Jeff Baxter - Long Endurance Fixed Wing Drones

Jeff Baxter is the founder of Baxter Aerospace developing a long-duration drone, giving eyes in the sky all day or all night to incident commanders during active fire. As a former SpaceX engineer, Jeff leads a small team of other SpaceX alumni and experienced long duration drone engineers. Jeff shares a refreshingly candid view of the industry, the hurdles we've overcome and those remaining. Join us for an entertaining and interesting conversation.

Transcript

Bryan 0:05

Good morning and welcome to the Solving Wildfire podcast. I am Bryan Gardner and on the show today we have Jeff Baxter, founder of Baxter Aerospace building the Gimbal Copter. Working on tactical surveillance And longer term, they're going to work on early detection. One of the reasons I'm excited to have him on here is he is definitely one of the stronger innovators in wildfire space, partly because he's coming from outside wildfire and also has some background in here. Jeff and I first crossed paths in the early days of SpaceX. Back before... we'd only had a couple good flights, maybe when SpaceX was still very likely to die. So he's had some some experience in businesses that probably should not succeed. Jeff was in avionics while I was over in propulsion. Jeff then went into the wildfire space and for a few years led up r and d for Ericsson. He was going to convert the sky crane into a fully autonomous vehicle and bring real heavy water drop autonomously to fire where we don't risk human. And that was one of the, biggest glimmers of hope that we've had to really solve wildfire. We're gonna have some fun conversation about what worked on that and what wasn't working. And fun little piece on Jeff's background. He led the team that held the world land speed record for electrical vehicles. This was way before Tesla, but we'll probably get him to a little bit of that fun stuff as well, just for background on what he's done for technological team leadership, for innovation, and what he's now bringing to wildfire. So Jeff, welcome to the.

Jeff Baxter 1:38

Thank you very much, Bryan. I'm excited to be here. It's an important topic, very much near and dear to my soul, so thank you for inviting me on today.

Bryan 1:46

All right, let's start off I feel like we're gonna miss the Land speed world record Let's get that in there really quick because it's fun and we don't need to spend a lot of time, a little bit on SpaceX, but we'll just start a little bit on that back.

Jeff Baxter 2:00

Okay. You bet. Yeah. Yeah. Racing is great. Racing's always been part of my life from a very early time. And land speed racing really came about cause I lived in Utah for a while, going to school. And that is where, of course, Mecca is for land speed racing at Salt Flats. And the biggest driver for us was put together a team to set what was called the E one class land speed record. It's a class of vehicles that is the lightweight class. It has unbounded. Ability to use as many batteries and as much power as you can possibly fit in the weight class there. And we built a car that, from the ground up was a concept to completion in two and a half years of development and then out to race for a couple of years to set the land speed record. It's challenging worked like it was not without as bumps. We certainly had major issues in the sense that we got out to race for our very first time on the salt and there were substantial vibration environment issues so vibratory because of the way the salt is, it's different every year that salt air was very rough, that the driver actually couldn't see the dashboard very well cause the car was vibrating so badly on the salt. So we had a massive tear down, rebuild, new suspension, new drive system, components new wheels, the whole thing. Mid-race week, like working nonstop for day after day after day, so we could bring the car back out that year onto the track. What we did, we got it back out onto the track and put down some really good speeds and we successfully qualified. So racing is land speed racing is a two-way event. You race one today and then you erase the next day to set the record. And those two things have to happen at the. The appropriate time. You can't have a gap or that sort of thing. So we put down an excellent time and celebrated and thought, okay, all we have to do is repeat this tomorrow we've got the record. And on our return run the next day we think we hit a submerged 55 gallon drum that was submerged in the salt, caused the car to roll over, and had a massive massive crash in our world was doing. We were. I think around 130 miles an hour when strongly accelerating, when the car had this happen and the driver, thankfully was safe. So all of our safety systems worked perfectly. He was able to pop outta the car just fine. And that was a big setback for us. But then we didn't stop there. We rebuilt the car, complete rebuild on the outside carbon fiber frame and came back. And set land speed record. That's it's actually still the E one class is still holding the record for that one. We did a bunch of other record setting, it's electric cars. We built the first drag car, drag racing car with no batteries on board. It's powered by ultra capacitors. We had lots of fun things, so racing's been around a long time. I love it. It's like a show it or don't kind of experience and I really like that, that that high pressure.

Bryan 4:51

Wow. All right, automation, human in the loop. Humans are amazing because we can learn things without having to write lines of code, but. In the wildfire space, we're put human lives at risk every time someone goes up in the air. And we're averaging seven deaths a year amongst pilots in wildfire. You actually, way back then, wildfire was far off your radar and you almost had your driver die. Did that influence any of your propensity for automating dangerous human in the loop systems?

Jeff Baxter 5:20

Hmm, that's a great question. We certainly took a good solid look at why our safety systems work and verified that everything that we had planned to work functioned correctly. That there was a lot of safety systems on that car. And we went through them one a time and they all functioned as we designed. So there was a good basis to believe that we could put up him the same exact driver in that car the next year and have success. We modified the car with a new vertical stabilizer to add more directional stability. So we looked at this very analytically and said, what does it take to take those risks to zero and so There's the human element, like we were on the starting line the following year and we had the car completely rebuilt and all tested, and our driver. Bless his soul. He had, he had literally had a panic attack from a flashback from the crash, and he pops outta the cockpit and he is like, I'm not driving. I'm just, I can't, can't mentally go down this again. And we, we walked around a while and, and it really was heart to heart, like eyeball to eyeball. Does he believe us? Did we, our homework? Did we do it right? And and he's laid down hot speeds and set the line speed record in that car that year. So it really is thinking very carefully about safety systems, thinking very carefully about how you, perform in a interpersonal trust relationship environment too. Those things have to go hand in hand to, have a system that can work.

Bryan 6:39

Wow. That is, I would not criticize anyone for having that panic attack in the

Jeff Baxter 6:44

Yeah, me neither. And we didn't, of course. So

Bryan 6:49

I really appreciate about this wildfire space coming in here relatively new is, especially talking with people from the business side, the technology side, the operational side, there is so much emphasis that goes back again and again to the safety of the crew, the human safety on the ground. Repeatedly number one. Let's make sure that the crew and the people who are fighting the fire are safe. Number two is we'll protect the people and the towns and the structures. And number three is we'll protect the land. I really appreciate and respect that. It's a genuine, emphasis on human safety. It's throughout the industry,

Jeff Baxter 7:24

Yeah, definitely. I can't resonate with that more. There's the whole point of what we're doing is to reduce the risk, reduce the risk for everybody, and expand the reach of firefighting to areas that aren't currently blessed by having a nice big helicopter at the waiting, ready to make a difference. Those things need to be available to people who can't afford them today. So safety is first for sure, but if you look at the stats of that just as one side, If you're a captain of an air airliner or you're a captain of a firefighting aircraft just by that decision, the same kind of role, you're like 450 times more likely to die as a firefighting captain than as an airliner captain. And that's just unacceptable. It's not that they're bad pilots, it's that they're, they're flying old hardware, low to the ground max payload in bad visible conditions. So they're just kind of set up to fail. They don't have the tools they need to be as, as safe as our airliner captains. And that needs to change.

Bryan 8:17

Yeah. You know what's interesting too is the personality type that goes in to take this kind of risk, they're good people. Just, it was actually just two nights ago, it was dinner with some friends, and one of them, she's going from law enforcement. She wants to go get her helicopter license. and flying to fight fires is definitely on the menu for what she would like to do. And I asked her, I said, do you know how dangerous this is And she said, yeah, but there's, kind of this nature of it won't happen to me. it could happen to me, but it probably won't happen to me. I think that we need people that have that risk taking mentality to, do these dangerous jobs. But I think appreciating their risk taking mentality, we need to have in ourselves as engineers, as designers, as operators, we need to take that risk out because we don't want them worrying about that. We want them focusing on the mission cuz that's how they succeed. But we need to take out every risk everywhere we can so that we don't lose these pilots who are knowingly accepting the risk of life, but it's just unacceptable for us to not carry the moral burden of.

Jeff Baxter 9:23

Yeah, I agree. This is a really important point. The firefighting pilot is, is somebody who's dedicated, they're a passionate community of people who have lost friends in the environment that they operate in and we want to honor all of those memories of the people who did kinda sacrifice so much for. That are underrepresented in my opinion, by trying hard to do our best to provide new and better improving tools so that the firefighting risk can go down. I think we don't wanna lose the passion, the excitement, the energy they bring to this community because they do represent the people that we want in the community, but we also want them there for the long haul. So we gotta provide better and better. tools

Bryan 10:03

Yeah. This actually throws back a little bit. I don't wanna digress too much, but I was speaking with Jeff Mecklenberg at Erickson, who heads up production and that guy, you spend a couple hours with someone and that guy's a rockstar. He's got his team and they rebuild those spurs again and again, and these guys are wizards and what they can do with that metal. But it was a little bit sobering talking with him when he brought up. They bring back a bird after it is gone down in a lake or gone down in a fire and they're gonna rebuild this bird. It's gonna fly again. But they just lost a couple pilots in that bird. And everyone who's working on it knows that a couple lies have just been lost in that thing, and they rebuild it. They're gonna send it out because they cannot get new airframes, they cannot get new vehicles. And there's more loss of life if you don't rebuild that airframe if you put that airframe in the grave. So it's it's an interesting, again, back to the appreciation of life that is permeating throughout the industry. They're very aware of the value of life in.

Jeff Baxter 11:01

Yep.

Bryan 11:03

Let's, there are the technological challenges. On the race car stuff How about the business challenges? Not everything's technology these days, what were the non-technical challenges you had to solve and were those holding you guys back from those land speed records? What can you share on that?

Jeff Baxter 11:19

You bet. So that whole project was funded by us going out and, gathering people who are of like mind to see the technology move forward, that were not going to receive a financial benefit. We were taking their donations to provide the funding for the team and that funded team salaries. Vehicle build all the testing, traveled to the test site, traveled to race. All of that was funded by, philanthropic donation to our team. That's pretty common in racing and very challenging to, see a, fully defined budget with a good understanding of how you're gonna make ends meet throughout the whole effort. You just have to press forward and put one step in front of the other. So, yeah, certainly it hamstrung us from a speed perspective. There were definitely things that we wanted to. imminently or rapidly that we knew we could do if we just had money. But what a great benefit it turned out to be as a mother of invention, it caused us to really dig deep and simplify and make designs more elegant and multitask the componentry and all of the things that are really good in, in the end for reliability and safety. Also come out of having no money. It's really an interesting juxtaposition. So those are really key development decision is we're just gonna press forward and make this work with the resources that we can gather up. We did have a great donation kind of near the end from from. A single full answer who's like, look, what does it take guys to take this over to the finish line? And we've gotten as far as you have, you have a vehicle ready, but you don't have enough to actually finish the racing. And he, he pushed us over and that was an awesome day to get that level of support.

Bryan 12:54

Hmm. I've got my philosophy that in the space world We have Jeff Bezos, who's been able to plow a billion dollars a year into Blue Origin, and then Elon Musk, who put in a hundred million initially, and the company almost went bankrupt a few times. Those were sobering times, but I do think. The reality of eminent and bankruptcy, forcing you to get things done, get them good enough, get the job done right, and get the job done right now is, a catalyst for progress. I'd love to go back and do more philosophical study of the differences between SpaceX and Blue Origin and why SpaceX has been so successful so quickly, whereas Blue Origin has had some success, they've overcome some challenging problems, but not near at the speed and acceleration the SpaceX. We're gonna revisit this when we go into your time with Erickson and your experiences there. But now you're raising money for Baxter Aerospace, raising money for the Gimbal copter, and you're, again, under that gun. There's a contrast raising from philanthropists and raising from venture capitalists. I'd like to hear a little bit about that. This experience of raising having to work under the gun and not really cut corners, but find out which corners really matter. Might be the best way to phrase it. Let's Hear your thoughts on, that.

Jeff Baxter 14:07

Sure. Yeah. This industry I think, is underserved from an investment perspective. It has been for many years. I think there's a lot of technology that needs to get rolled in. To helping a variety of things. The amount of data that people have out when they're deployed out of cell range, they, they lack so many common things that you and I take for granted on a daily basis that we could provide. So I think the investment into the industry is something I'd really like to promote. Really like to see us as an individual contributor in this industry, land better investment, more investment, more relevant people who are interested in investing. All of those. I think as a whole, the entire thing needs a lift. It's a, it's to me kind of unconscionable that we can fight war so well at night remotely with great effect, and we can't put our fires out at night. We don't fly our helicopters at night. We don't deploy our people at night cuz they don't have the data they need to safely execute the mission. That's a pretty fundamental gap that we need to address. And for me, that starts with investment. That really does us investing all of our effort in time technologically, but also financial investment, gathering up people of like minds to solve the problem. We see a very cyclical interest level, when the smoky brown sky is overhead interest is very high. And we get lots of lots of bites. And when it's, November and December then through the second half of the year, And the clear skies and the snow's on the ground, there's not a ton of investment interest and that, that cyclical nature is is problematic. We need to just think of things in the long term. How are we gonna solve long-term problems and take a big view of this. So those are kind of initial feedback for you, and I'm like, assessment of the industry.

Bryan 15:46

Yeah. That's an interesting piece to factor into it, cuz on the venture capital or the private equity side, there's a investment time cycle and it takes so long for. For committees to decide that they're gonna look into an industry then so long to do some due diligence, then so long to look for the companies and then so long to make that commitment. And if the smoke's out of the sky, then the committee that initially decided to look into it no longer wants to pull the trigger. That'd be interesting. And then from a course a agency standpoint, the governments, whether state, federal that's a whole different beast in and of itself to deal with on the investment. Especially when you're dealing with startups.

Jeff Baxter 16:27

Yeah, it's a combination of challenges. There's the long-term contract cycle, so it takes a long time to land a large substantial contract, and that's combined with this small business to government sales complexity. These are. Challenging things for VCs to typically engage in with the hardware perspective. So you lump all those together. You have hardware plus sales to the government, plus long sale cycle. That's a challenging space to be raising money in.

Bryan 16:54

Yeah. Have you made any efforts to raise money philanthropically people who instead of donating to some charity, they just want to give it to a business who's gonna make it happen? I've been enough on the investing side and there's just people can't bifurcate. Charity and investments. As soon as they go into a business, they just can't bring their head outside the roi, the direct bottom line roi. But then with charity, there's, a double line bottom ROI or whatever, but it's all this fluffy and tangible stuff, and it seems that there's this human, a human in inability to bifurcate the two which maybe is why people who have enough money to be charitable still have enough money to be philanthropic about it. But ha. Have you, what has been your experience in the crossover?

Jeff Baxter 17:40

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a good fit in some sense that these people are aligned with the mission, they're aligned with the outcome. They want to see great things happen In an industry that's been underserved for so long the financial realities of fielding a completely new technologically advanced aviation platform are measured in millions, not measured in like tens of thousands. And so the magnitude of dollars means. We're really looking for foundations, groups of philanthropic individuals, and we've met with a couple of foundations and those conversations are ongoing, of course. We'd love to see more engagement in that in the future. We have not landed any philanthropic investment into the company.

Bryan 18:19

All right. I'll be curious to see evolution on that, and I'd love to talk to some of the people that you've talked to and just get their honest thoughts on how they view things across the two different sides of allocating capital.

Jeff Baxter 18:31

Yeah, you bet.

Bryan 18:32

Let's move on to, I wanna spend some time on Ericsson and what you did there, but let's go straight to Baxter Aerospace. What are you guys solving near term and medium term? You guys are, right now, looking to raise 3 million, bucks, where's that gonna get you? Let's start off with some of the hurdles you've already overcome. the successes you've had, and I guess you just had some of those recently.

Jeff Baxter 18:54

You bet. Yeah, it is simple. In some sense, our efforts around wildfire are based on two things. We need to discover fire when it's small and put water on it. We put water on it. When it's small, you can manage it. And there are many fires that we want to turn off that we can't, and there are other fires that are good that we want to burn to help thin the undergrowth and other things, but there are many that truly are destructive, and we must do our darnest to turn those off. Those are the ones that we want to detect early and place water on them. That for us, is two areas. First, it's the collection of information about the fire. And then the ability to relay that information to large water drop aircraft to actually have the impact we need day or night, 24 hours a day. Good visibility or bad visibility in any condition we need to be able to launch. The analogy for us is that this should be like sprinklers, building sprinklers for the forest. They're largely autonomous. Require human in the loop to maintain them and monitor them, but should be able to detect and deliver water on fires that we don. We've been developing an aircraft as the base platform of the sense side of that, the measure, the data the collection side, the eye in the sky. That aircraft is a hundred pound class, vertical takeoff, long endurance wing born flight aircraft. Pretty unique configuration. We needed vertical takeoff because we want the ability to not have launch and recovery equipment. So it's gotta be light. Footprint on the ground, easily deployable. It's gotta be long endurance so that it doesn't disrupt the other firefighting environment, all the other aircraft that are doing the same critical mission. So we're being able to be out of the way for many hours and it really needs to be simple and robust. It needs to be tough, needs to be able to sustain that kind of firefighting experience. And that's where we weren't able to find an aircraft that we could purchase off the shelf and begin scaling up. We had to do. Ourselves to stand up a brand new aircraft. We've called the aircraft dragonfly, the BA one dragonfly, and it uses this technology You've mentioned a couple times, Bryan, we've talked about called Gimbal Coter Technology, which is just straight out of the SpaceX playbook. We, came from that world and we just use thrust vectoring right off of Falcon nine. It's an idea that has been around a long time, but never applied to vertical takeoff aircraft. Now we're applying it in a way that allows us to dramatically simplify an aircraft that can take off vertically and fly like an airplane. We have an aircraft that is arguably the simplest configuration ever of that Of that type of aircraft. And for us, that's critical. We need the ability to scale up. It's a big problem. We need many of these aircraft to be able to service the needs globally. And so it needs to be tough, robust ability to take off land vertically and be low cost. Those are our targets. I think you were mentioning earlier some milestones we've successfully proven out some of the most difficult flight regimes for the aircraft and chief among those is the ability to take the aircraft into full hover full helicopter hover mode and control that in different conditions. So that is a major milestone for us that we've been able to achieve recently. We're very pleased with that. It proves out the technology from a thrust vectoring perspective

Bryan 22:00

That video of when you guys had just got that test flight that was fun. Watching that drop into my inbox,

Jeff Baxter 22:06

Yeah, it's good. It's exciting to see. It's exciting to see our six degree of Freedom flying robot come to life. You know, it's exciting for us.

Bryan 22:14

Nice. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but your brother Michael, he was with Insitu building a similar size, similar class aircraft, drone, and then that, got bought by Boeing and has gone military so your brother Michael has worked from beginning to end on exactly this kind of a vehicle.

Jeff Baxter 22:35

Yeah, I think that he's brings a wealth of experience to our team. He and and there's a couple of others that are coming from SpaceX and other experience base that really bring a technical expertise. I think the feather in his particular gap is that he's worked hard at a company called Arvell, where they set a world endurance record for vertical takeoff aircraft of 32 hours. The only aircraft to fly that long ever. That's vertical takeoff, vertical landing. Except for spacecraft. So it's really a high performance aircraft. It brings a lot of exposure of that technology to the team. We're excited to work together to apply that now to firefighting at commercial mission.

Bryan 23:11

Nice. So, your first application is tactical surveillance of active fire with working crews Then the next goal, is early detection. But first is tactical surveillance. What's driving this one, two step in what you're pursuing Business wise.

Jeff Baxter 23:28

Yeah. What a great question. So a couple of factors. Inside the industry, there's a lot of understanding that there's value in satellite imagery, for example, and it doesn't provide the tactical response capability We need. It's very kind of large pixel not updated very often. Read that to mean daily or every two days, that sort of thing. So it really doesn't provide the tactical response we need. We need data continuously flowing on active fires so that people know where things are. That is the core driver for kicking off the aircraft data acquisition in the active fire campaign is that there's just a gap. People don't have enough information about what's going on out there today. There's some really cool add-ons to that. We can do. The ability of connecting people in the field via backhaul, via starlink data onto the internet so that they have broadband anywhere effectively is the goal. And that is a big step forward in communication and situational awareness for those people. So that whole system that's running on existing fires, that needs to exist now because we have those demands.

Bryan 24:34

Yeah. I want to ask you why, why doesn't it exist already? And I'm looking forward to having the guys from Precision just down south of Oregon. They had a$2 million military drone that they were flying for a while and then they, I think it was about two years they were doing the tactical operations and they shut that down. Partly was F FAA stuff, but a big piece too was they can't afford a$2 million drone again, cuz they, they got lucky on the way they got one. So I'm looking forward to going deeper with them. But that's one of the answers to why doesn't this already exist and it's because$2 million drones, what's the price point on your dragonfly?

Jeff Baxter 25:09

Yeah, that's, that is the driver of why we're designing dragonfly is that nobody can scale up many millions of dollars of drones for firefighting. Yeah. Our target is aircraft airframe costs less than a hundred thousand dollars. It depends on what payload payloads are between.$10 to 10 million payloads are really highly variable, but for the payload we need for firefighting monitoring, the whole up package is less than 150 grand. We wanna see better than that, substantially better than that pricing. We think as volumes go up on the products itself, then we're less than a hundred thousand dollars. So it is something that a local agency, a local fire department, can easily provide to their citizens as a tool, in their tool bag. That's the level that we need to scale out to so that people can have this data wherever they need it,

Bryan 25:56

you're looking at less than one 20th of the cost of the guys at precision. So that's a legitimate game changer in the economics of tactical surveillance.

Jeff Baxter 26:07

Yeah, the military aircraft, and that's, I'm sure where they're coming from and are not designed for low cost. They're designed for their particular mission set. They're designed in ways that work great in forward operating bases, and those rule sets are not firefighting rule sets. And that's what we discovered when we tried to go do the same thing, was we're getting quotes like a million dollars in airframe, and that was just a non-starter. So that's why we had to go to, to the beginning and design an ultra simple, highly capable aircraft

Bryan 26:37

Nice. Let's go to the FAA question. It's easy to point fingers and say regulations and the FAA are blocking us and blah, blah, blah. But I've found in the drone space, the FAA, they've put people on there. That want to see things work. With SpaceX one of the luxuries that Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis with the X Prize, earned for all of us was friendly counterparts dealing with the FAA and with other regulatory groups on what can be allowed and what cannot not be allowed. By design, NASA gave us people that were friendly, but there's intelligence and smartness behind the rules that are laid down. You don't want to swallow a spider to catch the fly. To keep everyone safe, I think I've seen enough to believe that the people within the FAA are not trying to be a stick in the mud. They want things to advance and press forward. I've seen from, people like you and other innovators that the people, the FAA are not the problem. What we need to do is just do the tedious work to get the proper regulation in place and done. So what's been your experience with, the regulatory challenges of, first we'll start with tactical surveillance over active fire crews, and then we'll look further ahead to early detection having a drone fly all night long.

Jeff Baxter 27:49

Yeah. Yeah. Right off the bat, I want to just echo what you said. I'm a pilot. I fly an airplane, and I appreciate that there are people who are working really hard to make sure that this integrates into the national airspace safely, if you were to run into a hundred pound class drone in an airplane that I fly, it would be bad So like the regulatory side of things is super critical and we really appreciate the FAA and their efforts to make it safely integrated in ways that can scale. The working the right issues. I think from our perspective as well, we've had good headway. We feel like there's regulatory allowances already that provide such a great. both safety culture and also deployability in the firefighting tactical airspace that have been proven out. There's already been unmanned air aviation operations of this class over fires, so it really is not the blocker for us. It really comes back to how do we build a product that's at the right price point, the right reliability has all of the capability that we need to monitor the fire and provides. Value. The regulatory site thinks has gotten so much better over the last years. A lot of efforts been put into it, and progress is steady in making good forward headway

Bryan 29:02

You let me ask a bottom line question right here. Let's say you guys, you get the 3 million bucks you're looking to raise and your technology development happens on schedule. And you find the agency leader, probably state level agency leader that says, we wanna put this up and use it over this next fire, or at least experiment with it during the weekend. Those things go in there. Do you believe that the red tape and the paperwork, which everyone knows goes slower than anyone wants it to go? Do you believe that would be anywhere on a critical path for getting a dragon fly up in. the air

Jeff Baxter 29:37

That's a great question. It hasn't been to date and so far it looks like it won't be. The reason why I say that with great confidence is that there. Good allowances for this kind of operation today. There's no blocks that we see between here and success that are not understood already by the FAA as things that need to get figured out or have already been figured out. I think that is not the case for other unmanned operations in the national airspace. There are a lot of blockages to fly cargo over people at night and populated areas. Some of these really difficult mission sets. There's a lot to go in the regulatory space, but when we're fighting in an emergency situation in a temporary flight restriction, those rule sets are pretty well defined.

Bryan 30:19

That's good to hear. So part of the, easiness that you have is you are in a less complicated, less dangerous flying space. There aren't civilians underneath you and the ground underneath you is already burning down. So what's the problem?

Jeff Baxter 30:35

that's great, so if we rank order the risks, the risk is colliding with another piece of aviation asset in space. That's, that is, that's a major. And that's managed in very clever ways in the firefighting space. There's good airspace stack and there's a lot of things done to mitigate that risk, to drive that down to non-issue. But what's interesting, just to make a side note, the stuff's coming. I have literally flown my airplane next to a UAV V that was it was flying in, in similar airspace. So the UAV operations are integrating slowly and we see good headway in this regard. It used to be a major block. But now we're seeing things getting figured out.

Bryan 31:11

So with your own eyeballs, you physically saw that UAV flying over next to you.

Jeff Baxter 31:16

No, it was small. I couldn't see it. So but I was aware it was there and the air traffic controllers, provided awareness and separation and it was fine. So it was just like another airplane. You don't necessarily have to see every aircraft in order to avoid every aircraft.

Bryan 31:30

I guess That's a piece of the greater danger of a hundred pound class or a 10 pound class is you're not gonna see it until it's gone through your windshield.

Jeff Baxter 31:38

Yeah, this is true with birds and other things as well. So let's not think of this as a drones only issue. But but there's a lot we can do to make this kind of operation really, really safe. I mean, extremely safe. So the technology is improving. The regulatory side is, And I think those things are coming nicely along as we work on developing the product for the firefighting.

Bryan 31:59

I guess also one of the elements is it doesn't have to be applicable to every situation to be valuable and applicable to some situations. I know Oregon has their sensing aircraft. Aircraft and Colorado has their sensing aircraft that, they use, that are manned by human pilots up there. And they're in use all fire season long, and they're talking to the incident commanders in Oregon and in Washington and Idaho. They'd love to call in that vehicle but they just can't, cause someone else already called the thing in. Someone else has priority over them, so there's more demand than there is supply out there. And if your drones are only able to serve even 20% of the fires that they want because of whatever regulatory stuff. That's fine. That's still a fifth of the coverage that you wouldn't have otherwise. So I guess the business case, especially the initial business case, even if there are places where authority over airspace is clear, unlike in California, I know it's a real complicated mess out there. But even if you don't touch California. There's still plenty of demand and plenty of opportunity for you to put these things to work where we're regulatory or cost or just appetite from the operators. Is there.

Jeff Baxter 33:12

Yeah, I think that's really great. One of the things we're excited about is teaming with manned Aviation because they're different, and I don't see a world where there's no manned aviation anymore. I feel like there's such a good use case for clever people observing things in real time. And then once, they have a good mission set to find that you can put a surveillance aircraft on a monitor of fire as the fire burns and provide real-time data, they get freed up and they can go to other great work that, that people are really good at. So I think there's a good synergy between the two things, and I think industry wide and maybe even globally we're beginning to understand more about how that teaming nature can work with these these kind of assets that are automatically deploy.

Bryan 33:51

Yeah. Yeah. I'm hearing you say someone else just phrased it very well a little bit ago that the technology's coming, the regulations are getting in order. The desire and the demand is there. It's just a matter of who gets to be the one that solves it. Lots of people can solve it. Lots of technologies can solve it, and this particular version said it's a race and I wanna win that race. I want the problem solved by whoever solves. But I can do it and I wanna get it done.

Jeff Baxter 34:19

Yeah. That's awesome. That's the motivation we need in general in the industry, is to stay, just to stay in that world of developing new tech because it's the right thing to do. Let's, let's go for it. If it's not us, it's somebody else. in the end, we need to be able to detect fire when it's small and put water on it. If we want the fire to go out. We can't do that today. Fundamentally, at night. There's just no, there's no technology available today to do that,

Bryan 34:43

I, that still blows my mind, and I have the good fortune of being in a position where I don't have to win the race I just wanna talk to all the people out there in the race and, and help them make those connections to get the problem solved.

Jeff Baxter 34:55

Yeah, I think that's, I don't know. That's an interesting comment. There's a lot of people who, who know that it should be solved that, that want it to be solved but don't know how to contribute and somehow we need to tap into that brain trust, tap into. That energy that people really want to contribute and don't have a way, and I think this is our way, but everybody should find a way to make it a little bit better.

Bryan 35:17

Yeah. Let's, take a little bit of a tangent well, it's not a tangent at all. It's the next step in the agenda. Let's go to surveillance, long duration surveillance detecting brand new fires. I mentioned Colorado and Oregon have their programs. You guys can do this with less risk, and less cost. there's not a lot of human risk when you have two pilots at night, but there is still human risk and, and it's just awful for your circadian rhythm. I'm into longevity, all my friends know this, and if you're having to fly through 4:00 AM in the morning, that's just not good for your long term health. But that's a total side issue. We've got these two programs that are having some good success. They could definitely be replicated. They're more expensive than anyone would like Let's talk about you guys going in and filling that space. There's the regulatory side, the technology side, the contracting side. Take it away on all three of those.

Jeff Baxter 36:09

Yeah. There is demand, like you were saying earlier, there is demand for more information about what's going on in firefighting environments. Across the board. In California, there's like 3000 fires a year, and there's maybe a handful counted single digits of aircraft out there doing infrared surveillance of fires. There are two king airs that are outfitted with these advanced cameras and a few. What they call NROs aircraft as well. And it's just not enough. The commanders don't have real time continuous data of their fire and that's what needs to change. So we love what the man aviation world is doing. We need to scale it up by like a hundred or a thousand and provide that same level of data to every single fire commander. And I think from a regulatory perspective, we talked about that a little bit already, but the active firefighting campaign. that's that's a largely solved problem. There's already UAVs being used in these cases,

Bryan 37:02

If we can, let's Focus on the early detection for the next bit. where there's no knowledge yet, of a new fire start.

Jeff Baxter 37:09

Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the early detection portion of the work is interesting because there are no available contracts for unmanned aircraft to do surveillance of forest, and do the monitoring required to detect these. when they're small. So we depend on things like satellites that have Inadequate data sets to give us the information we need to tactically respond. And if it's not satellites, then it's people calling in 9 1 1 to report smoke blooms. If it's not that, there are some companies out there putting smoke alarms into the forest that have very low data bandwidth back hauls so you can know if there's smoke in the area. None of these things actually solve the issue of being able to write a tactical response plan against something you detect. So the only way to detect a fire to the fidelity needed is to field an aircraft over it or send people driving and walking into the forest to go see what's going on. So that early detection portion of the mission is critical because that is the find it before it's a problem kind of solution set. We must find fires when they're small and the only way to do it is to be looking.

Bryan 38:16

One example of that succeeding and I love putting numbers and measurements to things. In Oregon, I was talking with the director of aerial ops out here. And he said he might have to correct my numbers, but it was around 62 fires that they found last summer with a pilot and a watcher up in an airplane flying at night. And they're able to, they detected 60, 62 of them and 57 of them. This was the unexpected technology surprise. They had their tens of thousands of dollars flir infrared suites on the aircraft, but they had their night vision goggles that are a lot less expensive. 57 of them were found first with the night vision goggles, and five of them were found first with the infr. Now, of course, once you see it with the night vision goggles, then you go in with the infrared and there's the questions about was it the human, the pattern detection on wearing the goggles that found the fires first. And it's fun to talk with him. He doesn't know and he doesn't really care. But the, it, it points to the expensive sensor package might not be the best one. And we probably don't need ai. We can pipe data back. This is a question that I wanna bring to you guys also, piping data back real time enough. You can have a person sitting in a trailer off in southern Oregon or on the other side of the world for all that. And for practical purposes, get the data back to them fast enough. So in, I guess just in this example of Oregon and getting data piped back and the sensor packages your thoughts on that and you guys your guys' goal, it seems as clearly to. compliment the human part with drones and maybe fully sup supplant the human part with drones. But let me just open that up and hear your comments.

Jeff Baxter 40:00

Yeah. Okay, great. So there are use cases today where it would be better to have an unmanned aircraft flying continu. that Mand aviation are not flying. So in particular, when it's impossible to use night vision goggles to safely fly an aircraft, you have bad visibility conditions with heavy smoke, for example. Night vision goggles don't work in those environments. And in that case you still want to know what's going on. You still want an aircraft overhead and that we would definitely still feel an aircraft and and be able to take the data in the infrared spectrum without being blocked by visibility conditions of smoke. So that's a great use case that we want to step into as soon as we possibly can. There are, I. quite a few steps to get there. That's not where we wanna start because that's a very difficult thing to walk into regulatorily. Again, we wanna contrast early detection in the national airspace with the tactical fire response in a temporary flight restriction, very different rule sets. So when we are flying our unmanned aircraft in the national airspace, then we get to, to deal with all of the regulatory overhead of flying in that place, and we

Bryan 41:11

You know, lemme just pause here for a little bit because one of the things that I haven't been able to comment yet, but in terms of the audience for this podcast will be innovators and agency leaders, investors. This is not a comment to you, Jeff. This is a comment about you, but. You don't bs. And I think we just have an example here that within the tactical firefighting space, the f aa and regulatory stuff is not a problem. And you just say that FAAah, we totally got it. And then here we are on the early detection and flying over the national airspace and you say, oh, no, no, that's, that's a big mountain to conquer. They could be seemingly very contradictory, but when you look at the specific space you're talking about it's very clear. I've seen that from Jeff again and again in whether engineering in terms of schedule, in terms of regulation, and in terms of expectations from what people can do and cannot do. never seen. Overly optimistic projections and expectations. That doesn't mean he'll always be right, but that means that there's no BS coming out of his honest view. And he's always applied a thorough look at things before you get an estimate out of him.

Jeff Baxter 42:20

I appreciate that. That's a compliment right there. I'm pretty sure that was a compliment, but I'm not sure that's a I think,

Bryan 42:25

it's not a backhanded compliment,

Jeff Baxter 42:27

Yeah. No, it's good. Like the reality is it's complex. This is the feeling of a robot in a difficult environment in the air is challenging and complex. And so people who wanna wave a wand and think that this is simple. Don't engage to the depth that it really takes to understand. And some people are just not interested in engaging at that level, and that's probably fine, but certainly we, people who are saying they're gonna fix it have better understand it to the depth that needs to be understood.

Bryan 42:56

Yeah. Let's just take this moment, and again ask the question, why isn't this happening already? It's, you talk to people in the wildfire space, especially in the drone space. The technology required to solve those wildfire problems is we don't need cutting edge technology. 10, year old technology is fine. We definitely don't need new te. So it's easy for investors to just brush that aside saying, oh, the technology's not a problem. It's the market fit, or the market uptake, or the agency to uptake or regulatory. Everything except the technology. So why isn't this happening yet? We already used the example of the team south of Portland that just had a 2 million drone and it was working, but it was just too expensive, so they shut it down. You guys are looking at 5% of that cost price point. Of course, there's operational cost you'll have to add on to that. if your hardware is 5% of that cost that's a big piece of the solution. So why isn't it happening already?

Jeff Baxter 43:57

Oof. Goodness gracious. I can think of a thousand reasons why it isn't already happening. Technology is definitely one of them, for sure. You need technology developed for this space in order to keep the costs at a place that function that's like table stakes. But beyond that, I think a long time in this particular industry, there was quite a movement against drones in the aviation firefighting arena because people were flying recreational drones to get cool footage and disrupting the whole effort. And so that painted the whole system in a very bad light and set us back substantially. I think that's changing now, but man, what a bummer that that set of decisions that people have made caused the overall response. So that's one.

Bryan 44:40

Just to reinforce that, I guess the, when the Nokia Creek fire right in my backyard lit up and it only burned 2000 acres. So that was a good outcome. And no, no structures or anything, but every time they put up any kind of YouTube thing on there with a update, they had the little three and a half minutes updates twice a day, which were great. The first thing was don't fly any drones over here. It takes our firefighters out of the airspace. And I just I can see that putting a bad taste in the mouth of everyone there. But I guess that's why you have to come in over the top. Playing by the rules, playing fair, playing with the human airs in the airspace okay. Point taken on that one for sure. Why else? I guess there's the investment side. Why, if you're not the only people who've come up and said, we can do an autonomous solution to this what's on that side?

Jeff Baxter 45:31

Yeah. There are some good things in work. I mean, some of this technology is hard to develop for sure. It takes advanced, engineering from a wide variety of disciplines to provide a tool that actually functions in this environment. It's a hard environment to work in. So I think the technology does take some effort to develop. There are some good ground. Robotic solutions that are in work helping with prescribed burns and helping with other needs that firefighters might have on the ground. So it is coming in a longer horizon than we all would like, but definitely good progress is being made. Why doesn't that already exist? Maybe there was some historical regulatory blockages, perhaps, but I think honestly, it's about getting the right minds to look at the problem seriously and take a very cohesive approach that solves for all of the inputs that people need to operate in the space. I think too many people have endeavored to drop in with the solution that they thought up in their own sphere, and try and force that into the firefighting environment. We've come across that very, very often. And we take the opposite approach. Just tell us what you think as professional firefighters who've dedicated your lives to this. Just tell us what you would love to have and we will do our darnest to, to cause that to exist.

Bryan 46:41

You guys have broken through that particular barrier with a few people. You have letters of intent signed with some, I don't know if they're incident commanders or with different groups out here. Can you tell us about the agency leaders who. Have the authority to uptake your technology and what those conversations and relationships have become.

Jeff Baxter 47:00

Yeah, those people are the people who want the community benefit. They're interested in their communities. They've committed to protect and serve. Getting the latest technology, getting the latest benefit. So people who are interested in this are really highlighted by those who have already active drone programs, people who are seeing the vision of the future of autonomous aircraft and, and their use in this space already have engaged even with the limited commercial drones that have been available for years. So seeing those people say, oh, okay, wow. We could have a 10 hour plus endurance aircraft that could do everything we want, universally available for our firefighting people. Okay? This is a game changer for us. No longer are we suffering from 20 minute endurance or an hour endurance. At the most, it's this kind of, they get it, but now they want more of it. Those are the people who've had the best conversations with people who are in charge of vast land holdings. Australia in Alaska. These are

Bryan 47:51

Have you been working with? Are you actually engaged with people over in Australia and Alaska?

Jeff Baxter 47:57

Definitely, yeah. Alaska's been one of the biggest proponents for what we're working on because their, again, their land holdings are not accessible by road. They have fires that are completely, there is no road to even get close, so you must address it from the air. They understand the air piece and they understand the advanced technology. They want to see lots of data be collected on fires and provided to people,

Bryan 48:21

so is it safe to say it when an investor comes and is talking to you, kicking the wheels, and they say how long until you have a customer? If they put in the development money that you need, and this thing's developed, do you have customers that could use your, I, let's say, your full production capacity or initial production capacity?

Jeff Baxter 48:40

Yeah, I think that's, that's clearly the case, that they are aggressively interested in new technology that helps them solve these problems. I don't think that's the issue. I think there's the product realization to a point when they're confident, they can feel that successfully and we could feel the for them or provide data successfully. That's the hurdle.

Bryan 49:00

Hmm. So it's not so much giving them the toy, but it's being able to play with the toy without breaking.

Jeff Baxter 49:06

Yeah. And in order to abstract some of that risk out, they're not necessarily aviation professionals. And so we have partners with our company and we have pilots ourselves so that we can provide them data as a service, not aircraft sales. That's a totally different model than they've experienced from an unmanned aviation perspective up to this. We've seen limited cases where that's been deployed in Colorado as a good example of this. And it works really well. It's like the people who do the aviation part really well get to do their professional expertise and the firefighters get the data they need. That's the way that the future is gonna be built. I would love to see somebody say robotic aircraft are not the future Love to have that debate. I already had a good debate with somebody. An exec had a SpaceX that we had some, some good, review from and, his primary feedback was like, if you guys build this, we will, as humans, we will overuse it. We will, we will use it when we shouldn't. and, and so I think that's totally fair and probably true, but man, the alternative, the opposite of that analogy or the opposite of that logic is therefore we should not build it. That I don't agree with. We should have the ability to make decisions, we should build our own capability to make decisions, and then we should all agree very carefully what the right decisions are. But we shouldn't even have the opportunity to turn a fire off that we would like to, it seems like. Uh, head in the sand approach. Once the fire's burning towards your city, forced thinning, doesn't matter.

Bryan 50:38

Yeah. One of the things too is the people we spend time around, shape our worldview. And this guy, I can see someone who spent enough time with Elon Elon's fear that keeps him up at night is AI taking over the world? It's. Terminator in the future is what he's most afraid of that being his primary fear of having that tool and using it where it should not be used is a legit fear.

Jeff Baxter 51:00

we shouldn't develop ai. No, it's the opposite. It's like, Let's engage, let's, let's try and have a good outcome here

Bryan 51:09

Yeah. And I think we both agree that that's exactly what it is. We want that guy joining the conversation We want him in the room who's just so afraid that it's gonna be overused and inappropriately used that we just say, in this situation, you're right, And he keeps reminding us again and again, because the pendulum's gonna swing. It always goes too far one way and then back the other way. If you can make it not swing too far the first time, You just took out a whole, swing cycle and that's just benefit to humanity.

Jeff Baxter 51:40

Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely fire that's healthy for the forest. It's been that way forever, but more than 90% of the fires are human caused. At some point we gotta say not all that should be there, I think that's the balance. People lose context of in, a city's environment, just to be a little bit harsh. All the criticism I've ever gotten is from people who have never lived where there's fires, they've only seen smoke, they've never actually been around a forest fire. And I think that's once you see it, once you presence it and how scary it is, and when your family looks at you and you look back at them like, I'm gonna do my best, but I can't make any guarantees, that's a different life experience and not something that I want anybody to have, and it changes you. It's like, okay, that should never occur. It should never. To have somebody have that experience and, we're not in that place that occurs regularly.

Bryan 52:34

Hmm. There's The guy with at and t who's in charge of their disaster response, I heard him on another podcast from a year and a half ago. Because hurricanes are predictable as to when they're gonna pass through. And they know where cell towers are gonna be knocked out. They're able to put up heavy lift drones hundred pound drones, new cell coverage. Within three hours of the hurricane going through their trucks have already been staged. They've already driven in, and they've got a new cell tower up. Not everyone's getting 5g. But people can send text messages. They can call and say, I'm okay. Or my house is flooded You can at least get 9 1 1 back and forth. So I wanna have the question with him, why isn't that already happening with wildfire, where these people are out

Jeff Baxter 53:14

Because those first net trailers are$47,000 a trailer nobody can afford them. And it covers like this little tiny spot. It's again, it's like, it's financially driven. They're highly incentivized to, to not drive cost down cause it's so unique what they offer.

Bryan 53:31

By the time the hurricanes come through, they probably get pre-approval from FEMA to get that reimbursed. And that's one of the things on the financing of wildfire stuff, whoever calls for it, pays for it. It's funny, or painful. this fire chief out in a western state that will remain nameless, the counties all make their mutual support agreements And there was one guy in one of these four counties. This one guy said, no, we have to have on the contract that we will always, deploy all resources to the other counties because that's the morally right thing to do The other three guys were trying to tell this guy. If we have that on our contract, we can't get reimbursed federally because it's it's contracted into the budget. But if it's not in the budget, if it's beyond our budget, then we can get federally reimbursed for it. And this guy insists, no, we're gonna do the morally right thing. So they all end up with less resources.

Jeff Baxter 54:17

that's the problem. Like I feel very much in like the morally, yeah. I feel like I'm in the morally right camp a lot and like I don't understand the budgeting cycles well enough. I don't know how to play the politics well enough and, and those realities. Our hindrance are our company. Honestly, I'm just not, neither inclined nor good at some of those kind of the, the way that some of those decisions are made. And so that's a problem. It's a real, an issue, to our business progression. So I'm, I've decided to ignore that and just keep going from as best I can in the best way that I can get done. And, and

Bryan 54:52

Because you don't have to solve those problems to get to irrefutable technology demonstration.

Jeff Baxter 54:58

Yeah. Yeah. And somebody else is gonna hopefully step up and say, I can help you

Bryan 55:04

Hmm. there are high level leaders out There that claim when you say the problem's not solved, they're like, you're outta your mind. We got the problem solved But talking with incident commanders, The Problem is not solved because I'm the incident commander who doesn't know where my people are on the ground.

Jeff Baxter 55:22

Yeah. There I've been to some real winners in firefighting like that. You have these, these regulatory, federal level people declaring that they've got it solved and it's just the audacity. Maybe this shouldn't be recorded. That the the complete abject hubris of saying that they've got it under control is amazing to me.

Bryan 55:39

Yeah. it Was in legislation from 2018 that all this stuff would be solved by two years ago. but it's still not solved because I'm the person who doesn't know exactly where my people are out there.

Jeff Baxter 55:51

Yeah. I think that's one of the biggest concerns that I think is underlying the surface. We actually had a, a potential large customer say to us, well, hang on a second, time out once we have all this data. are we gonna be able to lock that down so people can't see what we're doing? And of course the answer to that is yes, but that that implies they don't want people knowing how they're fighting the fire because they're uncomfortable with how they're fighting the fire.

Bryan 56:20

And we haven't even touched on the accuracy of water drop

Jeff Baxter 56:24

Yeah, there's so many good, like we asked the best ericson pilot ever to hit the same target four times in a row and to Jeff Baxter standards wasn't good enough. He was close within like a couple of hundred feet and, and that's just not acceptable. We should be able to hit the target every single time. And those are the unspoken realities that these people are out there working really hard to do good things. But honestly, if you step back and you think about it, you, you did just tell people to walk out on foot and go look at a fire. Right? That's what you just told them to do. You're like, what industry does that? Hey Team, would you walk out into the middle of nowhere because we have no data and, and go see it? Like, wow, that's amazing that we accept that and that's, that's not acceptable and we'll get there.

Bryan 57:18

Hmm.

Jeff Baxter 57:19

It's so weird. I think it's because you can't, you can't tell the emperor that they're naked. The emperor's clothes are, are important. These are the people who write the checks, honestly, and it is. it is the role of government to centralize externalities like fires mega fires. That is the role of government because no individual person should bear that burden and, they are in the right place. They have the mandate to do it, and when it becomes obvious, this is the right tool, then it will get done. But it is, it's surviving to that point and developing to that point and getting the investment in before those eyes are open. That's very challenging. It takes a long time.

Bryan 58:00

Yeah. Yeah. When someone who you run into or comes to mind that would, that can really, can speak honestly, because if you've got career risk on the line, that's the biggest detriment to, to get the problem solved. If the choice is putting food on the table for your family or speaking your mind in a. You're gonna put food on the table for your family. You're not gonna blow up your career to

Jeff Baxter 58:26

Well, I think I don't really care anymore. It's like I'm, I'm My family's made so many sacrifices, for durations to make this thing work. That, jumping over that now is, is not as big of a hurdle as it once was. I was once very concerned about what other people would think about us developing. So, yeah, for me, that's a good point. but for others who aren't, who aren't just baked into the problem, it could be very problematic for, certainly for regulatory, like they have no incentive to, enable this kind of risk-taking. It's, it is risk, it's new, and so it, it just represents career risk for them.

Bryan 59:04

Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that needs to be respected. And that's, I think that, I believe that's one of the agency dynamics, that the solution set, the solution plan must design around the career risk of the agency people involved. And that's where I think it comes to what you just said. It has to be demonstrated such that it's so obvious this is the solution that their career risk is greater from not uptaking, But the first step is, and this is, I'm reading now, crossing the Chasm, it's a book from back in the nineties, you have, your early adopters and then your early majority, your late majority, and, the people that never come on board. You need to get that with your early adopters. The. Just enough demonstration that it becomes, there's plenty of air cover for the, early majority, and then once the early majority of taking it, there's, there's more risk for the late majority to not take it up. So, again, it comes to that goal and that's why you guys are looking for 3 million bucks, not 300 million, because you don't need to solve everything and get to the Forest Service. You just need proof case in Alaska proof case in Oregon proof case in a. And then your first mover, you're the winner at that point, and you keep moving it from there.

Jeff Baxter 1:00:19

Yeah, there's, I was trying to think of other people that would be relevant to, to help push that narrative forward and get, get some traction that the future's coming. You know, this industry kind of prides itself. It's odd. It's kind of like the rocket industry before SpaceX that prided itself in stability. And this industry also prides itself in stability. And it's a strange motivation that I'm, I don't fully understand. Um, but I think it is based on risk. It's like based on saying, I'm sure that this will work cuz it worked before or something. I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I'd love to just listen to a firefighter, maybe receive my pitch from ground zero, but responding in a safe environment with you. Like have them watch this video and do a reaction video and say, oh, a guy's an idiot. Or like, would love to. the insider of their brains of like, what do they actually think? because some people are very forward thinking, but what are those? What are those, I think they call them laggards in that book. What are those laggards that are late technology adopters? What do they really think and what does it motivates their decision making?

Bryan 1:01:24

I'm glad you bring this up. This could be an interesting piece There's apparently a very different reality out there. If we just bring, the reality to surface, and then we just say, you understand diplomacy, you understand, people, politics showboating and pr. Our goal is just to get the problem solved at the early adopters, which then opens up the door for the early majority.

Jeff Baxter 1:01:50

Yeah. The way I think of this is just awareness. Perhaps this person, said what she was informed and so she thought she was saying real things, but all we need to do is provide awareness to everybody of what's really happening, and then I have great confidence that people are smart. and that they will make good decisions with good data like that. I'm not too worried about us overusing the tool. I'm not too worried about us, reacting to fires badly, because actually forest thinning is the answer. we will all make the right decision when we have the right data set all of the data that we need. And I think that's what. I'm most excited about. It's just clean data. Just, oh, here's here's the fire. There's where the water actually hit the ground. Sorry guys. You missed,. That's gonna be great.

Bryan 1:02:33

You know what could be a good case? for you guys, for prescribed burn we need to enable, safe prescribed burn. And that's one of the reasons to have this suppressed within an acre. To keep the forest healthy, we need to be able to do, thousand multi-thousand acres prescribed burns. But in order to do that safely, you have to have the ability to monitor where that is, but if you can have drones in the sky, you can have a few thousand acre perimeter monitored all the time. And then if you've got a battery of, a whole truckload of drones that are ready to go, get that fire As soon as it goes outside of the planned boundary if it crosses over that road or whatever, then the risk of prescribed burn, it can actually be insured at that. So it becomes a matter of safety and all the surveillance can easily be operated, remotely for that matter. If that can be, a few of those could be sent up, or maybe you only need one, then you can do prescribed burns safely. Now, that's not gonna be your first use case because your first use case is go where it's most dangerous, but, that could be a common ground of saying, this is where we see the business eventually evolving, because eventually we get to where we can attack unwanted fire and suppress it within an acre. And then when we do that, it goes to forest management, which includes prescribed burn. And it's a matter then of making sure that our management activities are well controlled. And that's where the dragonfly

Jeff Baxter 1:03:58

is spot on. Yeah, you're right on. The first question you ask somebody who says that forest management is the issue, is what does that mean to you? And if that's prescribed burn, then it's the answer you just described. Or if it's forest thinning. then Yeah, them. How are you gonna do that? I mean, these things are just, This is a big area, very big problem. So any of the solutions, every solution will need data to make sure that we're doing it right, So I'm quite satisfied that dragonfly will get used in, in all the solutions that turn out to be.

Bryan 1:04:32

Hmm I kind of feel like we have wrapped through a. good field of useful content. Is there, is there anything that you believe we should touch on? I'm gonna invite you back on the show later, and I, we definitely want to get into the legacy players in your experience at Erickson, because I think one of the answers to why this hasn't happened yet it can only be answered in the dynamics of what happens and the organizational challenges within legacy. That's a whole other can of worms. But I think we've covered stuff now. Is there anything that you want to close on?

Jeff Baxter 1:05:04

So couple of things that I'd look forward to talking more about is what does starlink do to firefighting? That's like a whole theme by itself. We're really excited about that. The idea that internet anywhere is coming and how can we get that into firefighting as rapidly as possible. We think that has some very strong implications to the way the firefighting is. I think in addition to that, we really didn't get a chance to talk about SpaceX, and all the adventures there. So love to talk about that sometime too in the future.

Bryan 1:05:34

Awesome. Well thanks for coming on the show, Jeff, we will have you back on again in the future.

Jeff Baxter 1:05:38

Excellent. Thank you, Bryan.

Bryan 1:05:44

That concludes this episode with Jeff Baxter, developing unmanned eyes in the skies for fire surveillance. If you have any comments, please reach out on the solving wildfire website. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.