The National Council on Public Safety UAS

By Charles L. Werner

Chair, National Council on Public Safety UAS

In early 2017, public safety had an awakening of the value that unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) brings to enhance the safety and effectiveness of emergency operations.  This of course, resulted after the changes and more realistic FAA regulations in 2017 which previously were much too restrictive. By the end of the 2017 Hurricane Season, UAS had demonstrated the undeniable value of public safety’s use of UAS. And even as public safety agencies were moving toward an increasing adoption of UAS, there was little information about what a program should entail, where to find policies and training information. Organizations were all repeating the same process and duplicating effort to learn and implement UAS programs. For this reason, the National Council on Public Safety UAS (publicsafetyUAS.org) was organized and in less than two weeks, more than 30 national public safety organizations were on board.

The mission of this National Council is to advance the use of UAS by public safety through collaboration, sharing of lessons learned, best practices, policies/procedures, training information and more and have them available on the National Council’s website (publicsafetyUAS.org). Presently, information is posted from local, state and federal agencies and the United Kingdom.

This Intent of this article is to solicit information, policies/procedures, links to UAS video footage of public safety missions, lessons learned, etc., that can be posted on the National Council’s website. Additionally, information of counter UAS (C-UAS) information is equally important for public safety to know about the emerging counter technologies and the related laws and regulations on their use.

Please send information to the National Council on Public Safety UAS to charleslwerner@gmail.com