Commission, the Euro-K, the new Working Group 93, and the RPAS Steering Group. And I know that I just threw a lot of stuff at you, but I'm going to just let you kind of roll with that, Peter, and, you know, we'll just go from there, so if you would.
Okay. If we look at the IKO-UES study group, the work is progressing very nicely. The IKO way of doing things is very specific. It's also extremely slow.
That's just the way the beast, the nature of the beast. However, even though they're slower than NATO, they got on board with UES faster than anybody had ever seen before. There is very great support for it within IKO. At all levels within IKO, they've recognized now the importance of this work.
The circular 320 that was brought out, or 328 that was brought out last year, was a milestone, but it's just a beginning. We're now going into the phase of producing the UES-RPAS manual. That is also an extremely important thing. It's going to take a lot of work.
For those who don't know, the study group consists of state representatives and representatives of internationally recognized organizations. The work, everything they produce is made public, but it has to be purchased. It's not free. I like public, but I don't like purchase.
That's me. Well, that's you. You can screen all you want. There are certain organizations in the world that you won't be able to change.
As long as the United States still owes a hell of a lot of money to IKO, I don't think you should say anything. IKO is God. You have to play with God. You have to respect God.
In this case, these guys are really going out of their way to make all of this feasible. At the same time, I'd like to mention also that at the Civil Military Coordination Conference that took place at IKO, it was decided that UES had to be taken into account in the field of civil military cooperation. IKO is now in the process of organizing regional workshops to bring the circular that they've brought out on civil military cooperation to the attention of the regional authorities. When I say regional authorities, it's like Latin America, the Far East, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.
At these events, UES is always on the agenda. We now have had a regional workshop in Latin America. We've had one in Lima, Peru. That was last year.
This year we had one in Bangkok for the Far East. In September, there's going to be one in Jeddah for Saudi Arabia for the Middle East. In all these cases, UES are put on the agenda, and I'm requested to give a brief to the regional authorities on what is going on in the field of UES certification, airworthiness, standards, and operational rules and regulations. They're into it.
Then you ask me about UROK. UROK is very similar to RTCA on your side. They're progressing steadily but slowly with the creation of standards. Within UROK, there is now a split between UES below 150 kilograms and UES above 150 kilograms.
That split has to do with a legal split that was made by the European Commission when it constituted the European Aviation Safety Agency, IAZA. Responsibility for UES below 150 kilograms lies with the national authorities, whereas UES with a mass of more than 150 kilograms are the responsibility of IAZA. Right. If I can interject for the listener's benefit, in the United States, our definition of a small UAS is 55 pounds and under.
But the definition, basically for Europe and the efforts that you're talking about, is 150 kilos and under. Is that correct?
Yes. I just wanted to make that delineation for people because they might get a little confused. I say that too. I really kind of think of the 150 kilos as 90 to 95 percent of the market moving into the future.
You agree with that or disagree? Well, yes and no. During the process of the European Commission UES panel, it became quite apparent that by far the majority of the current non-military UAS applications were using UAS below 25 kilos. 25 kilos equates roughly to your 55 pounds. Right.
When I say the majority, I'll put it at something like above 95 percent. However, if we dig into that amount, we'll find out that the majority of that 95 percent is below 15 kilograms. And as you go down, the numbers get bigger. And that's where the challenge is because not only within Europe, also at ICAO, we have not come to grips yet at what mass of the U.S.
military is being used. Right. And I think that you're hitting on that point there that, Jerome, that Gene always hits. I mean, Gene's aircraft has been used in the U.S.
military. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And I think that's a good point.
I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Right. Well, and I think that you're hitting on that point there that, Jerome, that Gene always hits.
I mean, Gene's aircraft, Gene's been doing this with the small U.A.S. for many years now. And we keep kind of talking about this on the show is how the sensors are better, the different types of sensors you can carry. And I mean, Gene, what's the typical weight of the spectra or the aircraft that you were using for Sarr?
Well, typically the spectra runs anywhere between 4.5 and 5.5 pounds depending upon the sensor. And, you know, these are short-term. They're very short flight durations. I say short, within an hour.
And they have a very small footprint, a very small operational footprint, you know, of just a few square kilometers or miles even. And that's one of the reasons why we feel like these are going to probably be the more practical use type aircrafts as they move out into the civilian arena. Much like Peter said, you know, as the numbers get smaller, weight numbers get smaller, the use numbers go way up. Right.
Well, the thing with that, too, though, and, you know, and I'm jumping in on this again, but, you know, the IKO definition of frangible, you know, something that was low mass and low speed, you know, that's where I'd like to see this thing start out. Let's get that door open. There are many uses you can use these aircraft for. Let's start there and get people used to this.
And we've got a little sidetrack, so I want to jump right back to you, Peter, what you were on here about the numbers. And were those numbers, too, those findings, was that kind of the impetus behind the working group 93 or the small RPA expert groups?
Yeah, quite obviously, because when you bunch them all together, the big UAS and the small UAS, like was the case within Euro K, that means that everything is dominated by the bigger boys, the bigger companies who produce bigger aircraft who have more financial and personnel resources, whereas the smaller companies don't have the people, the time or the money to sit in endless meetings. Right. They need results.
So last year I made a proposal to Euro K that took all of this into account and put together a work mythology that would suit the smaller companies, give them inputs, the possibility of putting in their views, but also, and that's very important, helping in forming a community opinion.
We were not getting enough of the small players into Euro K to participate. And this had for a part to do with the fact that Euro K is a very traditional organization, a traditional aviation organization. So the tradition had it that you had to be a member of Euro K to be able to participate. You cannot expect small companies, one, two, three-man companies, to pay multi-hundred euro fees for the privilege of doing work for the community.
So having thought this all through and discussed it with a number of organizations, we came with this proposal which was finally accepted in December 2011. And that was the beginning of Working Group 93, which is now ongoing. We've had our first kickoff meeting. And we now have, if I'm not mistaken, over 150 companies signed up.
They can sign up either as an active participant or a passive participant, an observer. What is very interesting to see is that by far the majority are active participants. Well, and I think people have mistaken the game. Now, and a lot of the points that you're making here are the same issues that we have on this side of the Atlantic.
And I've sat through a lot of this, the RTC efforts, the ASTM efforts, and some other efforts, and whatever else. And some of the scenarios that you're describing are some of the same issues that I have over here. I cannot afford, I've been at this, I call myself a relative newcomer, and I've been at this about eight years. And I've sat through a lot of meetings where nothing's gotten done.
I've also described a situation to, I'd say, industry insiders that that model that you described with, you're okay, and some of the Civil Aviation Authority and FAA, same thing. We're the regulator. We're going to work on regulations. You jump in line, and this is the process.
And I think what, you know, Moore's Law keeps kicking in here, and the technology goes beyond, and people are doing their own thing. And this isn't traditional aviation in the sense that we're making big aircraft. Some companies are, but by and large it's smaller aircraft. And most of the people that develop are not aviation people.
So when I sit in a meeting, and I sit in a meeting for several hours, and I'm trying to gauge what type of work is going on or not going on, I have to minimize my exposure and cut out. So if I see something good going on, I'm all in. I want to participate. If it looks like it's going to be 10 years, I don't have time to participate.
So I think that is bringing up some good points that people need to realize with these efforts. And it sounds like we're making inroads with that. Well, there's also a very interesting thing that is now starting to be implemented in Europe, which is called a qualified entity. And that's going to go European-wide.
So a qualified entity is a legal entity. By that I mean a company that has been mandated by the National Civil Aviation Authority to undertake work for them relative to UAS. This has to do with the fact that many of the civil aviation authorities don't have the time, the money, or the people to take care of small UAS because there are a lot of them out there. And it's probably best to give you an example.
There is an existing qualified entity now in the United Kingdom. And thanks to them being there, there are now well over, close to 200, commercially operating UAS operators. There is 120, if I'm not mistaken, or 140 flight licenses that have been granted in Sweden, all for non-military commercial operations. This doesn't even take into account the research and the scientific operations.
All of this is with small RPAS. It's interesting that you're making these points with a lot of people, I think, over here in the States who don't realize what's going on in the rest of the world. It's hard to believe that the Americans over here that were U.S.-centric. But I really think that we in here in the United States need to look to these examples that you're describing.
I do think that the UK CAA has been taking a very pragmatic approach. Their CAP722 document, even while that was being developed while I was on the ARC, that was kind of interested. We were shown parts and pieces of that, but we were not really given the big picture on that. And I say that they've made a lot of progress while we're still kind of swimming in their wake, as it were.
Oh, yes. But the thing that everybody has to understand, you mentioned it earlier that a lot of the small companies in the U.S. don't have aviation experience. We have the same problem over here.
Now, what is going to be – and they can jump and scream to high heaven, but they're going to have to learn that they're part of the aviation community and that there are rules that you have to have mastered to be able to be part of that community. And if there is an operator out there who doesn't know what the rules of the air are, he's not going to operate UAS. Point final. It's not just the guy out of his garage flying a UAS who's going to be part of the community.
In Europe, we have taken that decision. There has to be an education base that an operator has to have. Now, it all depends on what type of UAS he's going to operate, at what altitude and what distance from the operator the thing is going to fly, where that baseline is going to be. So obviously, if you're doing, I don't know, flare stack inspections, well, you're flying maximum 25, 30 meters horizontal.
You're flying at an altitude of maybe 50, 60 meters. Well, that guy will not have to have as high a base of education, aviation education, as somebody who's flying at 3,000 meters and 50 kilometers. That's one. The other one is the operator who employs the pilot.
Now, if the pilot is a one-man company, he's also the operator. But that operator is also going to have to be qualified. Right. And in the work that we're doing in 93, we have clearly understood that we have to deal with these issues.
It's not only the technical part. It's not only the aircraft and the system. Right. Now, I don't want to cut you off, but we're down to like 50 seconds, and the show's over.
Believe it or not, the 45 minutes is over. This has been really informative. I'm glad you stayed on the whole time. I think there's a lot of information to be gleaned here.
Again, I'm going to ask people to go to the website. I appreciate you coming on, Peter, and staying the whole time. And I would like to extend an invitation to maybe have you come back in about six months and give us an update on the work that you were talking about. If you think that's possible.
Well, that's possible. And then I'd like to touch on the things that are going on in China, in India, in Latin America, specifically in Brazil and in Russia, because I don't think you guys are really aware of what's going on in these countries. No, we're not. That's it right there.