Valued consultants
After realizing the process where a government entity has to
sponsor a COA for any legitimate UAS/Drone operations I was looking for sources
to help Dr. Jiri Hulcr from the University of Florida to fund his research on
the Laurel wilt disease spread by the ambrosia beetle in the everglades and
avocado orchards. I discovered that the Florida avocado Growers Association has
lots of money and they turned me onto the National Parks Service and they are
doing all kinds of research and collecting all kinds of data. Then I found out
that they know nothing about Dr. Jiri Hulcr so I made an e-mail introduction to
Dr. Jiri Hulcr. In order for Dr. Jiri Hulcr to obtain a COA and obtain funding
we are going to have to convince the National Parks Service and possibly the
Florida Avocado Growers Association the benefits collecting data with UAS/Drone
technology. The data pertaining to cost for technology, pilot and sensors is a
huge appeal for the use of UAS for these type of operations.
Finding panthers
I connected George Sigler from Sky Warrior Inc. and
Ryan English of Skymotion Media to talk about George’s desires to incorporate
UAS training with his courses for basic FAA ground school where he has been
training navy pilots and NFOs since the end of Vietnam. He has a huge database
of NFOs who hold their civilian pilots license but they won’t qualify for their
commercial pilot’s license due less than perfect eyesight but they won’t have
any problem flying a UAS/Drone. Then George started talking about how he gets
requests to fly in the Everglades by the Florida Department of Fish and
Wildlife and different colleges and universities. Then he started talking about
one of his jobs is to track panthers in the everglades. They have radio
collars, if a cat doesn’t show movement for a period of 18 hours it is an
indicator of either the cat is dead or injured and they track young cats to put
collars on them and using tracking dogs. After growing up hunting raccoons in
Michigan I know that using a UAS/Drone with IR capabilities would be of benefit
for these types of operations and save a lot of stress on the panthers.
Good content
These applications make for interesting content for the
proposed UAS/Drone reality TV show. I am looking for similar application
pertaining to the Amphibious Predatory Migrator with alligators and pythons
crawling out of the Everglades into residential neighborhoods. I am also
looking to connect with those operators who are inspecting oil platforms in the
Gulf of Mexico.