Like Palm Coast, County Government Plans To Send Small Drone Fleet Airborne

Two months ago Palm Coast government unveiled its plan to develop a small fleet of drones and use them for public safety, for inspections of public infrastructure, for surveys and the like–but not, the city insisted, for any kind of surveillance or aerial code enforcement.

Today, the Flagler County Commission agreed to do likewise in a plan that would be centered on its emergency flight operations, and that may soon spread to include the Sheriff’s Office and the property appraiser. The county already has a drone and has been using it to inspect its communication towers. But it plans to spend some $20,000 to acquire a few more and have a corps of four people trained to fly them.

The county and Palm Coast are joining innumerable local and state governments in the use of drones (first developed for military and surveillance uses), which can be a far less expensive way to carry out what are now expensive operations that require endangering human beings on high structures or using helicopters and other aircraft to conduct surveys or searches.

But the technology, currently policed by the Federal Aviation Administration, is fraught with regulatory, legal and technological uncertainties created in part by the speed at which the technology is developing, its ease of access, its affordability, and its inherent ability to go where larger aircraft cannot–for good or ill.

“My thought would be to keep moving the ball forward on this, and to keep identifying where the usages would come from, and I’d like to see them come from public safety first,” Commission Chairman Don O’Brien said at the end of a half-hour discussion on the county’s direction at a workshop this afternoon.

The discussion was led by Flagler County Fire Rescue’s Jamie Burnsed, a battalion chief and drone enthusiast who owns his own drone and framed much of his presentation in what he’s learned of the technology. “I’ve been yelling drones at Chief Petito for a couple of years, and he’s been putting me off,” he said, referring to Fire Chief Don Petito, who was in the room.

Burnsed said it costs $800 an hour to operate Flagler County Fire Flight, the emergency helicopter. Flying a drone costs $30 to $50 an hour, a cost driven mostly by the salary of the person flying it, not the drone itself, whose one time capital expense is around $2,000. Drones would not replace the helicopter, however, Burnsed said. (Burnsed prefers to use the more technical term for drones: unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, because it makes them sound less like toys, he said, but the clunkier term isn’t catching on beyond trade magazines and government lingo.)

In Flagler, drones would be used to conduct building inspections, communication tower inspections, code enforcement (a signal difference with Palm Coast), land management and inventories, “incident mapping,” before or after an incident has occurred, monitoring flooding situations, monitoring the county’s dunes-repair project, and various emergencies, including fires. “Most any large incident we could monitor from an aerial standpoint,” Burnsed said, with live feeds easily accessible in ways that Fire Flight does not accommodate. To make the point, County Administrator Craig Coffey joked that he’d want to rig up Fire Flight with drone technology just to get those live feeds on various emergencies.

As with Palm Coast’s approach, Burnsed sought to put certain fears to rest. “You can’t climb up on a ladder and look over a fence to figure out a code violation, we can’t fly a drone over somebody’s house to find a code violation either, so there are limitations to that,” he said. “But there are still some uses as it relates to all of that.” When Palm Coast unveiled its program, it had already drafted a set of rules and was still refining them. No such rules were included in today’s county presentation.

Burnsed said the county plans to establish policies and “centralize” the use of drones at its flight operation, seek grant funding, and prepare the public about drones’ uses. “It’s not something I don’t think you just want to start putting in the air or throw it out there that we’re using them without letting the public know what we’re doing,” Burnsed said, “how we’re doing it, how we intend to use this technology for their benefit. I think a lot of items when people hear drones, they think nefarious things, of people peeking in windows and things like that, and obviously we don’t want to be tangled up in any of that.”

The sheriff’s office was not at the table today. “We’ve been looking at it and examining it, we’re going to keep examining it,” the sheriff’s Chief Mark Strobridge said. “We haven’t bought anything nor will we in the near future.” The agency’s focus will be on “how to respond to rogue operators,” he said, as well as on search and rescue. But that’s only when the agency settles on a sound approach. “One of the things you have to do is you have to do it right,” Strobridge said.

During the workshop, O’Brien cited a recent Wall Street Journal article that noted persistent difficulties in rule-making, as well as the FAA’s attempt to develop the sort of safety regulations that ensure that drones don’t fly into other aircraft–or that they aren’t used to criminal, violent ends.

“Federal authorities and advocates of unmanned aircraft agree that reliable remote-tracking methods are essential for rapid industry growth, in areas ranging from package deliveries to expanded industrial uses and video applications. Such features, expected to be a combination of hardware and software, would allow law-enforcement and national security officials to identify suspect or potentially hostile unmanned aircraft,” the newspaper reported in late November. “But despite extensive company-government cooperation—spurred by White House pledges to fast-track decisions—trade-association leaders now see final FAA regulatory action stretching past the end of the decade. Some experts say 2022 is more likely,” or three years behind earlier goals.

Commissioner Dave Sullivan today questioned where the current money for the program is coming from. The answer was not clear. Coffey said there is no money budgeted for drones, but that money is being found in small increments from various capital projects. “It wasn’t a major investment,” Coffey said of the drone used for tower inspections. He said money saved on a capital project could be used to “ease into the program.”

“We have no money budgeted right now” to buy drones, the administrator said. “It depends how far you get into it.” Every indication today was that the county is getting into it.