Two pioneers in sUAS (small drones) emergency services: Fritz developer of drones for SWAT and John developer of FEMA’s first drone program. Fritz and John talk about building these programs and walk through the use cases for tactical and strategic operations. Fritz is now the Head of Public Safety at Skydio.
In this week's episode, tactical meets strategic. We talk about the use of small drones (sUAS) to support emergency services response operations, and the benefits, as well as after actions, of real-world use cases. We also explore the future of emergency managers, first responders, and humanitarians in this increasingly popular field and what you can do right now to get your own program off the ground. Today's guest, Fritz, developed the first small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) drone program for SWAT, which is now a complex and highly effective drone program. Fritz now leads Skydio's Public Safety Program. Likewise, our host John, created FEMA's first drone disaster response program. Fritz and John highlight what drones can do for you by comparing their experiences in tactical and strategic level operations. While these uses are different, their discussion points to the numerous benefits and hurdles associated with using small drones. Ultimately, drones enhance the capacity of emergency services.
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.
Host: John Scardena (0s):
You've just entered the Disaster Tough Podcast, the place for emergency managers, first responders and humanitarians who want to get the job done. Stories, lessons and tips are provided by field experts. I'm your host to John Scardena, owner of Doberman Emergency Management and former federal emergency response official who's responded to some of the most extreme disasters. Disaster Tough is our mantra. It combines experience, training, and analytics in order to be successful at any stage within the disaster lifecycle, it means being a professional in emergency and disaster services, Doberman Emergency Management lives by this. If your organization needs to fill a gap, please contact us we can help. Contact info is in the show notes.
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Host: John Scardena (1m 55s):
Welcome back to the show everybody! It’s your Host: John Scardena, I am so excited for this week's episode! Man, you've heard me talking about drones so many times on the show because of my background with the use of drones and doing it with preliminary damage assessments. There's this random scene, let me cue this up. We might put this in post-production from, I think it's Guardians of the Galaxy to where the father goes, I'm finally not alone. That's how I feel today because I am meeting with the man, the myth, the legend Fritz who's from Skydio. He's a Skydio drone expert there for search and rescue for public safety, all this kind of stuff, because he has a background in it. He really is a pioneer in using the use of drones for tactical level response. So, all you guys out there who are in, you know, first responder capabilities are doing tactical response, damage assessments, you name it. This guy is an expert. He can talk to it for its welcome to the show.
Guest: Fritz (2m 55s):
Wow, thanks John, it's quite an intro. Very glad to be here.
Host: John Scardena (2m 60s):
Like I said, it's pretty exciting for me because you know, when you're talking about pioneering drones in agencies or in emergency services, a lot of people don't understand like what it takes to get that done and with perception behind it. Then once you implement it, that change that happens and to see all the positive changes. So maybe we can just kind of start there, how did you get into the use of drones? I understand that you were doing SWAT with drones. How did you find that capability? Then what were some of the outcomes from using drones on your side?
Guest: Fritz (3m 39s):
Yeah, so I guess I kind of became a hobbyist and got a Phantom four and started flying around and the ability to get the thing to return to home. Every time I really started to see how valuable that would be for just public safety use cases in general, being a guy, I spent five years on SWAT obviously some entry time as well as some sniper time. Really when I saw drones, I was wasn't on SWAT at the time, but I thought, wow, this is great to be able to send in. You know, we were doing ground-based robots and other solutions where you want to see what's going on in their near, before you send people, but having a drone that could not get caught on the steps and just fly right in and clear the whole house without putting people in harm's way was like pretty intuitive, a no-brainer, you know.
Obviously, I wasn't the first to think of that, but that's really where my mind first started going with drones and I would get little FPV drones and buy them for like a hundred bucks and fly them all around the investigations and blow paper off desks and getting everybody excited about it. Wouldn't it be awesome if we had these at Chula Vista, I worked at Chula Vista Police Department. A buddy of mine, Vern Sully, who's now at Axon, after he retired working with Axon Air, he started the drone program and I kind of was looking from the sidelines. Then when I promoted the captain and I got the opportunity to take over the team, we were swapping around collateral duties. He was like, yeah, sure, great. We really hadn't got into the operational aspect of Chula Vista yet.
So, when I came on, that was my first role. It's just, let's get these things up, let's get them in the air. Let's show start showing the value to the operators because, you know, until you see it you don't really realize the value that they get. Then once you have it, you just don't want to do anything without them.
Host: John Scardena (5m 27s):
It's kind of like for me. First of all, blown paper off the table. I remember that when we got the drone, I was in a joint field office in Hurricane Harvey and I was so excited to use it. I put the drone in the room and took off no experience whatsoever and immediately blew all the paper off everybody's desk and flew it right into some blue lines. Like the other deck cables that were hanging down from the ceiling. I was like, oh so there was a learning curve, but that learning curve was what, five minutes.
I mean, it's amazing what drone capabilities can do now. For my end, same thing kind of happened. We knew we knew we had a one-use case that we wanted to use it for. As soon as you do it, you're like there's a hundred other use cases that you can put this for a big one, saving resources and time. Another one is just not putting people in harm's way, right? I mean, you're talking and the ceiling, you know, compared to a robot or compared to a manned helicopter. You know, a small UAS drone is a game changer.
Like you said, you could just put it right in the house and start seeing capabilities. The way I want to go through the discussion today, I liked what Skydio had on your website. Now this isn't a big ad. I'm not an official sponsor, I just like what you guys have. So, I have to say that for my audience, but there were four capabilities for this drone that I liked a lot. The reason why I'm excited to endorse it is because, you know, it's an American made drone assembled here, the whole deal. For us agencies that’s the hot topic right now and it seems like an amazing drone.
The four topics I thought we could kind of just run down today, one was situational awareness, two search and rescue, which you highlighted three hostile scene and de-escalation and for crime and accident use cases. So just like backing up situational awareness, can you talk about it? Remember we have a lot of emergency managers on here. First responders, humanitarians, military personnel who've never used a drone before they see it as a hobbyist thing. So, my job today is to have an expert on here to say, Hey, this is why you need this. This will help out our field a lot. So, from the perspective of situational awareness, talk to us about what you have found drones can do.
Guest: Fritz (8m 19s):
Yeah. I mean, you hit on the four, probably the biggest, most common use cases for public safety, emergency management. You know, a little bit about my history. I was on the type three incident management, all hazards, incident management team at Chula Vista was a regional source. I was the Ops Section Chief. You know, you do a lot of decision-making at a remote location, and you're delegating a lot of activity out with units in the field and having a situational awareness of what's going on out there of whether it's at EOC or an incident command post or whatever, is huge. So, on major incidents get downlinks from helicopters and once you have that, you're like, I want that on every incident, big and small.
That's what drones let you have is that eyes on the situation so that the decision makers aren't making the decision based on radio chatter or third hand information, they get the context of video. We all know, and that led me into the ideas related to drones as first responder. Then specific to Skydio that's the goal is to get that capability out into the field broadly and onto the most what we think is a routine incident that you wouldn't be using a manned aircraft for that quickly turn and turn deadly, and we all know how those situations can happen. So, to have a drone is the foundation of autonomy, easy to fly and get it in the air.
It's hard to crash. It's as you said, American made NDA compliance, grant money can buy it and get these things out into the hands of people that don't necessarily have a hundred flight hours on the sticks, right? That you feel confident flying in obstacle rich environments and flying below the tree line, looking into windows and doing all these things that these drones can do, and to have a drone to help you do that with the autonomy that comes with Skydio platform, I think is huge. Like I mentioned, my first drone would just return to home feature and then hover in place. The first drone that Chula Vista got was a gift from SDG. You literally kill yourself without thinking, because it wouldn't have to have skill to make it hover in place.
Once that hover in place became, it’s just a tool for the masses and that's what the next level of autonomy will do is doing, is making people who are they're professional cops and firefighters. They're not professional drone pilots, but they want to use it in their work. So, you know, that's the foundation is to make it, democratize this asset and make it something we can use more often on a daily basis, early in the incident and get the vantage of these big resources on the big stuff down to the most time-sensitive smaller incident so they don't grow into big ones.
Host: John Scardena (11m 8s):
Yeah. I mean, I think we said it last week on our show, or two weeks ago with Pete gainer, for those who don’t know he was the interim head of DHS and he was head of FEMA just on here two weeks ago. He said, you know all disasters are local right. We've heard that before. He mentioned that and that's true. All disasters hit hardest local because it takes a lot of resources in a catastrophic event to know what's going on in the field, talk about the hover in place capability. Now, if somebody's listening to that, they're like, what does that even mean for me? Well, we even played with the idea of tethering like cell connections or radio connections too, you know, hard hit, okay. Put five drones up with a tether on there. So, we have continual power and now you have connectivity over mountain ranges.
We've talked about that. We've talked about all these different capabilities. We used drones for herd migration when volcanoes went out so putting in the right place to help the cattle go in a different direction from the volcanic eruption, that was a big deal. Right. To have that situational awareness of agriculture and how these things are interacting with the environment, let alone people, right. Then see okay, we have a potential for a mudslide here because it's been raining heavily for the last four or five days it's led up. Okay. Do we want to send out resources, see if there's going to be a mudslide and they get hit by it on their way out there.
No, let's put up a drone out there right, and so it expands your sphere of influence to a huge range, right. To be able to see that in real time, like you said, as soon as you see it, it clears up so many issues. Another use case I just thought of, going back to the preliminary damage assessments, wildfires. So, most drones that are used on the federal level are like the Reaper drone is, you know, high altitude, you know, infrared, right?
Host: John Scardena (13m 22s):
So, we have a good understanding of where the fire is, but it's not really great for situational awareness of the ground level because that image can be completely whited out from height, drones, only small drones, lower, low level 2 to 400, 1200 feet. If you have an SGI, Koa can see fine detail and say, okay, like what the wind and everything going, the firefighters is actually behind the line of fire. So, like again, situational awareness there. Right, talk about a huge capability. You talked about SWAT, remind me, does SWAT specifically deal with crowd control, right. With crowd control, drones have a capability there too, right. Of just not putting your guys in harms way, like just having that situational awareness for crowds.
Guest: Fritz (14m 21s):
Yeah, SWAT, it kind of depends on the agency. Most agencies move to a, sort of a mobile field force (MFF) professional crowd control training, which is different than you might get from special weapons and tactics. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap and you'll see resources, both resources at major events, depending on what's going on. But in terms of using drones for crowd control or for just situational awareness during large crowd events, you know, in the old days, quote unquote, you'd have to get to a position to be able to see the crowd right and you can't do that. If you're standing on the ground at the same level, so you had people getting up on rooftops and stuff, and just being able to like, see what's going on, because if someone's getting hurt in the center of a crowd, how are you going to see that?
If you're on the outside edge, look at the standing ground level. If there's threats to the crowd where they may be approaching cars, and we've seen what has happened with cars running into crowds. So, I know there's concern from crowds doing lawful protests that drones are there to like spy on them or surveil him. But every public safety ADC I talked to, is there's a responsibility. They have to protect that crowd and you can't do it just by reacting to what's going on. You have to get to a position where you can see the crowd, you can see what's going on. You can see approaching threats. You can see areas where the crowd is heading so you can stop traffic and cordon off any kind of incoming threats to them.
So, you'd be irresponsible really not to have sort of an Overwatch position on these crowds. You owe it to the crowd to understand you're responsible for protecting them. So, you've got to understand what's happening and be able to manage resources. It's kind of a team effort, much like it'd be hard for a coach to know what going on without sort of game day film that top down looks at this team and handles the situation. That's the same with crowd control.
Host: John Scardena (16m 22s):
I like that. Let's talk about the elephant in the room because I'm pretty passionate about this that I think, yeah like I said, passionate. I think people are pretty stupid when they think about the privacy of drones and understanding people in public spaces, because you have, I'm not even talking about a protest, let's talk about concert. Let's talk about any kind of open venue. You have 400,000 people taking live video of everything around them. You have 50 satellites up in the air, just you know, Google earth, whatever you will as seeing what's going on. It's public space. Anyways, you have film crews there, you have news. You have everybody else, any kind of public event.
There is so much data being collected on people anyways, that when somebody says like, oh my gosh, the drones are spying on people. Actually, you're spying on yourself. You're taking your camera over everybody so I don't get it. I guess there's real concerns there, but I think they're kind of just stupid to be honest, but I don’t know. So, what is your take on that?
Guest: Fritz (17m 32s):
I mean, I get that sentiment for sure. I do feel as an ex-cop working for the government, we do have a responsibility to be transparent. You know, the data that the government gets, isn't like the data that citizens or private sector gets, you know there's a fear that there's an incremental illness about things that we know, and that’s reality. So, we do need to be certainly respectful those fears, even though I think like you say some of it's because of the unknown of what drones are, it's a new, fascinating technology. There's a lot of movies that show drones, it's sort of true you know, like the drones being equipped with weapons and being used to like prevent the hero from escaping, right. So, I definitely get that sentiment.
I think when the public is exposed to what drones do and how they do it every time I see they're very supportive. As long as we in the law enforcement, public safety, emergency management remain transparent, use it in the right way. Definitely share the successes so that if people say we don't want drones, they know at what costs that comes, that is a huge win for the drone industry. So, I think transparency through and through is, you know, we have responsibility to protect people's privacy, but we also have a responsibility to show how these things are being used to save lives.
Host: John Scardena (19m 2s):
I appreciate that answer a lot because usually, like I said, I'm a hard liner on I'm like, come on. But I think you're right. As government bodies, there has to be transparency. There has to be data acquisition and protection and all of that goes into play and as it should. However, in a public space it's already being collected, you know, and that's my call. I love how you said people always like it. I had this cool story where I think I shared it before on the podcast. So, it's kind of a repeat for some of the people listening. But the first time we were using drones to do preliminary damage assessments in a wildfire, I was standing on one side of our vehicle with our spotter and I could see in the drone, an individual walking up behind kind of like sneaking, walking up behind the vehicle. I was like he knows I can see him right. But while I was watching this, I said, Hey, you know, Kyle, just letting you know, some guys walking up behind us and he's like, okay. So, I went over to talk to him and the first thing is, what are you guys doing? He thought we were a private sector, he thought we were just trying to take cool images or whatever. But as soon as we said, Hey, we're trying to figure out how many homes are damaged as fast as we can, to be able to help you out, the guy's attitude flipped immediately. I'm like, that's really what it comes down to. It comes down to the survivors and helping out survivors as fast as humanly possible.
I'm not one of the guys who thinks drones are the only thing we should be doing, but it is a tool that allows us to move into that space to help out people faster and that's the mindset. That's the culture cultural shift I want to see happen. Emergency management is like how to help out survivors fastest, responsibly, but fastest drones by far right now are that cutting-edge technology that shows data impacting decision-making.
Guest: Fritz (21m 3s):
It's a great story. I mean, that's an instant transparency, right? It's not a tool to be used to control you, or it's an asset used for your benefit, the community's benefit and as long as they see it as their asset, then they embrace it and run with it.
Host: John Scardena (21m 16s):
I love that the community asset, right. Drones are a community asset for life saving life, sustaining an emergency response. Yeah, no question. So, I admittedly I do not have a lot of search and rescue experience. My search and rescue experience are limited to a bunch of training and in large scale disasters, as a GIS guy, I would point search and rescue operators in the right direction saying, Hey, this is going to flood. This levee is going to go. We think this dam is going to give, you know, wherever. So, I would point, so can you kind of share us your experiences and kind of understand, help us understand, like how drones’ impact specifically search and rescue. You talked about clearing facilities, what else can it do for you?
Guest: Fritz (22m 7s):
So, yeah, and I'll admit, I got a ton of search and rescue experience as a cop over 27 years, right? Looking for lost kids and walk away adults and Alzheimer's patients. This is a relatively urban environment so I don't get a lot of the wide-open field search and rescue stuff. I do talk to agencies daily who do this quite a bit, right? A lot of rural areas across the country, it's a huge tool. Obviously a thermal is a great way to pick up heat signatures. So that's a needed aspect for any search and rescue tool. Certainly, the sooner you get something up in when it's, you know, a walkaway adult or a missing child, the better, right. It's less far they can get from the point of last scene.
Just in general, it's just hard to see anything from the ground level. Typically if you don't have a man helicopter with a really robust FLIR system available, and most agencies don't have those at a moment's notice, you know, your drone, that's the drone that's in the trunk, you throw it up right away and do as much as you can in terms of the searching fields and eliminating areas that you don't need to hand search or walkthrough so you can concentrate on those most likely areas. I know the, the civil air patrol, which is a huge search and rescue, you know civilian arm of the air force, they've recently purchased, you know, scores of Skydio X twos to be delivered that have a thermal precisely because they're a great drone for a very large team that you can't, you know, all these people spend hours and hours and hours of being drone experts.
Guest: Fritz (23m 50s):
So, it's a great tool to have quickly throw it up. and then not only be able to see what's high above, but be able to navigate down below the canopy, right? There’re two types of drones in a search and rescue situation. Here's your high up Overwatch drone that looks over a broad swath of areas and then there's drones that can kind of go where humans can't go on foot, that's invisible from above, right. You know, along riverbanks that are tree-lined covered, you have your Overwatch drone. You notice that there's no heat signatures in the center of the water, body water or the river, but you don't know what's along the banks. Right? So, you can wait for a team that might jump in a boat and sail down that river and look to the sides, or you get one person out with a drone fly low along the river, looking along the banks clearing that in the first 10 or 15 minutes, time's not on your side.
So, having something that's in the trunk of pretty much every first responder on the fire truck or whatever that can do both be comfortable in both environments that Overwatch and close to the ground or an obstacle rich environment is your perfect layered approach to search and rescue as it relates to using drones. Certainly, having the sensors on there, that's going to be able to see what you need to see, right? A thermal sensor that can heat see heat signatures, and then your cameras, high quality cameras that we can see where we need to see basically a drone is just putting a subject matter expert somewhere they can't otherwise be. It's kind of an avatar for a decision decision-maker search and rescue or just the use cases and the environments where they add values unlimited.
Host: John Scardena (25m 26s):
That's awesome. You said a word that struck a chord with me in a very good way. When I go out and I do presentations, I often get requests to talk about my experiences in the field. I remind the audience constantly that the number one problem we have in emergency services is time. Time changes everything. It's relentless, obviously, but the more time it takes to do something, the more problems you're going to have, as soon as you get behind the ball, you're never going to get in front of it. I've seen it way too many times. You know, again, just like I said, a big ad for drones and trying to get people to change their cultural mindset because like hard to get to places, check quickly, going over an area, check one thing that's where drones can do that the naked eye can't do is point cloud. I was a big fan of doing point cloud, you know, the shape, Hey, we want to be able to find a body. Well, we found that the shape of an arm in the field, right. We can, we have millions of points and it's now we're using artificial intelligence to scan over that. And so clearing banks looking for the heat signature, you're now doing multiple that the naked eye just can't do. Even if you're looking at that Riverbed, right. Infrared currencies, there's something over there. Human eye might not be able to see it. Right. Especially if it's buried on a surface level and that's a big deal for catastrophic level to have buildings that have been thrashed right. So, these down buildings and trying to get into places where we haven't showed up yet. So huge use cases there. Okay. So, another one that admittedly, I stay away from as much as possible. In fact, I don't get on this too much on the show, but I did way more manmade stuff in DC than I ever want to talk about. However, the hostile and hostile scenes in de-escalation, talk to us about drones and hostile scenes in de-escalation.
Guest: Fritz (27m 39s):
Well, I'll touch a little bit on your time thing as well with the de-escalation, because you know the thing I'm probably most known for is the Jonas first responder use case at Chula Vista police department that we had done through the ICP where essentially, you've got drones nested on rooftops within the city. And as soon as the call comes in, they respond the drone to that location, getting ahead of ground units. And that's something Chula Vista police is still doing to this day. There are over 6,000 missions they are doing, you know, pretty much every day, all day. Literally hundreds of use cases where they're on the scene, whether it's a walkaway child or a robbery that just occurred, or people fighting in the street or a car accident or anything you want to send emergency responders to get the drone there first, before people were in harm's way and get someone who's an experienced incident manager on scene.
I think from your audience, they understand, you know a lot of times the experienced ICS come well into the incident after a lot of the first responders are doing as best they can in the first moments. The idea of getting an incident commander as the first responder, some experience the decision-maker who's not in harm's way, who basically essentially arrives as a drone and basically an avatar for their decision-making capability to see the situation. Then, guide units in is like the ultimate in terms of the shortcut and time and that's kind of what your example is just to have to get a jumpstart on time and see the future, whether that's indoor case where you want to send a drone in before people, it totally changes the paradigm.
Guest: Fritz (29m 20s):
So, I may have gone on a little tangent there, but your time thing kind of made me think of that. That's cool. Then the other aspect that you had mentioned was the de-escalation. Again, that a lot of times officers or emergency management, fire, they rush into a situation because they can't sit and wait and plan, right? They don't have enough information. People might be in harm's way while they're waiting. So, they rush into the situation as necessary. Then they got to figure it out once they get there. So, any opportunity to slow them down and say, look, we're on scene, I've got a drone. It's not in harm's way. I can see what's happening if anything changes, I'll let you know, but it's perfectly safe right now to stage, wait for less lethal, wait for a canine, wait for the right resources with a fire and then not rush in, and then not be forced to be in a situation where you're not prepared.
That is a very effective tool to deescalate, right and getting a drone into a room where a person may be holed up. Once you send the drone in either you find out he's in there and you don't have to go in, you know, right where they are, or you find out it's clear and essentially means you don't have to go into either way. It just kind of changes the whole dynamic. You're stacked up on the store about to go in. Then once you send it a drone, it just changes the whole dynamic because you know whether there's threat or not. So, it's kind of just a paradigm shift really. So, in de-escalation, that's all about that is bringing the right tools, the right decisions, the right problem-solving methods to the situation so that you're not hitting every problem with the hammer, right. Not everything's a nail, but in historically we just respond and then kind of make it up as we get on the scene right, do the best we can.
Host: John Scardena (31m 12s):
That's so true. That's all true, a hundred percent. I think of like make it up on the scene, right? So real-world application on my end, dealing with active assailant, active shooter events, right. You know, statistically, as soon as first responders are in a facility, active shooters, change their motive from finding innocence to either killing themselves or addressing the first responders. It's like 99.9% of the time. As soon as we get people in their assets in there those things change.
I do wonder what the capability of having a law enforcement drone specifically going into an area just for sensory overload to psychologically broken terrorists or active shooters, obviously the sound of the drone, the location of the drone makes them shift just enough to where people’s lives could be saved or the reminder to potential survivor’s help is on the way, whatever. There could be lots of different use cases for helping, not just the survivor, but preventing the loss of life of a responder who was going in there and has address a threat who is extreme right. I think about that a lot because I had to deal with that a lot. You know, at Doberman, we teach an active shooter course and we go through, we're like a data backed company. Like we're really focused on data. So, when we do our active shooter course, it's like two hours of just use case after use case. We're just drilling it into people's head like it doesn't mean just run, hide, fight, right, it means freaking barricade and what the difference of barricade means versus, you know, the fighting and what fighting means. It means like stopping the threat or the threat will hurt you. Right? And how fast those scenes are. You talked about time, we talked about time. Most active shooters are 10 minutes or under.
So, you trying to figure out where, the person is trying to figure out, you know, your other first responders are showing up on scene, everybody's showing up on scene. You guys put battery in, put a drone in the back and shove it into the building, figure out where this thing is at as fast as humanly possible even for clearing rooms, what is that diamond formation teams. So, you have diamond formation versus drone. Okay. For living people, drone. I don't know it sounds like there's a lot of use cases there as well.
Guest: Fritz (34m 1s):
Yeah, so I'll talk broadly because you're hitting awesome, a lot of points and the work you're doing there is so critical. So, I'll talk over you, then I'll talk specific to Skydio because we have a tool, I think that really can help in these kinds of situations. Hopefully it never gets used for it right, because it never happens. Again, but we know that we know the answer there, and there's a couple of really big paradigm shifts that where everything just kind of turned on its head like 9/11, right. We used to hijack, or everybody said, Hey, if you get hijacked, just sit and cooperate right. That totally changed in a heartbeat within, from the moment that first plane crashed in the tower to flight 93, right? That's no longer what we do. We fight back, right? The big paradigm shift, as you well know Columbine where you can't just sit and set up a perimeter, the people in there aren't there to negotiate. They're there to slaughter like your Joe citizen in the neighborhood, got it before the police officers did because we're trained a certain way. When it was hard for us to change our paradigm, and once we understood that difference, then our change training changed. We began to learn with that incident, the LA shootout, that we can't wait an hour for a special weapons and tactics and these really effective tools that require a lot of training and a lot of expertise and money. We have to push these capabilities to the frontline. They got to be there on the first second. So now you have officers with AR solutions, right?
So, they have active guns. I'm exterior accurate guns that can fight off serious threats immediately. We have an active shooter training, which you talked about where it's, you know, don't sit and wait, go in. That's what you're paid for, trained to reduce the risk, but going to have to take risks because they're innocent lives at stake and drones are part of that, right? The drone is first responder is that type of use case of getting the drones there. First, whether it's going to go indoors first or on scene first is going to add that value of service and intelligence and making those people that have to put their lives at risk do so with a little more knowledge and intelligence, and then have the tools there, right?
Guest: Fritz (36m 2s):
That's a lot of what we talk about Skydio is, you know, the drones that are back at the station are no good to you in those situations, right? It's got the drone in your trunk is better than the best drone back that the station is what you have with you, have the ones that people are comfortable with flying. You can train them, you're comfortable with giving them to them and they're easy enough to fly where you can fly them in these types of difficult environments. The Skydio too, it's the first drone out. It's not an expensive option, a lot of public safety has it and it's this type of situation where it really could add value because you can get it up in a minute or two. You can just fly it in an obstacle. Richard Meyer with no skill whatsoever.
The first time someone's got their sticks on it, they can fly this thing through a mall, a business park, a school. You can imagine a stack of four or five people, maybe the person in the last part of the stack just throws the drone up front and it's running point around these corners clearing the area because you don't have time. You have people bleeding out, you have victims that you have to assess and you've got large areas that you need to clear and secure and to be able to do that where a person's head, isn't the first thing around the corner, but a drone that's there and that's going to take time to get it up. But you know, these clearing these business parks takes a while after an active shooter and you got to do it safely because you never know.
Host: John Scardena (37m 22s):
We took forever to clear the Navy yard shooting. A beast of burden and that after action and you had every federal and state agency dress, not dressed in uniform, had the badge not have that, every buddy was there, you have a ton of people. Here's a really sad statistic, again, the drones are kind of a tangent, but you know, the Parkland shooting officer, the, the one who waited outside people give them a lot of crap. People don't understand that 30% to 40% of the officers, single officers that show up on scene die in an active shooter, not injured, not whatever, die because they have no backup.
When you're talking over a third, that's a big deal. You want to use, you want to come in with a lot of force and what I mean by that is an overwhelmingly amount of what I call sensory overload for the threat. So, they don't know what's going on, which causes them to pause, which causes us to be able to end the situation. Again, a drone is the force multiplier, even for a single officer who's on scene, distraction, distraction, distraction, sensory overload. Let me take care of this. See it, the other one, which is like a huge tangent Navy yard shooting, the officer who lost their life unfortunately they heard the sound. You could see them like was that, was that the sound of a gun? They holstered their weapon again and when they holstered their weapon, the active shooter came around the corner and killed them. Like I said, that has really nothing to do with drones, but I'm super passionate about that because like we hope active shooter training is the most worthless training people ever get, but if they do get it, it could save their lives. Now we're talking about it in a cool new way that I've never really thought about before, to be honest is the use of technologies as a force multiplier for first responders. As a guy who deals with catastrophic disaster on a large scale, hurricanes wildfires, that kind of stuff, it's kind of amazing to have somebody who's an expert in tactics to be able to say like all disasters are local, all disasters fail at the tactics and give you every resource you need to be successful. We kind of hit a lot on the crime and accident side of the house. So just like looking, is there anything else that you think that could help out somebody, like I said, a first responder, emergency manager who's listening to this, who's now hopefully on board with the idea of drones, what would you say to them for accident and a crime scene awareness for drones?
Guest: Fritz (40m 18s):
That's another thing about data, that data that you just can't get any other way. It's not necessarily a time-sensitive one, but there's a safety component specifically to accident reconstruction, which wasn't something I did as a police officer at all would never work traffic, but certainly that's a lot. I talked to a lot of people doing that, certainly now with our 3d scan solution coming out from Skydio where it's a data capture tool where it flies around in a 3d environment, capturing evidence, photos, and something you can upload into a photogrammetry tool and makes great evidence to take measurements. It's a solution for your court and an investigative tool. To do this, instead of shutting down a roadway for four hours with a team of five people and flyers everywhere to be able to do it in 30 minutes, you know?
So, you're not out in the roadway that drones out in the roadway, collecting that. I mean, that's a use case that's out there. It's pretty obvious, it's a unique tool that Skydio has, but accident reconstruction in general is just a way to really good police work, collect the evidence in a way that's useful that you understand what happened and record the incident in a way that's manageable. It's got to go from a 2d sketch by hand, to a real time 3d model and have it be done by one person, regardless who is not an expert in anything other than just the workflow. I mean, what an amazing tool.
Host: John Scardena (41m 51s):
Okay. So, you shared tactics side, I'll share a strategic side, federal side. It made me think of a debris pile estimation. At the debris pile collection sites, they bring these trucks, it depends on the state. Each state is different I'll say that. But what happens a lot of times is the trucks back in and they fill up and the backseat. What happens is it creates a donut effect where as they're all backing in, there's actually a giant hole in the middle of this debris pile. You know, we're talking about 80 feet up by 125 feet wide.
What the state sometimes does in a disaster is by contract. They will look at their circumference and multiply it by the height and figuring out their dome and they will charge for that. Essentially, they're charging for a giant hole in the middle. Well, if you're trying to do accident reconstruction. What I did with the drone is I went over to a couple of these giant doughnuts and I saved the federal government, like $6 million in 20 minutes by showing that they were paying for a giant hole in the middle. My counterparts, it was just like, wait, what I was like, why aren't you calling it a toy the other day, a $6 million recovery of just waste.
Now I'm sure the construction company was pissed, but at the same time, it cuts down on freight, fraud, waste and abuse, and it is tax dollars, right? We are government agencies. So, like a big one there and it goes back to that earlier point about the point cloud and point people don't really understand what the point cloud is. Basically, what you're talking about is, if I take a picture and, you know, traditionally there's a 2d image of my picture, right? What you're talking about, it's amazing thing and I think Skydio paired up with it's as Reese product, the shoot drone deploy, that's what it is. Yeah.
For those listeners, it's as if I can put my mouse on this mic and start spinning the mic and I considered 360 degrees up, down, left, right and you're able to get a true picture. Another one on the, big scale stuff. Obviously most of my experiences with floods and that kind of stuff, let's say it was a hazmat incident we do with floods where the water actually went right by. But we have to worry about hazmat unintentional or intentional. If it happened in a large city, where is all that material, are you really going to send in first responders who could be impacted by that by accidentally touching something? Then no, like you got to figure out what's going on in the large-scale incident. You know, whether outfitting the drone with infrared or chemical detection capabilities. Now you're getting a 3d image of literally where every single particle is, and it's a huge game changer. So, I'm glad we ended up talking about it.
Guest: Fritz (44m 59s):
6 million bucks, there's a lot to brag about. There's quite a bit of ROI there, so.
Host: John Scardena (45m 4s):
Oh, I know. Tell me about it and that was one mission. Another mission is a brag moment, the Southern California wildfires. First time, this is why drones are now SOP and on all federal responses and why civil air patrol was contracted by FEMA. I went out there, I was pilot and command, by the way, I hate that term. We got it, that's a term we need to change and that's a bit much for drone pilot, whatever. But I was the pilot in command and I had my spotter. We had three giant GIS people back at the JFL and I went out there and we found 33, sorry we found 31 more homes than a 33-person ground crew PDA team and we did it in a third amount of time. We did that at almost no cost. We actually recovered eight homes that the Reaper drone thought had been destroyed because it cannot white out image. You're talking about two people versus 33 people in the field when they were out there for three or four days, we were out there for one day and we fed it back to the JFK and almost real time, they were able to analyze the data. We were able to get the state, their federal decoration faster because we were able to prove the economic loss faster. We actually worked really well with the ground crews because they were able to get into areas.
We were looking at areas, but when they got blocked, they were like, Hey, can you just fly your drone over here? Yeah, sure no problem. We'd be there in an hour. Pack up, go over open, flew over an entire neighborhood, found more homes and the other part of that was wildfires. If you're on the east coast, you might not know these wildfires burned left to right. Or sorry, top-down not left to right. Your home can look perfectly fine from the outside, but the entire inside is gutted because it, Amber burned right through the middle of your home. So that's the other reason why we were able to find so many. So just like it's a wonderful tool. It doesn't replace PDA teams. That ground truth information that you're getting is great.
But I mean, talk about cost saving. You multiply that hundreds of thousands of disasters that we go through globally a year, or the 300 active disasters that we're dealing with right now. Administrator Criswell, you're going be on the show here soon. We applaud you for stepping into FEMA. Now 300 disasters are currently under her belt. So, I mean, it's just crazy stuff that we're talking about here. I can talk about drones forever, but yeah.
Guest: Fritz (47m 46s):
No, that's huge. That experience is invaluable, and once you guys are on scene, adding that kind of value to people who are decision makers and responsible for doing it quickly, efficiently, safely, they don't do it any other way, right and that's a lot of what we're trying to do is just let people know this tool is out there. If you don't have it, ask for it and get it once you have it, it speaks for itself.
Host: John Scardena (48m 11s):
It's kind of fun to talk about both sides of this house right now, because Skydio is obviously a for-profit drone company has a really good product. By the way, again, not official, but just my own personal feelings on it. But it sounds like you're making all the right moves by saying, Hey, let's address all these different issues, whether it's situational awareness, threat detection, de-escalation crime, and accident scenes, like in terms of a for-profit company, you're very socially conscious and you're trying to do something. What I would, it's a weird word, now I would say righteous, it's a righteous endeavor to be able to impact this space.
I applaud you Fritz, who, by the way, before we started recording everybody, I realized that Fritz is the prince of drones because he just has this one name. It's not, you know, Fritz O'Brien or whatever, it's Fritz. So soon is going to be a drone civil it's going to be in a quad copter is going to be a symbol. So also, you're not allowed to sit next to him and award ceremonies, but Fritz, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for talking to us about Skydio’s capabilities. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. I've been watching you guys from afar and I think you're doing really great things there. So just thanks again for time talking on the show and talking about tactics versus strategies and drone space. Thanks again.
Guest: Fritz (49m 36s):
No, John appreciate being on here. I mean your list of who you've had on as the who to be included in that is a great honor. And it's really great to talk with you. The work you're doing is amazing. We're glad to be on the same path with you guys.
Host: John Scardena (49m 50s):
Yeah, absolutely. So maybe we can have you back on in the future, again, as a new capabilities rollout, and again, applaud you and both Skydio on the work you're doing. For all those listeners who learned something today, you should have learned something today because we talked about a lot of really great things. We got to say it, we say it every week, it's kind of monotonous, but we're going to say you got to give us that five-star rating and subscribe. If you liked it, you got to send us a comment. I say this, I bring this up every single week. Thank you so much for those emails to info@dobermanemg.com. I always put it out there, but I really put it out there for if you want to work with Doberman Emergency Management. However, if you want to talk to Fritz, if you have questions about using drones, or you want to talk about Skydio, we'll do them a favor. We'll put Skydio’s link in our show notes, so you can check it out there. But you can also put your question, put your comment out on social media so he can see it immediately so we can start addressing some of these ideas. Change your culture, use drones. It's an amazing tool as you heard for the last 50 minutes or so on our show. We'll see you back next week.