Adam Cockerill decided that becoming a drone pilot was the perfect the way to escape the daily grind of corporate life. So he quit his job as a marketing guy at an education technology company in the Camen Islands and founded AirVu, a company that provides aerial photography and other stuff via drones. But he hit a snag when the company applied for a drone license.
Regulators asked him to put together what’s called an aviation standard operations manual, and that’s not something he could do.
So Cockerill called on SkyWard, a Portland, Oregon-based company that helps drone operators navigate local regulations. With SkyWard’s help, AirVu finally secured a license in the Camen Islands, and now, Cockerill says, the company may expand throughout the Carribean.
In addition to helping customers determine what they need to do in order to follow laws, Skyward offers mobile apps and other software for logging flights, tracking pilot certifications, and managing other information that regulators and insurance companies require. “It’s essential,” Cockerill says. “I honestly don’t know how other operators are managing—if they’re managing—without a software system.”
But eventually, Skyward wants to automate the entire compliance process. Not only would you be notified if you’re flying your drone too close to an occupied airspace, but you’d actively be prevented from doing it—making it much harder to accidentally break the law, or do something potentially unsafe.
The Geeky Pilot
CEO Jonathan Evans spent about 17 years as a helicopter pilot, first in the U.S. Army and later as an emergency medical services pilot. In 2012, he decided to start a drone company after reading WIRED‘s cover story on drones. “I was really inspired by the idea that drones are going to be a physical extension of the internet,” he says. “And I thought I was well suited for that being a particularly geeky pilot.”
His original idea was to create a service for connecting customers to companies like AirBue that can provide drone-based services. But as he made the rounds on drone conferences, he realized that though there was demand from customers, there weren’t many companies to meet that demand. The big problem, he heard again and again, was that the regulations were too complex and it was difficult or impossible to get insurance. That’s when he realized that he would be better off creating a company that helped operators comply with regulations.
The Rules of the Road
SkyWard works with companies all over the world, but its biggest challenge in the near future is the fuzzy state of regulations in the U.S. Although the FAA has finally published its proposed rules last month, it could take years for the regulations to make it through the courts, and in the meantime the FAA has little ability to even enforce its existing rules.
Evans says it’s easy to get frustrated by the FAA, but that, as a pilot, he values the agency’s role in keeping both him and the public safe. “For me, the rules of flight are as banal and as important as traffic lights on the ground,” he says. The problem is that the FAA hasn’t been able to translate the rules that govern helicopters to the world of unmanned vehicles.
“It’s a totally new transportation system,” he says. “The air is a great place to build a new highway, but we need to build the rules of the road.”
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