TLIDR – I pitch municipal services for four minutes, then weave through current events.
LOCAL: I planned an aerial. It rained, flooded. Floods are annual occurrences here. Signed up to join an artist network because I need to move some paintings and meet new people.
I have dumped on pilots flying doing it the wrong way in the past. It is only fair to offer an alternative timeline. What can a local pilot do to contribute to community development? I studied municipal drone service integration at PennWest (nee California University of Pennsylvania) in 2017-2018. I found opportunities for municipal services, education, and economic growth. I focused on medical supply delivery.
The world is now witnessing the asymmetric threat of drone warfare. I did not foresee such calamity erupting in the near future. And yet, the domestic market is basically non-existent. How would we defend ourselves and our communities? DJI wenfrom a 70% market share to 90% market share globally, and they basically ran LAANC after it was conjured up from the UASIPP program in 2016 or so. When they started, you could buy a Parrot or a DJI in a retail store. The racing quads coming out are amazing. I cannot afford to build anything. If I did, it would be a delta wing running iNav or Ardupilot.
I followed the money. I studied the organ-matching network, became familiar with the parsing process for matching, and then took an online course in machine learning from Stanford to understand machine learning, a form of complex process optimization. I built an Excel playbook and determined start-up costs, break-even analysis, profit and loss, variable and fixed costs, and other principles based on an ROI that was about 90% profit, leaving the red within two years looking at three dozen years of profitable growth.
I read up on wireless communication and robotics, dozens of research papers. I built stuff in labs. I briefly won a NASA Space grant to develop a program at a local college, but the pay did not cover day care costs, so I turned it down. That was painful. At the time, only 1% of students at that college had parenting students. Now, about 18%-24% of undergraduates have a dependent. It is hard to go to college, work full-time, and raise young children.
People are struggling and being left behind technologically speaking, but they either cannot afford college, or they just want to avoid debt slavery. Those vast gulfs separating people become points of instability and inequality. I sought to train folks in production and operations to build the drone company, build out from opportunity. A local economic workhorse. Feeding schools and municipalities, soaking up investors.
Problems with data security was the real monster. Machine learning feeds on data the way civilization feeds of fossil fuels. It’s one-shot. The technology improved dramatically, stunning even me. Military applications had hardened the design process. AI has become a threat or a godsend, maybe both. Medical drones mix medical and aeronautical data in ad-hoc networks.
So, needless to say I am probably NOT going to make a break in comedy anytime soon.
If I had funds, I would build the transport system, the “smart cooler”, and then integrate it into a VTOL as a frangible system. I am just an office drone in a cubicle. I need investors.
However, I interviewed a pathology doctoral candidate on the phone after she complained in NY Times about the delays caused by transporting brain samples through a large metro airport. She saw my cause as noble, and I took that support and ran with it.
When trying to get, say, an Ebola-variant from an airport to a lab, it would be great to just throw a drone carrying it out of a cargo hatch and let it land at the lab, but at those speeds, live samples, especially blood, could suffer hemolysis. Or it could land at your BBQ. I mean, your ribs are nice, but are they Ebola nice? I have writing experience, have read tons of books, and I have no problem imagining every nightmare scenario. I spent a month in conferences either UASSC to bone up on ISO standards. With hands-on experience in robotics, I saw a future in developing a medical transport network built on top of nodes of response units in municipal-level service contract terms. It started with fire stations and EMS.
I mentioned last week I could train my county responders in a year. They can train operators.
I can see the system evolved, clearly. I know the technology. I see a need, I see a cost-saving, life-saving solution, but the general applications are under-appreciated. Also, they are FUN to FLY.
So, honestly, I do not understand why the drone cannot be landed, powered down, “released” for flight by an onsite employee/observer, and returned, with a battery and cargo swap, even a sensor payload swap. This fact shaped my idea of a cargo unit integration into healthcare pneumatic transport systems, game lands, and crowded urban environments. More Evidence Pneumatic Tube Transport Affects Test Results. A fancy cylinder.
Fayette first responders receive more than $600K in grant money | News | dailycourier.com I sent a “drone instruction” pitch to the group who provides the grant. I provide an opportunity for young people if they need to do community service. Basically, I offer an all-ages instructional environment, one fire station for one hour once a week, every Saturday or Sunday. This would cover all of them in my county in a year. I was trying to use about $15K, or 2.5% of the budget for emergency response training. Fire, police, EMS invited.
Kids could assist emergency response crews with an eye in the sky to provide forward information in critical situations such as residential fires, lost persons, floods, and 3D modelling for accident reconstruction, or construction monitoring. Drones can be flown from a browser or tablet, hover on a fiber for hours, or launch/land from an automated storage/charging unit. This is not new science. This is a mentorship.
Skydio X10 is IP55 rated, which means it is water and dust resistant123. It can operate reliably in rain and dust due to its protected joints and nano-coating1. However, it is not suitable for flying in icing and/or lightning conditions2.
American-made, so I could use it for federal contracts for long-form management on windfarms, pipelines, natural resources. And the service operates out of a municipal office. Volunteer pilots could fly by browser according to local FRIA, state, and federal restrictions in national airspace.
Other counties, other communities have been using drones for years. I have been flying them regularly for a decade. Anyways, I hope any commercial drone pilots reading this have better luck with their community than I do.
Here you can get practical info on configuration and mission control. DHS releases guidance for unmanned aerial systems for public safety missions. Adopt these parameters and check the metrics. Blue UAS for First Responders | Homeland Security. Anyways, these are sustainable projects. The drones are coming.
DRONE: Rain or wind or snow.
TECH: Firefly’s Blue Ghost reaches lunar orbital insertion on February 14, Valentine’s Day. The timelapse of the approach is intense. I accidentally deleted the premiere notice on last week’s blog. The Moon approach timelapse is INTENSE.
Quashing Quishing Attacks Using Self-Authenticating Dual-Modulated QR Codes | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore If you need help with that fricking package you missed.
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