YDQA_Remote ID

John Dickow: [00:00:00] What is the purpose of remote ID

Miriam McNabb: 2018 holiday season? When the Gatwick drone in incident happened, uh, bad actors deliberately flew drones to interrupt, uh, crude aircraft, passenger aircraft flights cost millions of dollars. They were not able to solve the problem over several days. Something like remote id, which was broadcasting where that operator was.

Could have solved the problem.

John Dickow: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Your Drone Questions Answered. I'm John Dicko here to answer any of your drone questions Today we're answering the question. When does remote ID become mandatory and could it damage the drone business or hobby? Today I have with me Miriam McNabb. She's the editor@dronelife.com.

Miriam, thank you for joining me today. [00:01:00] Always a pleasure.

Miriam McNabb: Thanks for

John Dickow: having me. Can you just tell me a little bit of what remote ID is, particularly? What is the purpose of remote id? So remote

Miriam McNabb: ID is the idea that, um, stakeholders will be able to see not only sort of where a drone is in the sky, but also connect that drone with the operator.

So, um, when you look at sort of what the f a A actually wrote, uh, in the rulemaking for remote id, they said it was for sort of law enforcement and other stakeholders. You know, if you look back at the, the very few bad incidents that have happened in the drone industry, like 2018 holiday season when the Gatwick drone in incident happened, uh, bad actors deliberately flew drones to interrupt.

Crude aircraft, passenger aircraft, flights cost millions of dollars. They were [00:02:00] not able to solve the problem over several days. Something like remote id, which was broadcasting where that operator was, could have. Solved the problem. And so, so the idea is like the license plate on your car. It's often, um, compared to that, it's not an exact, uh, comparison, but it's often compared to the license plate on your car.

If you get in a hit and run, somebody sees your car says, oh, that was Illinois plates. Um, With this number, it was a green car, and law enforcement can look on a database and see who was responsible for operating that car, or at least who the record says was responsible for operating that car.

John Dickow: Okay, so important for a couple reasons.

Primarily safety seems like a pretty big deal, right? And I know it's not so simple of when it takes effect, cuz technically it's. In effect, but it's, can you explain a little bit about what that means for people who, you know, anywhere from manufacturers [00:03:00] to just the individuals who won fly drones? When

Miriam McNabb: the rulemaking was published, there were three dates, um, referenced.

The first was the date that the rulemaking became ACT active X number of days after it was published in the federal register. The second date, uh, you know, tagged off that first one. People had a set amount of time for manufacturers to be compliant with the rule. And what that meant was that any manufacturer is developing new drones, uh, designed to be flown in the United States, had to be compliant with the remote ID rule.

And the third date is when drone operators have to be responsible for ensuring that their aircraft comply with, uh, remote id. So the, the manufacturer's date was September 16th, 2022. That was shifted slightly to, um, December before the, [00:04:00] the, uh, f a a went into compliance mode on that. But, um, operators will have to be compliant next September 16th, September 16th, 2023.

Okay, so if you have a legacy aircraft at that point, you'll wanna start checking. You know, you need to start checking with your manufacturer for, for the vast majority, you know, uh, common drones. DGI i's most, you know, common models, guido's models, uh, anything built on the TER open source platform. There are, there are different means of compliance.

For most of them, it should be sort of a firmware update. So no big

John Dickow: deal. This is in effect. Now, let's say we're at that date, uh, September 23rd. Um, could it damage the drone business or hobby?

Miriam McNabb: So those are really two very distinct questions, and I'm gonna take them, [00:05:00] uh, one by one. So first, let's talk about the drone hobby.

And, uh, you know, I've had the opportunity as a journalist to speak with, um, people at the ama, uh, and other kind of stakeholders in the recreational community and the recreational communities. Uh, really kind of close to my heart because honestly, They sort of launched the commercial drone industry. You know, they got us started.

And for the recreational, um, community remote, ID definitely, uh, presents some challenges. A lot of recreational flyers, um, are really creative. You know, they, they build their own aircraft. They trade parts. They, they develop new things. Um, And so for them, it's not really the case of sort of purchasing a traditional aircraft, uh, that just checks the box.

Yes, this is compliant. So the way that the f a A dealt with this, um, was to say that you can [00:06:00] fly in a designated recreational area. So that means, um, If you have to belong to a cbo, which is a community-based organization that flies under the FA a's safety rules, that's an organization like the ama, and then you fly at a designated area like an AMA flying field.

So, um, definitely presents some challenges for the recreational. Community, uh, on the business side, on the commercial drone business side, most of the feedback from commercial drone stakeholders about remote id, while there was definitely some pushback on the exact way that it was worded, the technologies that it adopted and did not adopt, um, And the, the sort of details of implementation for the most part, commercial drone stakeholders like the Commercial Drone Alliance, uh, [00:07:00] A U V S I, larger companies, delivery companies like Wing was agreed that remote ID was necessary.

And the reason for that is really that remote idea is sort of a foundational piece of U T M, which is, uh, unru Traffic management and it's drone integration. It's the idea that you're gonna be able to smoothly integrate the operation of commercial drones. And crude aircraft in the same airspace that at some point the stakeholders, air traffic controllers, whoever is gonna be able to look at their screen and say, yep, there's a helicopter and there's a commercial drone, and they both belong here and they're operating safely together.

And that is really critical for advanced drone operations. At scale. So right now, you know, everything [00:08:00] is pretty much, um, the drone, commercial, drone industry has a phenomenal safety record. I'm, I will stand behind that. Really. The, um, the terrible incidents of legally flying commercial drones are very, very, very, very small.

So, um, but if you say, you know, you know how many times an Amazon delivery truck goes by, By your door. Mm-hmm. If half that many times there was a commercial delivery drone in the air, that's a lot of drones. And if you say advanced operations are flight beyond visual line of sight, so Belos flight, um, And that can mean anything from it's flying right in front of you, but on the other side of your building to, I'm in California operating 12 drones on every mall, you know, shopping mall, parking lot that I own in.

[00:09:00] Massachusetts, you know, and that kind of remote operations of more automated operations of operations totally beyond visual line of sight really requires some foundational, um, technology behind it to ensure that that airspace is. Is safe and remote idea is one step towards U T M U T m's. Not one thing.

It's not a piece of software. It's a set of, you know, regulations and technologies and service providers all working together. But remote ID is one critical piece. Mm-hmm.

John Dickow: And I know it sounds like from a business perspective, it's actually a, a true effort into making your business run smoother.

Miriam McNabb: It is. And you know, when you think about it right now, you can say, oh no drones around power stations, right?

Because we're afraid that. Some bad actor will damage [00:10:00] a power station, but there are a lot of good reasons for having a drone at a power station, right? They can do maintenance, they can do inspection, they can do these things. So the important aspect is can you tell which drone belongs there and which drone doesn't belong There?

John Dickow: Yeah. Well that makes a lot of sense. Going back to the hobbyist, I mean, it almost sounded like almost sort of like the opposite news when it comes to positive and negative. Like some hobbyists may see this as a setback. Um, let's just pretend that, you know, uh, one of our, our listeners is if somebody who recently bought a drone, uh, was just looking forward to playing around with it in a park nearby, uh, is this gonna be a problem for them now?

Miriam McNabb: No. So a person who just went out and purchased a new drone, they got the latest d g I, you know, they're a content creator. They wanna learn to fly for fun. Uh, absolutely not. It's, it's not a problem for them. You know, they need to do everything that recreational flyers need to do. They need to take the trust test, they need to register their [00:11:00] drone.

If it's appropriate. They should start, you know, FAA dot. Dot gov and click on the drone slide and it tells you exactly what to do. Quick and easy. Um, and those drones are probably gonna be already compliant and it's not gonna be a big deal. Where it really is problematic for the recreational community is, uh, for those flyers who built their own drones, flu, legacy drones, um, flu sort of non.

It's, it's hard to say non-traditional when you're talking about drugs. They're so new anyway, but there are, there's a breadth of different aircraft, um, that are being flown and created and developed, uh, in that recreational community. And not all of those are gonna be necessarily easy to make compliant.

Um, so it does limit where those people can fly.

John Dickow: Okay. Well that makes a lot of sense and it eases the pain for anybody who's maybe looking forward to buying a drone soon and having fun with

Miriam McNabb: it. So Yes, absolutely. If you were just planning on, on going and [00:12:00] purchasing the newest one, this shouldn't cause you a problem.

John Dickow: Well, wonderful, wonderful. Well, we're about out of time, but I just wanted to give you another opportunity here to mention anything else that you think might have been missed in this conversation. I

Miriam McNabb: think that remote id, there's a lot of, um, discussion about privacy, about, you know, is it reasonable for somebody to know where I'm flying, uh, all the time.

And I think that there's a trade off there is, if you are a commercial drone operator, you're gonna have to be willing to sacrifice that level of a non. Anonymity in order to scale your business operations.

John Dickow: Okay, well that makes sense, and thank you for that. And thank you for joining me today. Now remember to our audience, you can submit your own drone questions at any time.

You can just submit them at Y D Q a.io. We'll do our best to get them answered for you. In the meantime, we'll see you in the sky.[00:13:00]