# Maximizing BVLOS Flight Safety with Micro-Weather Services

- Event: NestGen ’23
- Published: March 22, 2023
- Length: 40:48
- Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/307Nr3VGdY4/

> The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's
> captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms.

## About this session

Learn why integrating weather intelligence to your BVLOS flights is necessary to streamline operations, reduce safety risks & avoid unnecessary costs.

## Transcript

**[0:08]** thank you hello again welcome everyone to the session uh where we are gonna deep dive into one of the bblos tech content track in this session we will delve uh into low altitude weather data and why is this critical particularly for conducting when you're conducting large scale Beyond visual line of site operations uh before we get started why don't you let us know where are you joining in from and what brought you to this session what are you expecting at this session and that's definitely gonna help uh Dawn as well and us to you know curate the session better for you so please feel free to kind of uh uh let us know in the Q a as well as in the chat section uh what you feel about uh the session uh so the topic again reiterating is going to be on how you can maximize BVLOS safety with microwather Services uh the current uh Aviation uh weather

**[1:12]** infrastructure is mostly designed for human piloted aircraft high altitude weather frequently differs uh uh significantly from the low altitude local atmospheric conditions with drone operations are carried out and using the same non-localized form of data as a reference introduces uncertainty business are often subjected to weather tasks as Don likes to mention and failure to address this issue results in a few of flights customer dissatisfaction and significant Revenue loss so to to discuss on this further I would like to again welcome uh don the CEO of true weather Solutions uh to the stage uh with 35 years of experience in weather Aviation and logistic systems is currently leading through weather Solutions which focuses on accelerating micro weather sensing and prediction for better airspace management for drones and evitols to increase operator Mission

**[2:16]** Effectiveness rates and profitability previously he served in the U.S Air Force for 24 years where he designed and led aviation weather Operation Center served as an Airborne meteorologist and led all Logistics and ground operations at the Manus Air Base Kyrgyzstan as a notable meteorologist John also led the National Weather Service directorate for Science and Technology from 2008 to 2012. Don is leading the ASTM f-38 working group addressing issues related to design performance Quality Acceptance tests and safety monitoring for unmanned air Vehicle Systems true weather was recently awarded a NASA phase to small business Innovation research Grant to design an urban weather sensing infrastructure testbed as a part of NASA weather data infrastructure initiative welcomed on that's some introduction uh so

**[3:16]** before I pass pass over the diets to Dawn I would quickly like to share a few housekeeping or rules for the audience so the session is getting recorded so don't worry we will be will be available for viewing very soon uh please use the Q a for questions and do visit the booth uh true weather booth in the Expo section if you want to learn more about the product and the services they have to offer uh finally and do if you like the session do drop a LinkedIn post tag FlytBase and use hashtag question 23 opendib movement uh three lucky uh people have some surprise in store and uh I would also like to uh share my heartfelt gratitude to our title sponsor DJI Enterprise and our patronum sponsor world this airspace for supporting us in this journey uh with that uh over to you uh Don uh don do you want me to share the presentation yeah please do um I want to make sure we don't have any

**[4:19]** mishaps here welcome everyone thank you for joining I know how busy everyone's schedule is and I'm hoping that what we could do today is just give your perspective a different perspective about what weather capabilities can do to help improve your your business operations as well as safety and Beyond visual on a site there's so much um possible that folks don't really understand is possible about what we can do to improve predictions and real-time data a collection because we're used to using the freely available government data which is great data but it was built for a different system so today what my goal is is just try to open your mind up to options uh you know I want you to think about whether it's a cost to business I want you to think about whether as an impact to your Revenue generation for for clients who are flying aircraft I want you to think about how if you have a system yourself that you're serving Pilots uh with with Services how whether you can add our Weather Service as a reseller of our capabilities and UPS upgrade your whole system and

**[5:23]** differentiate those are those are the main takeaways today next so let's get started with the slides and I see we got some friends from Scotland here we're supporting skyports in Scotland and their medical package delivery uh and I see we have folks from Kentucky we are working with your Mesonet program manager Jerry Bronski to see how we can get some low altitude weather sensors out into Kentucky so as you can tell true weather is in a lot of places working on a lot of different things you have that the slides yes I'm trying to just give me one moment of hit some sort of what I could do oh wait I could I got it let me take over I I have the slides in here finally so let me uh I'll just take over this point I got them um I'm gonna share my screen and you tell me now I'm going to ask you the same questions uh and trust you uh okay um we're gonna do the window and we're gonna do this and could you see my screen yes we can see us

**[6:25]** awesome so so it really is the question is have you calculated the cost of weather on your operations in terms of maintaining safe flight lost productivity and revenue what I have found in my career is that um most people really don't know the cost of weather on their operations uh the Lost productivity times that you could fly and you're not flying getting some bad sensor data that you could have gotten if you picked a better weather window to fly those are all costs right and generally speaking weather will cost you about 10 percent of your operations budget so if you look at your your flight operations budget whether it's about 10 of that cost and it depends on where you live if you if you're in Boston it's going to be more like 20 if you're in La it might be more like eight uh but it averages out to that amount and that's a real cost to do in business and it's something that most people have accepted as the cost of doing business

**[7:27]** right they're using the Weather Service products or service products and and they're just assuming that's the best we could do and they don't want to pay for something they don't have to pay for so they just go along with that and what I'm going to tell you is that that's not really the case right um we know that 30 of mandaviation flights today are crude Aviation flights cancel or delay due to weather could have flown the uncertainty about what's happening and we've been working with some drone delivery companies and they've actually come over to True weather because we recognize that the way you uh not only the accuracy the weather did but the way you consume weather data is really important in how you make your decisions and whether or not you you're going to make good decisions about whether the shutdown operations or keep operations flying we know that 60 chance of rain in the next two hours is not going to help you make a decision about whether you should fly or not right you need more certainty than that so what happens is you wind up canceling because you hear about 60 chance of rain and it doesn't occur and

**[8:30]** that's because it may be raining around that area or other places the whole idea is to get the micro weather better and right so that you can have less uncertainty and then you can then take advantage of of the flight time you can get in order to generate Revenue so what I I was in the Air Force and what we did in 2001 is we demonstrated that how you use weather data in operations matters right we had been flying a hundred thousand missions a year for the tanker and airlift commands around the world to move cargo and people and Fuel and we had 5 000 weather days a year 100 000 missions what we did was we changed how people integrated that into their risk management framework we helped them better understand what weather data was act more accurate and which was a lot more uncertain and we targeted that and we cut in one year working with dispatchers and planners we cut the delays to 1800 and all we did was change the way

**[9:31]** people use the data and that's really critical because we have so many operators out there that use different weather data use different processes and really they don't have Insight on what's possible they've only been operating within the framework they've been operating in right so you almost got to change your mindset about whether if you want to regain some of that flight time or make better decisions as well as get better low altitude measurements so why is this becoming more important than say Mand Aviation well that's because we all know on crude aircraft or lighter they're electric powered they're more weather sensitive right you you know you can only travel a certain amount of distance you can't add more fuel so it's either going to be taken off weight uh losing a schedule or trying to maintain schedule and using in more power to stay in the traffic flow or in the volume reservation you've recorded right and there's a lot of weather hazards out there that today are unknowable you will never see them on a weather chart I mean that's why Pilots get surprised by weather right but the difference is Pilots are on the aircraft and they

**[10:35]** learn through heuristics about different local effects they learn about where our accuracy isn't as good and so they and then they can also take action if something happens well when you have a no air crew on the aircraft you've lost all those heuristics and eventually unless you're flying in the weather there's no way you could be as effective as you are today having a pilot so we have to close the data Gap now the only way that we're going to be able to make up for the loss of a pilot is by closing the data Gap and the current weather systems are too coarse for that right we just don't collect enough data so what's going to happen is the lack of a pilot more BV loss applying one to many and this uncertainty is going to drive more difficult decisions and it's going to cost money uh for you because you're going to have to be more conservative in order to make sure you don't have an accident right so the problem is really in the low altitude you know below 5000 feet the satellites

**[11:38]** do pretty good at picking up weather information and and satellites and balloon launches and aircraft flying at 30 000 feet are all important reasons why our forecast accuracy has improved uh over the last 30 years the problem is is that once you get below 5000 feet there are very few other measurements most of the time when you're looking at weather data above the ground below 5000 feet it's model based it's not real data and and so there's a lot of errors in it we have a lot of trouble with ceiling height with our models we have trouble with our visibility forecast even in current weather we don't know exactly where the low visibility is in fog and valleys and things like that so when you start flying Beyond visualized site you could be going from VFR to IFR to VFR um same with the winds winds Aloft there's 50 to 70 percent errors in our modeling versus the real-time wins so that's all going to add up to money over time it doesn't mean you're going to crash airplanes necessarily as long as you're careful

**[12:39]** and you're conservative but the conservation is what's going to cost you money right so we want to close those gaps you want to increase flight time want to increase revenue and we want to do it safely right safely so our goal generally is that we want to maximize your Revenue per airframe by flying in as much of a hundred percent tolerant weather conditions as possible right and the better data we have the more knowledge we have to help understand safely where those windows are we want to make sure we can provide enough lead time for you to alert when these windows are going to close or open up up because you know as we've been working with a drone delivery company it's not just about what's happening right now you usually need to know what's going to happen an hour from now because you're going to be loading cargo aircraft you're going to have people working you're spending money and then all of a sudden they say oh you can't fly now you've disappointed your customer because you're not going to deliver When You Say You Will and you've done a lot of work

**[13:39]** that's not generating any revenue and then we also want to talk about this power problem optimizing power based on the wins Aloft and knowing you know how much weight you're going to be able to carry how fast you will get to where you want to go and when you're starting to run a high density operation for drone delivery or you're doing any other kind of drone operation that requires a schedule once you start having these missteps in our forecasting affecting your ability to operate smoothly you start introducing a level of Chaos in your Logistics and supply chain I'm an expert that I ran an Air Force Base in Central Asia I mean I ran the main staging base in Afghanistan all the cargo all the people flew through my base to Afghanistan and I know when you have a logistical plan and you're trying to generate revenue and turn aircraft and get packages delivered you want to have as much visibility and anticipation of what's going to happen and yeah it does cost money for that but what I will tell you is the ROI is worth it if you change the way you

**[14:41]** view it right you you can't look at what the cost of weather is you got to look at it what's the value in your down to a unit cost of more flight time more Revenue generation versus what the cost is overall to your system and I almost guarantee there's a 4 41 return on investment waiting out there uh for folks and then finally if you're talking about optimizing flight safety we also want to worry about for evitols you know passenger uh Comfort right and air sickness so you know you don't want to you know you might be able to engineer your aircraft to fly in certain weather conditions but you may not be able to engineer the user's stomach to fly in those weather conditions and that leads to a you know a bad experience right so everything we're talking about here in weather is we're talking about more productivity safely more targeted flights times uh better predictability for your clients about when and if they're going to get their packages and better predictability about your clients if you're flying them in an evitol about whether

**[15:43]** or not they'll be able to get from a vertical to an airport in in the amount of time necessary because by the time they show up at a vertaport if the wind's picked up and you have to drop weight on that aircraft you've just impacted their whole travel schedule so that's the way we're focusing on this uh is by trying to improve data collection and it's we call it from the ground up and it's not me this was a study done in 2008 by the national academies in the United States that said if you really want to put improve micro weather and understand what's happening in the lowest three to five thousand feet you have to have a network of 400 ground-based profilers that could go up and measure temperature wind and and moisture on a regular basis today we have two balloon launches a day at 77 locations in the United States the same principle applies overseas so wherever you are it's about the data and if you want to really improve the onset of fog the dissipation of fog the onset of low ceiling the possibility of thunderstorms or showers popping up uh winds Aloft and

**[16:49]** then even further understanding what those winds are going to do in urban Canyons it really takes a more customized approach in order to get more predictability so we're focusing on the low altitude and we're experts at this right we're Logistics experts we're weatherx experts and we're low altitude experts and we're taking on the hardest problems most weather companies will not take this problem on because it is very difficult and it does take a little effort right but we are taking it on because we recognize that the Drone and air taxi industry is going to require this and it'll be the best business case ever for micro weather and everyone will be able to benefit from this because as we get our sensors out we're going to be able to amortize that cost across lots of users so imagine over an urban or suburban area you know we start flying thousands of drone missions a day that cost of of these Weather Services will drop per user because we're we're now going to be sharing information and sharing that cost which will increase everybody's uptime

**[17:52]** so we know how to achieve these results because we've shown it in the military and what we've done is build up we built a platform that could take all these data sets including new sensor data integrating that in and then feeding that back out air customized by location right data right time and giving you a much better picture of what's going to happen and then we can layer that with forecasted Services also so if you have some really expensive decisions to make about um not flying or flying we have a 24 7 operations center that you can talk to a meteorologist when you want to and only pay for when you talk to them to help to make those decisions uh sometimes those could be ten thousand dollar decisions and it might cost you 75 bucks to talk to a meteorologist you see the return on investment we also know how to you know work with you to eliminate the cost of weather and amplify your Roi and we also want to talk about how we fill these gaps in sensors and we could do analyzes for folks we don't want to put out more data

**[18:55]** sensors than we need we look at what's available we look at the gaps and then we make recommendations about how to fill those gaps and we bring all that data together in a single One-Stop shop so I'm going to just run a quick video here for you of one of our customers the pilot is the best weather sensor we've ever had on an aircraft and if you talk to helicopter piles they'll tell you how many times they run into undetected weather we don't see it in our current system true weather is a provider of micro weather data services to Advanced Air mobility and the Drone industry one of the great things about true weather is that they're innovating in an area that is critical for UAM Skyway is a navigation PSU you can't do navigation without knowing what the weather is going to do our job is to get them the best micro weather data to identify hazards or any kind of an event that's going to impact their ability to navigate the sky safely true weather gives us high resolution low altitude quality

**[19:59]** data so we can give the best navigation experience to our customers we're flying a weather instrumented drone this is one of six sensor types that we have this particular drone will go up and take a vertical profile of the atmosphere it will collect data on winds moisture but more importantly it can fly in clouds to detect icing this is going to become a major problem because we over forecast icing today in our models so we're grounding aircraft sometimes unnecessarily this drone is going to go up in real time and see if the icing's really there we're going to do a hug and spoke system you have a high quality sensor that give you a height of clouds and around that you have cost effective sensors that could pick up winds and neighborhoods which are going to be really important if people are delivering packages and they're dropping them from a loft we're going to array Those sensors in a way that gives us a micro climate view so we can be predictive about how those weathers effects are going to change over the next six hours and help become more reliable about scheduling assets and people and having customers know when and if they're going to be able to get the goods that they've ordered based on how the

**[21:01]** weather's going to behave that afternoon my vision is true weather will be in the uas industries weather provider everywhere in the world I'm Don Burchell so that again just was Skyway is one of our partners there in airspace navigation system um they view us as a partner uh most of the companies I work with um view us as a partner not as a weather data provider if you're if you just want to date a weather data provider and you could tap into any API you can get that but the problem is that's not going to meet your requirements so this is about a full end-to-end capability that brings the sensors in uh fuses that data in a certain way and also we're working on the ASM f-38 weather standard right now we should be going to ballot for the first round here in April I've already been working with Canada Israel and other countries to bring this standard into their areas and what we're

**[22:01]** going to be doing is working with customers out there in different countries that want to try to leverage this kind of technology in their in their systems and to build waiver packages to say Let's test this new standard which is a data performance standard you don't have to have an Asos uh 250 000 Asos you'd be able to have one of these instruments that are lower costs that are still very good and they work for the mission that you're flying and so those are we're working the whole problem from the policy and the standard to the sensors all the way to the solutions and we're offering that through apis that are simple to use we have them today are systems going to get better over time as we get more data in it and we also will bring that meteorologist meteorologist in as required so just to show you uh we're in we're working in Hampton Virginia now we've uh installing two scanning wind lidars these lidars could see dirt and dust and back out Doppler technology and you

**[23:05]** can watch the winds blowing in three dimensions all the way up to six thousand feet covering a 20 kilometer area uh res with the 10 meter resolution and what that's going to do is it's going to give us unmatched situational awareness about winds above the ground which will give you almost 100 percent true understanding of what the winds are going to do to your to your mission which can be incorporated into your analytics and uh and help improve your emission planning but this is an example we'll be running um these cfd models with our atmospheric models in the in 2024 2025 that will actually start understanding how these buildings will impact the winds with orange being stronger winds and how you can avoid areas with good in information uh that are not going to be very uh uh you know not enable your capabilities but maybe um hurt your capabilities right so this is where the science is going this is what the technology provides and

**[24:07]** um again this is the value that could be you know whether could add to your operation so I think that's it for us I think that was the last slide I think we have another question uh that might might want to answer is has this presentation helped you view weather differently and and do you see the possibilities now what weather can provide uh thanks a lot and I think we have a couple of minutes for questions yes uh thank you again Don that's been a very insightful presentation thank you and I'm here to answer questions and talk to people and yes so again I have a lot of questions already but in case uh anybody uh has any more questions for Don please drop them in the Q a I'm gonna open the house for uh questions uh so I'll start with some questions that are already in uh okay let me just go through them so um how can users get started with true weather

**[25:12]** solution what's the business model like so we have a SAS platform um we have two ways to deliver information one is through an apis which you can get an endpoint tie into those we're more than willing to let you demonstrate the capabilities uh you know before you ever get into a business with us you know we'll give you a testing and demonstration time you look at the data and that would be for integration directly into your system whether it's a command control system or a decision system or another uh service provider who wants to integrate our data into their system if if you want to integrate our data in your system and you want to make our data available as a service to your system we work with you on a business model on that where you can resell our capabilities to your system right so that's one way the other thing is we have a dashboard we do have a web a web uh dashboard now uh I'm working on upgrade we're working on upgrading that it is available today you can you can purchase it for I think it's 150 a year which is not very expensive

**[26:16]** uh and it's getting better and better over time if you want to use the dashboard you could buy a sensor yourself and if you buy that sensor we'll plug it in and you'll be able to see your sensor in our dashboard with all the other data we have that's one of the few weather companies that could do that so affordably um so those are the two ways you can get to us today thanks Don I think to add to the question the sensor that you mentioned is that uh available it's off the shelf is this something that you've customized and pro and provide very good question um we don't believe in building sensors we want to get the best of the best technology uh the way true weather is built our system is we want you to think of us as the Uber integrator of the best of the best so we even some of our data we're getting from our best partners because to weather realizes this is a big problem so we actually have a list of sensor providers that we would share with you and say look here's the ones that are East that are already integrated into our system so if you want to purchase one of those we'll work with you we'll purchase

**[27:20]** that we'll get that in there and we'll start providing you the services back if you want Accenture that's not listed in our uh our package um we would look at that and if it looks like a sensor that is going to be essential other people will want we will work we will integrate that and we won't charge you for that because we know that our business model is to resell data and the Plug and Play of the sensors right yeah so we have it's software as a service really I maybe call it data as a service right because our software runs our Fusion engine runs in the so we take in all this data we then you know aggregate it we put it into the right bins and then we run our analytics and then you come in with a request for a piece of information at a location we go in and we build your solution for you on the Fly and then send it back to you with the best data we have available or the best data you're purchasing from us so we have different tiers of data you can have a standard package a premium

**[28:24]** package a premium plus and the more granularity you want and the better solution you want you pay a little bit more for it right but we have that that that business model for you to buy which you can afford and and by the same token you can also buy forecaster credits so if you need twice a year or three times a year you go man this is an expensive decision I'm going to call true weather you give us 30 minutes notice we'll we'll come back to you with us helping you make that that hard decision about what's happening between the lines around the forecast that you don't know but we know right we know what the models can do and how bad they are sometimes and alerting we're going to have an alerting capability it's not out yet but it's going to come out in the next couple of weeks and we'll be able to watch weather for you in some areas of the world not everywhere yet but we can operate everywhere in the world we just have better capabilities in certain parts of the world right so we would work with you on that right a follow-up question to that is uh because you mentioned data so is the data that you're talking about only available for the us

**[29:27]** because or other geographies too we have a question for example is it available in Israel yes good question and we can do it in this I just visited Israel two weeks ago and I met with the CAA and I know you're running your uh your trials and I was out there at your shop uh at the Air Trials yes we can we can provide services anywhere in the world um we we build it out we connect to the data sets we need as we're getting customers right so it's like it's like a cell phone service right if you if we have enough work in Israel we're gonna we're we're in Israel right we're even working we're trying to get sensors in Israel we've been talking to some uh Partners in there so yes the answer is we could go anywhere we're in Australia now we're in uh um Europe we're in Scotland we're in the UK we're in France um we have the ability to to to go anywhere um like I said the quality uh or the amount of really good data is going to depend on what part of the world but we can always bring in a solution that would be

**[30:30]** the best anywhere anywhere in the world right we could do that we can run models we can bring in sensors so don't limit yourself now what what would limit that is the budget right so but if you come to us and say hey we got a business case here in Dubai and you know we are talking to folks in Dubai and in in those areas we we can um always work a solution if we can find a business case right uh just uh lost the q a w yes uh great great answer Don so let I I think you've already covered in this uh presentation however are there any challenges I mean what are the challenges that have are associated by using high altitude weather like if you could uh mention some of the shortcomings that you have noticed or some uh problem uh major problems that you've noticed uh and if you could share some anecdotes with some customers or somebody who you've heard from uh challenges that are with high altitude weather as compared to with when you are

**[31:33]** doing operations in in uh yeah I got it so um we work with we've worked with a couple of companies doing high high altitude operations you know the Big Challenge in high altitude is not necessarily when you're at sixty thousand feet although there are weather impacts they could be weather impacts at 60 000 feet uh but the big challenge is getting up and down right because usually when you're flying with these these type of aircraft they either have large Wings fans uh they're not uh they're they can't take the same amount of cross winds when they take off and land so you know so the the big challenge is getting it through the atmosphere right so you have to Target that window to make sure that you can get to altitude and then and then get back down but at altitude we you know there there are some challenges up there like thunderstorms that get that grow above and get through the tropical pores which could cause some turbulence um there's some other issues up there uh winds though generally aren't a problem because once you get above uh the tropical pause in the stratosphere the winds calm

**[32:36]** down uh but I find we're working with some companies we can help you with that problem uh if this is something you need better services for we can we definitely know how to do it right uh let me check uh okay so there's another question around what are your primary source for data set do you take inputs from GFS and ecmwf also how do you deal with microweather uncertainty so I prefer not to use GFS in in European model because they're they're not high enough resolution um they're only you know European miles nine kilometers it's a great model I'm not criticizing the model it's if these models are great for what they do but when it gets down to one kilometer or less resolution which is really micro weather they don't they can't pick that up so what we do is we sometimes will take those models and we'll downscale them and then we'll add new data and then we'll try to get the micro weather better so the way you increase the certainty uh associated with low

**[33:39]** altitude weather is you have to get better data in there then you got to run another model for the forecast so what we do is we try to get the better data first right because if we have a good picture of what's Happening that's even that's even a big Improvement of what you have right now because right now you know you really don't know what's out there because our models aren't good enough so you get that first then as we get enough data we can run a model that can get take that takes the initial conditions from those GFS or the European models and we run them down to one kilometer resolution with the new data and that's how we really get a better picture of what's Happening we're doing that in Hampton Virginia we're going to have two scanning Wing lidars we're going to take the her model in the United States we're going to run our models and then we're going to put our data into there and with this high resolution wind data that's unmatched that's going to make the forecast from zero to six hours tremendously better than anything you can get from the European model or the GFS right that makes sense there's one uh other question with the Drone that goes into

**[34:44]** clouds to take icing measurements how are you getting around the VFR requirements here in the US or is that a future capability once BVLOS is legal um we're working the waivers with the FAA um we've now got up to 3 000 feet uh not in clouds yet um up in North Dakota we're expecting we're working with the FAA in the in the Indianapolis Center um we have an area that has a detected avoid radar we're working on a military restricted airspace area so we have some advantages um we should be able we won't be able to get that wavering Cloud but again you have to be able to show where your aircraft is right and and you have to make sure you have uh clearance with the with the uh FAA if you're going to go above a certain height so we're working that right now and my strategy is we're going to get these drones out in other places um there and and there's other tools to see Icing By the way we have another tool that we're going to start using to be able to look up with a with a lidar to see the

**[35:49]** size of water droplets if we could see water droplets and clouds and we know it's below freezing we're working this icing problem really hard because we really do need to improve prove that but yes we're working through all those issues right now I'm learning a lot about them right I think we are almost close to the end of the session what's open diaab approach I'm sorry I don't know what that is well that's a question that actually uh the flight based team is gonna ask uh and we've been asking this to all our speakers so the theme of NestGen is uh the theme that we are promoting this year is open dib approach where we're bringing in companies with different technology Stacks uh that are contributing to different layers in the Drone autonomy um you know the industry and uh weather is one of the layers that are in this uh you know part of this industry so uh what we want to uh you know ask all our speakers today is uh do you think that having this kind of a layered approach instead of a

**[36:51]** monolithic approach uh is better and what are the benefits and how can it help us grow in the industry like for example we know that you've partnered uh with uh Iris Automation and different other such Partnerships to bring in uh all the different experts to form a complete solution so what are your thoughts on that uh so everything you know I was in the military and everything we did was join operations and if you want if you want to get the maximum use of weather data it needs to be integrated with other data sets to run analytics and that's how you're going to get the maximum value of it so I think that there is no doubt that the the better we can bring different um components of services together and we can then run these together and first of all just from the simple uh GUI perspective like to be able to see you know your volume reservation area versus your weather versus maybe your drift that you're going to have versus the alerts that come out from that that helps from that but

**[37:55]** even in a machine and machine when we move the machine and machine which is where we're going it's going to be digital right we'll be able to bring all these data sets together and run an analytic that gives you like a perfect best estimate of the best operation that you can run and for weather you know I hate to say it but weather is the last thing that matters right because you can have a perfectly planned operation you can have the best communication the best remote ID the best engineered aircraft and then the weather guy comes along and says oh you can't fly right so you want to make sure that you know all this is being integrated so you can make rapid decisions and and updates so that's a great question thanks thanks Don I think one thing that I've uh easily learned from this session is most of us ignore weather and they just consider it as a cost of doing business like you've mentioned it before so this is going to really open people's minds uh and they were gonna start taking seriously that this is something that they should consider and not just

**[38:56]** you know venturing for an operation only to get it canceled because they did not have the correct information so thank you again yeah just one thing I'll let you go weather's not a cost it's an enabler and you've got it and and we shouldn't be thinking of whether as you have to hit your checklist so you're allowed to fly that's the wrong attitude what you want to do is think about how do you get it integrated in there to get more benefit to your company and I think that's a real big change in the way we've been operating for years so thanks for your thanks for this I really appreciate it thanks again Don uh before we close do you have any closing thoughts for the audience today um I think that um first of all I see some of the uh it makes me happy to see three people said they learned something today so thank you for that I appreciate it um no I just want to tell you we're here to help everyone and enable this industry this is more than a business to us this is a passion we want to unleash the power of science and technology that has been trapped and we want to get it out to the commercial

**[39:58]** sector and we know the challenges of getting data uh getting government data improved it's just not that's not going to be the vehicle in the future because it's just bureaucratic and they don't have the resources so this is the way we're going to do it and we want to work with lots of companies to get this cost down so the more people we're working with the lower we can get our costs down so we hope that you'll you know take that to heart and contact us and let us know if you need anything thank you great thanks again uh for you know enlightening us and to the audience out there thank you for joining our session we have networking and Booth visits coming up next so please visit the networking tab or the Expo tab if you would like to explore some latest technology in this space um thank you again for joining in uh I hope you have a great day there thank you everyone for listening