California Drone Legislative Day

California currently has a plethora of drone bills in the legislative hopper, and many of those are not at all favorable to the growth of our community. Having attended a few hearings on some of the previous bills introduced by one of our more prolific anti-drone bill writers, I’ll say the situation is not pretty. At these hearings, the stakeholders usually parade through to give their views on issues and subjects they know little or nothing about. Knee-jerk is sums it up in most cases for those who are not familiar with the technology, existing law and viable remote sensing applications.

It goes point counter point in what becomes a tag team-sparing match where all of the potential uses get thrown together and derided or supported by the various factions. Plenty of face palm material on both sides, but what I think it helps to illustrate is the bigger picture and the leadership vacuum that exists. Less hocus pocus and more focus needed. Peel back the onion of participation and we have the lobbyists who don’t understand the issues besides the obvious we are paid to say no. Business’ that are pushing the business plan and an advocacy group that lacks depth more often than not leaves a convoluted takeaway. If people who know the issues come away puzzled about the message, we can only wonder what the Aides understood beyond the revelation that any and all limits are bad.

Over the last few years, people on both sides of the issue have had time to do some research and get educated on the technology and the issues. Something, for the most part, that is working in our favor and not lost on Bruce Parks, President of the Drone Pilots Federation. Bruce could see that the past effort was paying dividends and decided to double down on the success. He came up with the idea of putting an event together to give the community a chance to not only tell their story to their elected State representatives, but to show it as well.

On the show side, we had a drone flying display on the lawn courtesy of Werner von Stein from the SF Drone School. Other items on display included the DJI product line, the Yamaha RMAX and a handful of other service providers and drone-related businesses. On the tell side, there was a full scheduled of meetings for four diverse groups representing the spectrum of drone stakeholders sharing their concerns with the goal of protecting the viability of our favorite technology. We had folks like Leonard Ligon (UTM), Chad Partridge, 2D3 Sensing, Jon Resnick, DJI and Jesse Kallman from Airware. Also in attendance were representatives from Amazon, Yamaha, as well as students from the various Universities’ of California.

What I saw today were people sharing insights gained from experience on ways to make it easier for all involved to foster a better understanding of the realities of unmanned technology. I believe DJI’s Jon Resnick put it best, [my company wants to educate our customers on how to safely use our products for work and play, and a patchwork of laws would only make it harder to effectively educate those end-users.] I have to agree; it would be a daunting task for a well-intentioned company to interpret, capture and then effectively disseminate information about a myriad of laws spurred by the concerns of the electorate from around the country.

Today was a day where those of us who know the promise of drone first hand came together and without speaking only through the business plan shed light on the actual potential. Not so much on the canned goods (implied facts and figures) that are obscure and nebulous, but more about applications and what they mean to the rest of the State’s almost 39 million people in the terms of jobs, small business and efficiency that can help keep California competitive in the world economy.