Oh, I'm just going to sound continuing to sound ridiculous, but this is another very good friend of mine. Actually, I met Brian. Let's see. I was the Oklahoma air guard surgeon and that's where I met Brian up at. Um, and God and Andrews, when I did a rotation up there, and then he ended up being, or we, I think, were you in the RAM before that? I don't think so. No. So, then then I had him in my RAM class along with his will be future wife at the time. And then brought, then we, of course, we remain friends and Brian ultimately came to work at Kami and was in the education division. So, and of course, then I retired for the 1st time. So, but Brian and I keep in touch and I work with his wife all the time. So, Brian lives in Brian lives in a very nice place now. But he has a home some of the time and say, Petersburg, but he's also in. Saying, that's it. So, yeah, and he's a, and he's a neighbor to our president who comes down there sometimes, I guess. And so he's doing work and he's a, he's a, which is the, the substance abuse program for the and also I know a lot of this by heart because I know Brian and I, he told me last night. I knew he was doing something, but they're also teaching sailing. Okay, so, as as Brian didn't know, although I know I told him. The water and Silberman don't do too well since I was the only 1 wearing the orange helmet at water survival. So that's and that's it. That's another story. So so Brian. So, this is a, this is a topic that I didn't that we all discuss and we didn't think that that there was a lot of knowledge about from our group about it. And, and, of course, the is, I guess there's so many different names is, I think the is now using remote aerial systems or something like that. So so Brian is going to talk about, you know, at least give us a basic understanding of the whole drone thing. And there's, there are psychological issues that go with it. So, Brian, thanks then. Thank you. Thanks for having me, I'm very honored and humbled to be here not being someone from the osteopathic world. But the reason why I think was, because it wasn't well marketed and advertised in my neck of the woods, but as I got older, I really appreciated the broader perspective on medicine that you guys have and actually, what I became fascinated with. I had many mentors, the osteopathic community, or in being 1 of them, but probably 1 of the best, if not the best, I was going to say is, well, what fascinated me was the fact that you guys have a license to manipulate. Okay, I tried to do that myself and my wife says, I just have a personality disorder. I don't know what the thing is. I've got more to learn from you guys, but thanks for for being here today. So, I have no conflicts, I don't get paid from anybody, but what I make on brew hard knocks, I guess, at my practice and resailing. We'll talk a little bit today about history of unmanned aircraft current uses some definitions. Uh, the formulation of medical standards, and you'll see some how the Air Force formulated, but was in concert with the FAA and the FAA went on with those and where they are now some human factors and then current FAA rules, which. Are daunting at best, and that's because there's a lot of legal issues that go into it as well as a lot of opinion from the public that goes into these rule rulemaking. And my friends from the FAA will help me if I missed up today. So, believe it or not, unmanned aerial systems or unmanned aircraft. Uh, really kind of originated in history that we know of back in 200 AD, the Chinese used it in warfare, use them in warfare in the, in the form of those lanterns and nobody had seen them before and thought this is, this is there's some divinity or deity involved with with this. So they really, really used it in actually. Uh, the other than later on, I mean, we'll jump and I can't cover all of it by a long shot, but we jump forward to the civil war and they were using unmanned balloons to actually drop bombs and other things on the enemy. At least we get them to land, hopefully, and create an explosion. Now, how they created these bombs or created these balloons and I, and I, that was a little bit of a 40 and slip. They took iron. Shavings and sulfuric acid made hydrogen gas. I mean, what could go wrong with that? And that's it. That's an example of 1 of the balloons there. And then later on, we went on and actually, this is on the top left hand corner is the Curtis in 9 H aircraft and our Navy brethren really kind of led the way the charge on this. And what they did was they said, we could really use some radio controlled aircraft for for certain purposes, especially when we're looking at the competence of our aircraft in counter measures towards other aircraft. And so they started with this, this aircraft on the top left hand corner flew about 33 times with a pilot that was sitting in the, at the, at the controls plus under radio control. And then on September 15th, 1924, the pilot gets out after 2 perfect flights puts about 150 pound sack of sand in there to to make his weight the same weight balance the same. And then he took off and flew that aircraft later on the aircraft. The Navy used the into C2, which is in the bottom right hand corner to look at that what they were going for, which was how effective our aircraft in destroying, seeking and destroying other aircraft. And so that's kind of how the connotation for the word drone in my world kind of came to be, which is drones are the things that you shot at that you were kind of expendable. So they weren't that really, really, really that good. That's not where everybody is right now. Then later on the before, before I get to this, this is really Vietnam era. Does anybody know a famous actor who got their start through drones? And I just found this out after I developed this lecture. Marilyn Monroe was originally seen with a propeller that she made at a drone factory when she was 18 years old, that picture got on the cover of some magazine and then she was discovered. So played played a role in pop culture as well. But the Ryan Firebee in Vietnam played a huge role in doing reconnaissance missions and many other, many other types of different countermeasures. And then it was later reused during 2003 invasion of Iraq to lay down a chaff kind of highway for the aircraft to come in and be and be somewhat protected, the manned aircraft to come in there and do that. So, quite interesting now, I could drone on, but I'll let the aircraft and speak for themselves for a few minutes of the video here. And you'll notice some of these things, you'll recognize how they were used in development of other systems. You guys hear that? You sound. Paul Warnson drums. Paul Warnson drums. A lot of this environmental research can obviously continue going from these early prototypes that they did. Paul Warnson drums. Since we're about this, I'm not going to belabor the point of this video, but you've probably seen this in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum report, some of these aircraft that have gone on to really help us understand the environment better. This is the building of a Telesolar powered aircraft that was able to circumnavigate. Some of these were from our stealth era, F-111, not the F-111, but the B-2 and the 117, yes, thank you. I'll continue on from here, but you get the picture here. So what changed a lot of what we're doing in the national airspace system was Katrina. Hurricane Katrina occurred, and the Air Force especially, I mean, there were other groups, but the Air Force was really chomping at the bit to kind of test out the MQ-1 Predator quite a bit, saying, hey, we can really help out in this way by doing some, you know, search and rescue work and other things that we've kind of been working on since 2001 and before. And so the FAA eventually came around, it takes a little while for the FAA to do stuff, but came around on 18 May 2006, allowing the RQ-9 or MQ-9, R being the reconnaissance version and M being the military armed potential version, to be used within the civilian airspace, which was kind of a big step. Think about this, they're flying out there with all of you. It's a little scary. And in fact, I kind of enter the picture in my world about this time. So I was the Chief of Aerospace Medicine Operations at Headquarters Air Force, the Surgeon General's office, and started, because of this operationalization of the aircraft and moving forward, they wanted to develop a career field. But in the meantime, other people started working and saying, hey, with this, this license, there are other things that we can do. Let's see what's up there. This is a Global Hawk. Shots of Frederick the Reaper, but how they were used in other ways after that 2006, what this video demonstrates. I'll fast forward a bit before I go back to my Air Force time. So when I was at the FAA, Customs and Border Protection were actually looking at creating some standards for their airmen. And we'll talk about that. But they were already using them, utilizing them on borders in certain quarters. And so they were protecting our borders, looking at all that, before a lot of us even knew that that was going on, interestingly, based on that rule that the FAA came out with. So let's talk a little bit about definitions, because you hear about drones. You hear about RPAs. You hear about UAVs. You hear about UASs. So let's get there, okay? So an unmanned aerial vehicle is defined as a pilotless aircraft that is either manually controlled by a joystick or mouse or autonomously flown by following a pre-programmed mission. So, for example, the Global Hawk flies really autonomously. And, in fact, the interface to change things the way that it flies was really a keyboard and some mouse controls and stuff like that. That was really what it did. That was the thing. So very intelligent aircraft that much of this was already kind of baked into other aircraft if there was a lost link. And we'll talk about lost links. But that's kind of the – Global Hawk is kind of that autonomously flown aircraft prototype. A remotely piloted vehicle is a pilotless aircraft that's steered or controlled from a remotely located position. So it's manually controlled. And so this is kind of where we have a breakpoint, where there is a pilot or someone that's considered a pilot-like person that has to interact with the aircraft. And that's really – that became a really big deal in the Air Force. And then a drone is a pilotless aircraft controlled by radio signal. And that's why people still use drone because it's almost an overarching term. Yes, ma'am. Why is it considered, like, manually controlled? It is. Oh. And so what I'm saying is, like – I'm sorry. Like, a Global Hawk was really – it really followed a program, and you could manipulate the program or give it commands. But there wasn't really the, I've got the aircraft, I'm taking it off, I'm landing it, I'm doing that myself. As opposed to, like, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper, where really there are things that fly autonomously, but there is a lot of it that's controlled – and I'll show you further – that's controlled by a human at critical phases of flight, generally speaking. So an unmanned aircraft system, or UAS – and there's been a couple of terms, unmanned aerial system, that the Air Force had. But the current term by the FAA is unmanned aircraft system. And that system is both the aircraft itself, the pilot or pilot and observer, all the people that are involved with that, all the planners, all of the other equipment that allows it to fly, including satellites, believe it or not. So this is – actually comes from Penn State College. They're teaching that now in Earth and Mineral Sciences Division about, you know, coming forth to the future. That a pilotless aircraft system component – and we'll get – the small ones are a little bit different, but most of the bigger ones are going to fall into these categories. That there has to be an air vehicle. There has to be a mission planning element, a command and control element, communication links. You can see launch and recovery and payload. And the payload can be just a camera. It could be a number of things. And, in fact, as we go forth – and so I won't forget – UPS, Amazon, other organizations are coming forward to actually have a payload that it can drop at your house. That gets pretty complex because you're flying over people. You're flying over vehicles. You're flying over houses. And it depends on how large these vehicles are. But it could be a quite catastrophic issue if you're not careful. So those actually, as they get larger and large enough to do these operations, fly under Part 135. And so Part 135 pilots, generally speaking, have to have a second-class medical. And so we'll talk about these other things, but it is still pertinent – the medical component of this is still pertinent even though we're going to say there's no medical requirements. If you go onto the small UAS site at the FAA, all the questions and answers that it's really hard to find mostly say you don't have to have a medical. Okay? So we'll divide these up a little bit. But you can see how complex this can get. And this is what was happening back in 2001 and beyond over in the theater. We couldn't fly in the U.S. except at very special restricted airspaces, okay? But overseas we were flying these operations all the time. And you can see here what you have is effectively someone who is on the ground, generally speaking, the same type of person who is back home that would be controlling back home, but they're now forward deployed. They actually physically watch the aircraft go, or there is one person that's physically watching the aircraft go while the other person is actually in a ground control station taking the aircraft off. It is taxing on the same runways as all the other aircraft. Kandahar Airfield was a really great example of that, okay, where they were taking off together, and they were treated just as any other aircraft that was out there, okay? So they take off. They get to a certain height, a certain area, and then that transmission, that control, gets handed off from the person on the ground back to a ground control station somewhere in the United States because they have the command and control element that can do the mission planning and react really quickly back in the United States. It's usually one of their teammates, squadron members or whatever else that's back in the U.S. from the person who – people who are flying from the ground in Kandahar that would actually be back in the U.S. controlling once it got off the ground. So you can see that sounds, you know, complex enough about being a system, but check this system out. This aircraft is actually supporting on the right-hand bottom side of the screen. It's controlling airspace above coalition forces, okay, maybe actually launching weapons in close air support potentially, maybe doing a bunch of things that are kind of crazy if you think about, hey, there's somebody thousands of miles away that's saving my life today right now on the ground. And that became some of the contention of the people who are back home saying, I'm fighting the war just as well as anybody else is, it's just in a different way. The same thing that's happening is – and this is one of the things in human factors. Look at how complex that airspace is. You have an AWACS aircraft that's controlling kind of the air traffic controller for that battle space. You have planes above you, you have planes below you, you have people below you, and you're trying to keep all that stuff deconflicted so you don't have something like this that just happened inadvertently by Russia the other day, okay? So why would we go forth and do this? I mean, we've got a bunch that we had back in those days. We had plenty of pilots. We had plenty of aircraft. So why would we do this? Any ideas? I'm sorry? Cost is one thing. The other thing, the Air Force never wanted to do this. I mean, the Air Force kind of did, but the Air Force as writ large, really the pilot community said, we don't want to be part of this. This is not our deal. Combatant commanders went, wait, I can stay on station and watch somebody for days on end. One aircraft goes in, and F-16 flies in a couple hours maybe at max, unless you have a refueler up there and another whole system going on. But these aircraft can stay out there for 14 hours on one take of fuel, and they can swap with another aircraft. So you can keep an eye on the subject, whatever it is, whether it's close air support, whatever you're doing, you could do that for eons, and that became powerful. When you could actually put weapons aboard that and actually say, I'm going to take out a target, that became even more powerful. So those people who were fighting the war said, Air Force, we don't care what you want. We need more, and we'll go wherever we need to to get more. And so that's how it came about. So the advantages, as I've skipped ahead as well, is that there was a reduced risk to air crew. There's a long time on target capability and low profile. If you aren't seen, you're not seen. You can fly high. And, in fact, an MQ-9, I was just looking at that just a little while ago, can fly to 50,000 feet. It's about a 10,000-pound aircraft. It can fly to 50,000 feet. You can't see it up there, especially under certain conditions. You have the intelligence. You have the strike. You have reconnaissance capabilities all built into this one aircraft. Kind of cool. And you don't have that human frailty built into that aircraft. Fatigue in the aircraft. You don't have, you know, the issue with Gs. You don't have issue with acceleration. You don't have issues with motion sickness and all that, except, well, maybe that video motion sickness and all that that's going on. And it interfaces with multiple systems, so it can't interface with satellites. It can't interface with all these different aircraft. Problems are lost data links, and that happened quite a bit. But the one thing that they had that was built into it is if you lose a data link, what happens to the aircraft? It returns to base, right? It either returns to base or it does something pre-programmed. So it could fly like just a racetrack in the sky. It could do a bunch of things. Now, I don't know firsthand, but I heard when I was there that there was one that got loose, at least, and this was a while ago, but for DC, it started flying its pattern near that Oregon National Airport. So it's good in some cases, bad in other cases. So they had to work through, okay, how do we then say we want to de-automate the automation at certain times as well? It was one of the engineering conditions they had to work through. It's a vulnerable to electronic and physical attack. Any examples you can think of from the recent past? I hate, hopefully I wouldn't have been anybody, but it was a baby seal out there with an SU-27 that can fly 1,600 miles an hour. It can go three max, 300 miles per hour max. Okay, it really doesn't, it can't do huge maneuvers and stuff, that's not what it was designed to do. The SU-27, there was no fight there. It was, and oh, by the way, and I'll get to this is when human factors, you're looking through something like this, it's really hard. I mean, you have sensors, but it's really hard to look over your shoulder and see what's going on. So they were allowed to do a lot of passes and they really, there was nothing we could do about it. And you can see the complexity of communications in 3D battle space is just a lot. It's created up there, there's electronics that show you what's going on, but trying to process that thousands of miles away using computer systems and stuff becomes quite daunting. And then manpower and career field issues. And that was an early on issue. The manpower and career field issues was who's gonna do this, okay? And the reason why that was, and you can see back to what I was talking about before, was that, look, you can see that there was a requirement that just kept growing from the combat commands. We need more pilots, we need more hours, we need more of these aircraft in the air. We've got to meet that need, but it wasn't sexy to do that, okay? And I'll show you kind of who some of the mentors and those that were in the idols of the pilot force or what they were starting to do. And we'll show you a couple of studies that show that really, if you're already a pilot, that really goes a long way to getting you there faster, getting people in. So if somebody had either a medical condition where they couldn't fly in an aircraft, or they had some other issue where they didn't have the ability to speak up and say, I don't want to do this, they were assigned there. So then it became even more kind of, from a social perspective, became even worse. So then we came up with this new term called remotely piloted aircraft. And that was a specific term the chief of staff really coined in with the chief of operations, flight operations coined, because they wanted the word pilot to be in that title. And in fact, I was there when they developed those wings on the left-hand side. Those wings were, they wanted them to look somewhat like pilot wings, and they wanted them to show that, yeah, this is a new age, but they wanted them to have kind of a similar perspective and background. And they got there. These were the people that they looked up to. Who knows who the guy on the left was? Robin Olds. Robin Olds. And you know why you know that? Because it's March and you've got a great mustache, okay? And so he was kind of a rebel in his day, and he really wasn't supposed to have a mustache like Warren Silberman, but he knew Warren and he wanted to have one like Warren. But he really was a, I mean, an incredible pilot, incredible leader and went well. And another incredible leader who at times had a mustache, you know, this guy? Chappy James. When I was at the Guard Bureau, I worked for his son, Danny James, who was the guard, the commander. Oh, yeah, yeah. So he was interesting character, his son was. But these are the guys they looked up to. And you can see kind of this rough and ready kind of gang that did a lot of good for our side in Vietnam. What they were looking at, and this is what the opposition to trying to go into that career field was, this idea. Delta, Alpha, Bravo requesting dual support. I repeat, Delta, Alpha, Bravo requesting air strike. Let's rock and roll. Welcome new drone pilots. Your lives, as you know them, are about to change. Whoa, buddy, come on, man. This will take a toll on your bodies and your minds. Your families will not understand. This is a new era. You're going to have to get used to it. See, daddy is real, pilot. I still don't get it. Some of you will not last the duration of this operation, but such is the cost of modern warfare. Hey, did you hear that Rivera left? No. Yeah, it means that chair's open up, that comfy chair of his. Wondering who's going to get it. Those are my doughnuts. I've eaten three doughnuts by the time you wake up. Nothing to be proud of. He said, there's nothing to be proud of, eating three doughnuts before you woke up. So again, that's a humorous, but this is now in the culture where we're actually, Comedy Central, they're talking about that perspective. So it's obviously gotten better and things have improved with the career field to a certain extent, but part of the other part was they were not getting medals like the other folks were. They weren't being able to go to school because it was a stress like the schools that would help them get promoted in military education because it was a stress career field. And so this is where actually it was General Schwartz who was actually came from the special operations field, which this was really, really a solid component of special operations during those days. And this is his background. We're not going to create a second tier. We're not going to create two classes of citizens is what I've heard him say personally before. Which is interesting in the Air Force because they've always had two classes. Those who had wings and go speeding up. There's a lot more than that, but yes, I would agree with you. There is also self-loading baggage that had wings too. So you did whatever you could to do better. In fact, probably my credit achievement was on my Finney flight. We were refueling from a KC-135, refueling a stealth aircraft and dump some fuel on the stealth aircraft accidentally, which creates some problems. And it was because there was an issue. We had a problem at the boom, we're connected with the aircraft and we're leaking from there. So they got a little upset. But in the midst of all this stuff, I was back there with the refueling and everyone forgot the tail number. Having been an old guy, flight surgeon, I figured there's a lot going on. I better remember the tail number. Anybody get the tail number? Yeah, blah, blah, blah. Doc, that's you? My other heroic moment was flying over the Middle East at a C-130 when people were really, really tired. And the pilots said I needed a little bit of a nap. And the co-pilot said, yeah, I got the aircraft. We had two, I think we had two load masters and we had a navigator and a bunch of people. I realized at some point in time, I was the only one that was awake on the aircraft because we're getting our tail number called and nobody was answering. So the way I answered it, the way I took care of myself as a second tier wing wearer was pilot has the aircraft, nobody slept for the entire rest of the mission. I'm sorry, did I say pilot has the aircraft? I said flight surgeon has the aircraft, sorry. Yeah, they got a little scared. Somebody's piloting the aircraft. So that was kind of a drone at that point in time. Anyway, so you can see, and this becomes more pertinent. I'm telling you a lot of history to get you kind of where we are right now. But you can see there were these small unmanned aerial systems on the left-hand side. So it's for a couple of reasons. One was the size, the weight, the speed and the damage it could do. And that's actually where the FAA has gone now for small UASs. And the regulations is about how much damage you could do to a person. Okay, and then the more largely remotely piloted aircraft. And that's where they started calling them remotely piloted aircraft. And yes, you are a wing wearer and yes, you are a rated officer is in the group four and group fives, which is the Reaper, Predator, Global Hawk and those types of aircraft. But what, as we got into human factors, if you look at the list here, you can see that a remotely piloted aircraft, especially if they're using the same runways, the same taxiways and the same airspace, they've got to kind of do the same things, whether you're physically on the aircraft or not to fly it safely and you have a responsibility for the national airspace system, just like everybody else does, maybe even more because you can't, you're sensing versus seeing. And that was a big deal for the Air Force, see and avoid versus sense and avoid, okay? Because you're really looking through a little camera. Here's more, start and taxi takeoff, okay? And you guys can look at these slides later, but the same thing, you could, they said, hey, we got the same requirements here, okay? And even glass cockpits, okay? And recovery taxi shutdown, same stuff. So at some point as the Air Force was looking in the Army and others were looking, the Army, I love, some of my best friends are in the Army, have been retired from the Army. A lot of times they're just like, hey, let's just do this. We can save lives, let's get this done, let's go for it. And the Air Force is more like, we can't do anything unless we're told we can, just a difference in culture. Navy's the same way, which is, hey, if it isn't written that you can't, I can't, right? So the Air Force working with the FAA started looking back into history, okay? And saying, hey, if we're developing standards for medical issues for personnel, we need to look at human factors issues and what things are pertinent to this airspace or this aircraft and this mission. And so 1973 was kind of the first study for human factors and that was Fogel. And what he said was, really, non-pilot groups can be trained to actually fly these things, okay? You don't have to be a pilot first, okay? That was really a big deal, okay? It may take them a little bit longer, but they can actually fly just as well as anybody else without flying an aircraft before. In 2002, basically what they said was, any prior flight experience was beneficial for predator training when they came out with it. To your point, which is, we have approximately 52, any training, going back to my education and training mode, any training, you want to train the world, everything that there is about the subject, but usually budget says you can only train this much. You've got this much time and this many resources, so do what you can and then stage it at different levels maybe over time if you need more. But effectively, with resource constraints, we need people who can get through the training program in the allocated resources that we have, which often was 52 weeks like they did with undergraduate pilot training for manned aircraft. So that's what Shriver was really trying to say is, can we do this and what time does it take and what do we need, what is the right stuff? And the right stuff, in 2008, they started looking at this and they baited tested candidates and looked at, and one of the things they looked at from a psychological standpoint, okay? Anybody know, MFT, military, you can help me. It's the medical exam prior to sending somebody, spending millions of dollars on training somebody to say, hey, we're going to do a thorough physical on you, including psychometric testing, neuropsychological evaluation, which I had to go through too as a ram, that didn't work, but I had to at least experience it. They don't do any neuropsychatism. Well, what they did was, well, there are two things that they did with the neuropsych testing, okay? And I was there firsthand kind of too. My wife at the same time somehow got and became chief of standards at some point in time as well after I was there. And what they did was they looked at, what does it take to make somebody be able to function well in this career field? And what does it take for somebody to be able to be trained and operate within the timeframe that we have? And what they said was basically the same personality and the same neuropsych testing IQ and everything else that you use for a regular pilot in a manned aircraft is the same thing that's required for an unmanned aircraft or an RPA. And so that's kind of what they came down to. And that's what they developed and said, this isn't the case. The only other way I've seen it used is if somebody, kind of like the FAA does with the Cogscreen AE, which is we're using normative values for your group. If you're a air transport pilot by major airlines, we're gonna norm you to your group. I have seen the Air Medical Consultation Service use it as normed to yourself. This is what you were at 20 years old. And now you're 40, you're still a smart person, but you've had a major head injury. And now at 40, your IQ is 140. Well, it was 160 before. That's the only other way I've seen it used, person to person. But that's basically what they came up with. So developing standards, and this is Dr. Anthony Tavarianas, who got a PhD in this eventually as well, and 711th Human Systems Wing develops standards. Now, we were working with our colleagues in the Navy and the Army. I just know this story the best, but they were working along as well. But the Air Force had the biggest desire to work with the FAA on these standards to be able to get these larger aircraft to be able to fly in the National Airspace System. But what they said was basically those large ones need RPA pilot standards that they develop, which is a flying class to you in the Air Force, roughly equivalent to a second class medical in the FAA. And the thing about the, one of the major differences between the second and third class, for those of you guys that don't work as aviation medical examiners, is a couple of things. First class is gonna be an EKG after the age of, well, 35, and then you're really up to the age of 40. The other is the vision standard. And so being able to see the aircraft visually and from a distance, it was distant visual acuity is really the key. That's what really separated a 2040 vision that was allowable in third class versus a 2020 correctable vision at distance for a second class. And that's why they kind of chose that. And the FAA, I'll show you a paper from the FAA that was looking at that and basically recommended a second class as well. Based, Dr. Anthony Taveras was there. And somebody in the back of the room was also named on this paper. I re-read it again. And it was Kevin Williams that did that with you guys in 2007. Yeah, so, and this is a little bit later in this, in the discussion here, but one of the things that we were looking at as going into the National Aerospace System is how safe are they? With all the other, all the stuff that you've done and all the human factors, we're working through that, but how safe is the aircraft? The lost links and all the other things. And you can see back in, and these are different data from different time periods, but it was the best I could get right now was in fiscal year nine, you can see that things were going relatively well for the Air Force. They had some, a steep learning curve. As you can see, that blue line is the Predators. And in 2001 had a steep curve that was mostly over, that was really over in theater. And there was a lot of reasons for that. But you can see back in around 2009, they were getting very, very close to at least general, US general aviation standards. Close, close to that. Is mishap mean like crash? Or does that mean just some, anything? Well, a mishap could be anything, okay? Usually a mishap results in damage, okay? You can have under, and I'm sorry, that term mishap is a military term. Yeah, sorry. Mishap without permission is not something benign, it's something important. But it's pretty expensive. Yeah, and it could be very, very expensive or it could be. And so the mishap could be a physiologic incident, not in this particular case. But in manned aircraft, it could be just somebody all of a sudden lost consciousness or they, you know, G-induced loss of consciousness or something like that. That could be a mishap in itself where nothing bad actually happened. It's something we better really look at close to make sure it doesn't happen again because we could lose a human in an aircraft again. And the same thing here. So thanks for that clarification on that terminology. You can see that they got down close in 2008, 2009. You can see that customs and border protection was a lot higher, but their number of flying hours at that time were a lot lower. That's one of the reasons we were called in to help them with standards. As public use aircraft, the military does its own standards, which should be equivalent to the FAA. So does customs and border protection, so do others. And so they were trying to say, how do we make sure that our standards are kind of the same as everybody else's? But their numbers, I think that their numbers weren't that vastly higher for mishaps, it was just their numbers were a lot lower in flying hours. The denominator were a lot lower. And you can see the Army was higher, but they were using a different, mostly a different type of aircraft, a smaller aircraft and all that, because they were using recon like in the battlefield area as opposed to doing major operations. And you can see in 2015, the Air Force was down to four for reapers, four losses per 100,000 hours. So that was actually pretty acceptable by that point in time. And that's when everybody said, hey, let's, we can start really playing ball about doing the National Airspace System thing, although it was already happening somewhat. So I already talked about the reduced field of vision. Okay. In night vision goggles, they have the same thing. It's just you switch from your angle of vision or your field of vision to field of regard. You start looking around a lot more and you could do that a little bit with the camera on the Predator Reaper, but it is still a bit hard. The other thing is sometimes people would be flying the aircraft, especially if it was controlled by a stick and they would say, wow, the aircraft isn't leveling off. Well, they didn't realize that something was wrong. They still had acceleration in the throttle. They still had something else. So they didn't have that see the pants issue going on. Wait, something's wrong. I'm feeling high acceleration. Something's going on. And there's also the delay in the link time. So you're having to send this message up to a satellite back down to the ground. Yeah, but one of the things in pilot training is that you're taught, do not rely on the seating pants. Rely upon your instruments, absolutely. But when your seat tells you to look at your instruments, put your instruments. No, your seat will not tell you to look at it. That's the point. Yeah, and your point is well, Claire, in the education division, we also did aerospace physiologists as well. And we would confuse pilots all the time in our devices. So point well taken, it's the summation of all of those things that, I mean, you're trained to go trust some, but then always cross-check your instruments. The problem is if you don't have the clue light come on that I need to cross-check my instruments because you're not feeling anything at all, then that's the issue. And there are ways to get around that as well. But yeah, you're right. Sometimes you cannot feel that you're actually inverted and you still need to cross-check your instruments to say you're inverted. And they had that also in these aircraft that they've lost aircraft, remotely piloted aircraft being inverted in the past. Same thing, not much of a cockpit, but smoke in the cockpit, other issues that are going on. If the sensor doesn't pick it up, you don't know that it's happening. So you can see, and this is just one quote on the data link. I put the airplane into a holding pattern. The aircraft turned in the opposite direction than what I wanted it to. To correct the situation, I overrode the aircraft, had the aircraft going to hold again and the aircraft did it again. This is almost like the Coriolis effect where you're in and out. So very much the same, right? What's going on? They corrected it, the aircraft did fine. But sometimes there's this, it could be switchology, could be a bunch of things that are going on that created that. But you can see that there's link latency. That was one of the things that actually, my wife went to the Chief of Staff, General Schwartz, at the time, and there was a discussion about that every airman should, if they can't pass a color vision test to become a manned aircraft pilot, they should be a UAS pilot or RPA pilot. And the answer was, yes, you have redundant coding. Yes, you have a bunch of things. And what I mean by redundant coding is you may have an object that is identified as a triangle, may have a number with it, it might have a color with it, but you need all those things to quickly identify. And the argument was in close air support with any loss in timing because of the data link, you need every single one of those cues to be able to say, we need to fire, we need to not fire, we need to do a bunch of things. And so that's why color vision is still baked into the standards for that as well. And that's why the FAA, especially like the one, the 135, they still use color vision standards with that. And you can see people can become complacent. They can be surprised that the aircraft went into automatic mode, all that stuff. And you can see crew resource management is a big issue as well. And so you can see, here's another quote. At the beginning of the flight, the lost link procedure was valid, but this procedure was not updated later in the flight. So you may be near Reagan National Airport, and all of a sudden, the plane loses a link and then starts doing this automatic pass through the flight path. That's a bad thing to do. At one point, had the lost link procedure been activated, it would have had the aircraft fly through terrain in an attempt to reach the next waypoint. As a sailor, I have autopilot on the vessel, too. That vessel, that autopilot is great. It'll keep you going right through, right on land, right into other vessels and everything else. That's the same thing with this. It's smart, but it isn't programmed necessarily to sense and avoid at that time. And you can see there could be problems with transferring control, especially from down on the ground to the person through a satellite link, all kinds of things. There also was a delay that they noticed in transmission. So I start to transmit, and another person has already heard in that area. So a lot of the communications were going through the aircraft, but to a satellite, and they were communicating from the ground, thousands of miles away, to a satellite, then to the aircraft radio, then to the local. So you could see that loss of time. And so you might be stepping on other people's communications during that period of time. So it creates problems. Let's look a little bit about the ergonomics, see if you find anything about this. And one of the reasons why they're walking into a trailer is because it's transferable. You can throw it in an aircraft and take it out to the theater, and back here, back and forth, and people are used to the same things. It's really great. You're looking up here, you're looking over there. How many aircraft are they in control? At that point in time, one. But they can control one, that's one aircraft's worth of screens? Yeah, because they're looking at all kinds of things. So as opposed to seeing a void and sensitive void, they're looking at, okay, what's going on here? What's the battle space look like? I'm getting transmissions from here. And that's part of the problem. Where do you direct your attention? That's another part of the issue, is where do you direct your attention on that? So you turn away from the screens to right. Yeah, you can see that. Exactly. Exactly. Now, there's multiple crew members that are involved with this. There's multiple crew members that are involved with, if there was a sequence, that there was going to be a munition that was involved. It's a very complex sequence, and people are, as in, multiple fail-safes and all that. But that's kind of an interesting perspective, right? So it was engineered, but it wasn't necessarily engineered for, hey, let's work the human in here and make it the most beneficial for the human to do the job. Well, on a new plane, when they get home. Yeah, well, that was part of the issue. Now, the other part of the issue, in addition to, they said, I had to answer questions back in the day about, you know, they're fighting the battle every day, and then they go home to a soccer game, and they want to kill somebody. No, that's not. They were frustrated going and interviewing people, at least in the Air Force. They were frustrated about long hours, not getting the recognition and awards that their colleagues did, and not getting the schools, and not getting the promotability. That was the biggest problem. Otherwise, they were able to compartmentalize, but they had good reason to have PTSD like anybody else. Now, what's, this is a Winnebago seat, but effectively, I couldn't find a seat. I didn't, I couldn't find my pictures from back in the day when I was going out and evaluating these in 06, 07, 08. But basically, they had something that looked like a Winnebago chair in some of these. And the design, they're just going, okay, there's a human, let's put him in something that's kind of a comfy chair. And they had this ability for different sizes of people to be able to get up and down in the chair. Well, they have this piece of cloth on the left-hand side of the bottom in order to cover the scissor on the right-hand side. There were people getting their fingertips cut off as they were watching something and they were adjusting their seat and then clamped down on their seat. Just one of the design issues that was an issue, and I'm laughing just because not, I feel bad for the people, but it was just like, how did we, how do we figure this was going to work real well? But again, it was produced really quick. So you can see a bunch of things here. I think reliance on text displays to the exclusion of other sources of information was a big issue. So you could see writing things on the board on the back versus looking at what's going on, but it was a way that people got in to do their jobs. Or use of non-standard or counterintuitive language and text messages was another issue. So you can see all these things that were out there. You can see a lack of feedback on pilot control inputs or system states, and there's ways to do haptic, you know, like a vibration or something, but that wasn't exactly involved at the time. Multifunction displays and controls, particularly where control may perform a both critical and non-critical function. Okay. I was involved in a situation with, I won't say where or when, but a pilot had, same thing that happens, could happen here in another aircraft, had the aircraft in the wrong switchology and tried to laser, was doing it in practice and tried to laser a target. And when they pressed the laser, it was actually guns. And yeah, it was at night and nobody was in the building at the time, but a little bit of a problem. But you could see how switchology, same thing can happen in these. With multiple menus, you could be in the wrong menu, especially if you're at a stick. And poor hierarchy of presentation is an issue as well. Now, you can see reliance on key press sequences and shortcuts, making you memorize those things. And that isn't always intuitive how to do that. And then color palettes. And you can see how this is how it's depicting different, like that's an aircraft, but it might be friendly versus foe. So it's a red versus green. If you have a color deficiency, then our color weakness, you might very well go, okay, what is that? I'm looking for a shape, maybe that might be different or something. I'm going to look at that. That's where this color palettes became really important in these lines. And the problem with the engineering was, and there was a project going on at the FAA before I left, regarding kind of the most common colors people could see for air traffic controlling. I'm not sure where that is, but requiring engineers and companies that made products to only use those colors. I went to an organization kind of as a consultant and saw somebody have this, I couldn't make heads or tails of the display. It was because they had a color deficiency and they set it up that worked best for them. Problem is they didn't know what they didn't know when it went to the, you know, you can understand. There might be things they just don't see that they don't realize when they set up their palette the way they want it set up. So you can see fatigue, circadian rhythms, because you're on and off and deploying and all that stuff can play a role. Boredom, because you're on the target for hours and hours and hours. And one of the things that really played into people's, it wasn't PTSD is I want to go kill somebody necessarily. It was, imagine watching somebody day in and day out for a month. They're eating breakfast, going to bed, interacting with their family, all that stuff. And then in the end, you have a decision to make, you're told this is what you got to do. And you might see things in very high resolution when something happens. So this is over Ukraine, and this isn't the best optics that actually exists. But you could actually imagine if you could really see, imagine seeing somebody actually vaporizing in front of your eyes at even better optics than this. That's what was affecting people, that human factor there. So that's why they had as much PTSD potentially, other than the risk to their lives. But there was a risk potentially to their careers for the wrong decision, the risk to their ego, or holy crap, I made the wrong decision. What do I do now? All the same things that the Army pilots faced, except they were in theater. Yeah, exactly. Away from their families, missing this Army. Exactly, exactly. We had very little sympathy. Don't disagree. There's a lot of disagreement. Now, those guys were also deploying too. They were also on the ground deploying, not in hot zones. They're usually, obviously, on a base. But again, it's one of those things. But you can understand the human empathy aspect of it. But I get where you're coming from. They had the privilege of serving both in the Army and the Air Force. The Air Force is the only service where the enlisted folks and their officers can go up and kill. That's not outstanding. As Patrick was saying, you've got somebody out there in the theater. They're going to see somebody develop a pink mist very, very quickly. You're going to see your buddies getting that and what have you. That's been the truth since time immemorial. And the reality is that we understand a lot more about the impact of such kinds of trauma on us a lot better than we did a generation or even especially two ago. Never mind going back three or four generations or as they start. But the thing is, is that, as you said, in order to get it, how do you equate this in terms of potential to get promoted? Now, the missile leaders had the same kind of phenomena as did the folks who are in today the UAV, UAS, or RBV, RPAs kind of things. And it's still a system that is imperfect because, again, what is the board charged with at the time? And I don't know if you ever served on a promotion board, OK, but it's what is the board charged with at that particular moment in time? Yeah, and this is really it was a it was a advertising campaign more than anything else. How do we get people to want to do it? And the problem was early on, there's always growing pains. And so there was a lot of negative press. But your point's well taken. Yes, ma'am. One of the things I am not a pilot, never been a pilot, et cetera. But one of the things you said earlier, and I think it would be different from the pilot of an airplane versus these is when you said they may watch the people for hours and see them. I would assume airlines or a manned air carrier would not have that degree of intimacy of watching that daily human factor before they. So my only experience with it is watching. There's a there was a series. I think it was called Jack Reacher. But one of the episodes was a bad where they had watched his family for days and then to come out. Yeah, so yeah, that to me is one of the differences of those who have to sit for hours in your lab. But also in close air support, helping aiding in close air support is also watching your own people where you may not be able to do more than you want to do more and you can't. Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. Good point. Career wise, if they come up with a plan, how? My understanding is, yeah. And actually, I mean, with that developing it as the same kind of group of folks, there is that they have drastically improved it. But it's been a while since I've I've actually been close to that. What's interesting to me is. I've seen a number of people for non-FAA chance who were UAB pilots in the military. There's no path for them to become a civilian pilot. There's no. There's there, you know, the person who flew a physical airplane can go with the airlines. There's no similar path. They won't give them credit for any of their hours. Well, yeah, it's this weird never never land. And if you really think they're pilots and they're really flying, I appreciate you to learn how to do the stick and rubber thing. I know that you can't be a UAB, can't fly a real aircraft without those skills. But something some process to. Dr. Silverman, it sounds like it's your your your deal. It's like flying a simulator, really, you know, but and of course, you know, the FAA grants a certain amount of hours towards a rating. But I haven't heard anything about. So I think we're not there, but that's a good point. Yeah, I mean, if you want to make it, if you want to encourage people to do this, develop that path. I'm not saying what it is, but some path that will, you know, they say they're looking at, you know, our flying is no good. You get some maybe. They're looking at the same thing for career fields in medicine, too, for technicians and 18 Delta medics and the Army and things like that. So good points. Luckily, I don't have I wear a beard on a special forces or anything. So. So stay inside because this is not a fake. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Some process. And I was like, I spent seven of the one I talked to, like, I spent seven months in grad school. Yeah, right. Yeah. He's got, you know, I don't know, 3,800 hours or something flying at the UAV. Get zero from the FAA. Nothing. There's a pathway for people that flew tactile of touchable aircraft. There's a pathway for them to transition. Absolutely. These guys, I'm saying I'm not I'm not saying what the path should be something. Yeah, absolutely. The same work be made. I mean, in the medical community, you get zero credit toward medicine. From anything you might have done before to being a physician, you get zero credit for being a combat medic or being a nurse or being a PA zero credit for being a physician. It's the same kind of thing. And I'm sure that we can all make and have made it say, hey, there's an overlap, but there is a difference in the process and in the learning. But if you're a nurse in the Army, you can get a nursing license. I think that's what. So I'm going to I think those are really great points. I got about five minutes and I want to get to that. Actually, the FAA now. Yeah, she's she's about to pull me off the stage, which is great. But this is great. Thank you. This is awesome. It makes me feel great that this is you guys are excited about this. This is good stuff. So basically, you can see and this is the one where Dr. Silverman was involved with actually helping formulate this. And in March of 08, they said, yeah, actually, for these big ones, these big, big unmanned aerial systems or aircraft systems, I was you need to have a class two. And then you can see that then later on, people said, what about the rest of us? All of us that are wanting to fly drones, the drones, drones have exploded. We want to fly drones everywhere. And so actually, the FAA was was required. Really, they wanted to do it by 15. And they actually released it by 16 because I had to go through this whole process. But the FAA was working really, really hard on. You need to figure out a way to get UAVs, drones, whatever you're going to call them. You need to get them available to fly more in the in the national airspace system. For example, Amazon, UPS, other things as well. And so you can see that they came out with 14 CFR 107, which allows that. And so there are recreational and commercial. And I'll kind of go through this quick because we have very little time. But you can see it's recreational. You have to have to take a test called the recreational UAS safety test, the trust. That includes model aircraft. From everything I can, everything I've read, they define a model aircraft now as a UAS. And so that's one of the issues. You have to fly at or below authorized altitudes in controlled airspace. So they can fly in controlled airspace, but it gets really complex from there, who can and how they can. And outside controlled airspace, you can fly in up to 400 feet. So a lot of these aircraft have the ability to fly much higher than that. But on the recreational side, you can fly 400 feet. Now, another key thing, if you guys are thinking about going out there and doing that, it needs to be registered if you're flying in any airspace. And it's in my slides. It gets pretty deep. But also, you have to let the FAA know if you're flying in controlled airspace as well. And there's ways to do that. So you see Category 1 can weigh up to 0.55 pounds and have blades that won't cut somebody if they come to you. And that's one of the issues. And so what they came up with was there was another push that said, hey, what about flying over people, flying overnight? The other thing is you can't be recreational if you're flying a UAS for like putting pictures on a website for somebody or things like that. And that becomes more on the commercial side, and you have to go into that. But the other thing is you have to do a compliance with a remote ID in most cases, especially in the Category 3 aircraft, which are a little bit larger, a little bit more complex. Because they can fly faster, they have more weight, they can do more damage to people. The other thing about flying over people is you can't really fly over any parts of their body without them knowing it. You have to let them know. You can't fly them over if they're not involved with it. You can't fly it and hover it over a vehicle and do that. There's a lot of rules about that. And so they actually came out with an app called Before You Fly. And this tells you where you can fly and where you can't fly based on how you're registered and all that. That's something else that you want to look at. Model aircraft is actually also, like I said, meets those criteria for it. So it's a little bit more complex, and I've got two minutes. But effectively, anything less than 55 pounds, and go back since I've got a couple minutes, anything less than 55 pounds can fall into this. You can fly something recreational less than that, but then it becomes you may have to have it certificated if you're getting into the Category 4, Category 5. You have to give way to other aircraft. You have to fly at or below altitudes and controlled airspace, as we said. There's actually a way if you want to fly at night that you have to go through LAANC, that L-A-A-N-C program, to notify them during the day and then say, I want to fly also at night around those controlled airspaces. You also have to have a light that flashes that can be seen for three miles as well. You have to carry proof of you passing that test, as well. But you don't have to have a medical certificate. There's no medical requirement for certificate until you get into that Part 135. And there's no exclusion I can find in Part 135 for remotely piloted aircraft. And that may be the entree into what you're talking about as far as getting that recognition for those folks. I think that's basically, I had a video in, let me see if I can find the... We take a look at... This is kind of the weirdest drones and stuff that are out there today. Look it up. I've got the video. I think I have a copy on the reference slide, as well, regarding that. But look it up. There's some really crazy stuff they're doing with remotely piloted aircraft and drones these days. It's really cool. Which one is that? No, you said you've got three there. We take a look at some of the most incredible and strangest drones out there. We start off with the... Well, I'm not going to go into it because I don't have time. I'm right at my time now. But it's top seven amazing drones. Look it up on Google. Thank you. So if you hover over military installations in Montana, you have to be very careful on the exit route over the Carolinas. Well, you can fly until you get to South Carolina. Right, right. And then go over the water. Right, right. I won't go further than that. That gives you enough time to download all your stuff. Thank you very much. Thank you. See you around. Thank you. It's okay. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Brian.

Unmanned Aerial Systems

Drones

History of Drones

Military Drone Operations

Civilian Regulations

FAA Regulations

Pilot Requirements

National Airspace System

Operator Skills Transition

Brian