Successful Drone Programs Put Safety First; USI Helps Them Do That

Over the past several years, the drone industry has increasingly engaged in advanced operations using larger aircraft, in challenging environments and beyond the visual line of sight of the operator. With greater complexity comes greater risk. USI (formerly Unmanned Safety Institute) provides a holistic drone program to help growing businesses and academia to build program success and obtain a valuable return on investment (ROI) through a balanced investment in safety.

In this interview, Dawn Zoldi and Josh Olds, USI’s President & CEO, crewed and uncrewed aviator and maintainer, discuss how the company serves a wide range of companies, educational institutions, and other organizations by providing safety education, training, and certification. While USI provides basic-level training, it uniquely provides elite drone safety content that goes well beyond proficiency, a holistic platform to track the fleet and pilot readiness and insurance credits to use towards the different facets of the company’s offerings. Read on to learn how, with USI, you too can create industry leaders, innovators, visionaries, and aviators in your organization, together.

Dawn Zoldi: Josh, please provide your background.

Josh Olds: I come from an operations background, as a pilot and an AP mechanic. I started my career in the remotely piloted world with Textron, where I flew and instructed on fixed wing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance UAS. I then transitioned to Oil and Gas security team where I flew remotely piloted helicopters for anti-piracy missions. In those positions, I cut my teeth on the operational complexities of advanced drone operations. The lessons learned contributed to the co-founding of USI. I've been here for nine years now, and the President and CEO since 2018.
Dawn Zoldi: Tell us about USI.

Josh Olds: USI empowers corporations and academia with workforce and organizational standards. We're about raising the bar so that the industry can find that ROI through repeatable, sustainable, and scalable standardized operations. We focus on safety risk management from the perspective of personnel, the organization, and the technology, across varying risk levels, in the most efficient and effective way, to increase overall ROI.

Dawn Zoldi: You mentioned ROI several times there. What makes you so passionate about helping businesses attain ROI?

Josh Olds: At USI, ROI is our obsession. It’s one thing to be able to perform an operation once; but for corporations seeking to deploy drone technology, it's all about the long-term scalability and repeatability of operations. ROI is the difference between just dabbling in drone technology as a hobby and running a real flight department with registered aircraft and aviation assets impacting a corporation’s bottom line. Reducing hazard hours and increasing safety internally to a company remains key to program success. We provide the safety foundation so that a company has all of the infrastructure needed to execute a 2 to3-year drone program sustainability ROI model.

Dawn Zoldi: Tell us about the team that helps you build out this foundational safety ecosystem.

Josh Olds: We have a phenomenal team. This industry is built of a lot of different cultures and our team reflects that diversity. We have people with experience in the Department of Defense, general aviation, the tech world, hobbyist drones, business development and more. And everybody has a servant leadership mentality. They realize that what we do is about aviation and that we’re helping companies drive a new era of technology forward inside of an established aviation industry. We all want to do things the right way from the start, to enable that long-term scalability through safety.

Dawn Zoldi: What factors do you consider when advising businesses on how to achieve successful drone programs?

Josh Olds: USI tailors products and service deployment based on the type of operations a business will conduct and what kind of technologies they will use. These drive the type of skill sets, documentation, emergency response plans, safety management systems (SMS) and all the other pieces that need to be in place for that organization to create a shared safety culture, scale and attain ROI. Operations fall into two categories, based on ground and airborne-based risk profiles: (1) “primary operations,” which is probably about 70 to 80 percent of the industry today and (2) “advanced operations,” which includes BVLOS flights, flights over people and other complex missions.

Dawn Zoldi: What services do you offer for these various types of operations?

Josh Olds: We offer a wide range of training as part of our personnel line of effort. Target audiences include remote pilots, technicians, visual observers, electronic observers and others involved in the operation. On the technology side of the house, we assist with everything from fleet maintenance practices to SMS audits. To do this, we leverage several software tools that make up our VISTA® product.

Dawn Zoldi: Explain how VISTA® works.

Josh Olds: VISTA® holistically addresses professional development. It incorporates our Learning Management Systems (LMS), through which businesses can manage safety credentials and personnel can receive digital badges. All of this is tied to third party proctored assessments. We also use third-party fleet management, pilot proficiency and currency tools. We can track proficiency and currency from a pilot’s initial Part 107 all the way through complex BVLOS training. The software helps manage the entire ecosystem in one place, whether a company has 10 or 200 pilots, one or 500 aircraft plus all of the technicians, visual observers and other people, equipment and relevant data, such as telemetry, that are part of any operation.

Dawn Zoldi: VISTA® ingests telemetry. Why is that important as part of a validation tool?

Josh Olds: Every aircraft is different. Businesses want telemetry data ingested into the system because that now becomes part of standardizing the proficiency and currency per aircraft. Having a single sign-on into every one of those tools in one ecosystem is an incredibly important part of our VISTA® tool, which we built to be drone and software agnostic.

Dawn Zoldi: Taking the conversation back to training, tell us about how you deliver it.

Josh Olds: Our whole vision revolves around empowering and enabling workforce development and training. So we have a LMS with self-paced online content, through which individuals can obtain certification through third-party remote testing. We created the online modality so anyone can participate in it, from any location. We also have hybrid programs with live instructors who use asynchronous or synchronous models. Finally, there’s an in-person model. As part of this, we have affiliate programs with colleges, community colleges, technical colleges and high schools across the country.

Dawn Zoldi: With so many different training and education modalities, how do you cover it all?

Josh Olds: We empower others through licensing programs. For example, we provide licenses to corporations that want to do their own internal training. We certify their instructors to do that. With academic institutions, we use more of a “train-the-trainer” model. We also have partners that can also do this regionally. We also do a lot of training at USI for those who want training directly from us.

Dawn Zoldi: Are all of these programs designed around a similar training standard?

Josh Olds: Because we're aligned with safety certification, we designed a standardized skill set and knowledge set. Whether the customer is a corporation or an educational institution, all students will train to a specific standard and receive the same proctored certification. A 12th grader in high school will take the exact same certification exam that a lineman at the electric utility company will take. This was why we established USI.

Dawn Zoldi: Why is training and knowledge equivalency within the commercial workforce so important?

Josh Olds: The identical skill set or testing that the individual inside of the workforce takes should be identical to the knowledge assessment that the individual within Career Technical Education (CTE) or at a local community college takes. This creates natural employment pathways.

Dawn Zoldi: You mentioned CTE. What is it and why is it so important to the future of the industry?

Josh Olds: CTE is basically education that combines academic and technical skills with the knowledge and training, in a real-world, applied context, to help them succeed in today's market. We view Career Technical Education, or CTE, as being so important because it’s educating our future workforce. I go back to the ‘90s computer technology and compare it to drone technology. In the ‘90s every career cluster had a use case for computer technology. Today everybody has a computer. The laptop or personal computer became part of business. It created efficiencies for doing any job. Today everybody has a computer. Drone technology is now doing the very same thing within every career cluster that exists (and there are 16 formal defined industry clusters). If you go into the medical field, there's medical drone deliveries. The same applies for almost every possible career cluster, from utility professionals to agriculture to public safety.

Dawn Zoldi: How does USI engage with state education systems?

Josh Olds: When we go into a state system, such as through the Department of Education, we start with CTE. In the CTE world, there is a need for a drone as a tool in the job toolkit. So we focus on embedding drones into these various CTE tracks. This way, the future workforce has that feather in their cap of being a professional aviator who can safely fly a drone commercially, in their particular professional field. The exciting news is that some states are creating standalone drone CTE tracks now and USI is plugged into education programs across all 50 states.

Dawn Zoldi: Along those lines, USI has different stages of certification training. Can you walk us through that?

Josh Olds: Stage One drone training certification involves the primary certifications for lower risk profiles, such as Group One aircraft under 20 pounds operated within visual line of sight or a highly automated profile. We focus on flight training using that “train-the-trainer” model with certified USI educators and ground instructors. Stage Two training is for more advanced operations. In both stages, we incorporate a digital badge structure.

Dawn Zoldi: How does the badge structure work?

Josh Olds: Stage Two has four levels of certification that cover everything tied to BVLOS, such as practical implementation of SMS, resource management, aeronautical decision making, human-machine interface, automation trend analysis and the future of where this technology is going. For example, today, operators deal with a lot of fatigue because they sit in front of a computer for hours at a time, monitoring and scanning systems.

The first section covers the concept of pilot fatigue from an operational and safety perspective. With this foundation, the next section focuses on application-based certification. The program progresses from this “initial qualification training” (aka safety standards) to how to actually employ the technology. For example, for utility inspections, the content focuses on how to fly in the wire environment and covers everything from shot sheets around a utility pole to what to do with automated technology if there’s an emergency. We go much deeper than how to fly the aircraft. We discuss doing routine site assessments, pre and post risk assessments, following checklists and abiding by organizational documentation the same way every time.

Dawn Zoldi: You have a very structured program. Can USI customize a program for a client?

Josh Olds: We can create custom training programs. This can be for a specific application of technology or for on-the-job training within an organization such as when a company has a specific way they want a pilot to do something and then wants to assess them from a digital credentialing perspective. This allows organizations to offer their own credentialing by leveraging our LMS and our third-party testing provider.

Dawn Zoldi: Besides helping people get the right level of knowledge to be successful, does USI also facilitate job pathways?

Josh Olds: Our USI Pipeline Program connects the commercial marketplace and academia to plug in pilots at the right level of operation. If a company seeks a Stage Two pilot who can fly BVLOS, we have them. Students can opt into the program by providing their CVs. We then connect the dots between companies looking for certain talent and the talent pool they need. Several weeks ago, we announced a pipeline program with Zipline. Any student that completes Stage One primary certifications and then Stage Two advanced certifications can receive an interview with Zipline. Because it’s a certification-based path, it doesn’t matter if the student came out of technical college, transitioned out of the military (for which we have an additional 16-week Skill Bridge Program) or is simply an adult learner reskilling, upskilling or changing career fields.

Dawn Zoldi: USI has forged a lot of alliances, from academia to state agencies, to the insurance industry. Tell us about your insurance collaboration.

Josh Olds: We have a partnership with USAIG, an aviation insurance underwriter where USI serves as their safety and loss control partner. This allows corporations that have aviation underwriting to spend “safety points” on safety services at USI. They can use those points toward certification programs, on VISTA® products and other products and services within USI. This essentially allows the insurance company to foot the bill for safety products. It’s a win-win-win because safer pilots have fewer accidents.

Dawn Zoldi: We’ve been talking a lot about drones, but eVTOL aircraft are on the horizon. Is USI providing training for that future eVTOL workforce?

Josh Olds: Advanced air mobility is a major component of what we call the advanced training program, or Stage Two, where we focus on Group 2 and Group 3 larger aircraft. The skill sets that come from that program translate over to eVTOL platforms, which will likely be single piloted at first, and then eventually, remotely piloted or fully autonomous and monitored from an Ops Center. We cover the needed skill sets.

Dawn Zoldi: What do you consider to be USI’s greatest success so far?

Josh Olds: What makes me the most proud is that our safety certification structure has become the gold standard for companies to scale and standardize their operations and has also inspired the next generation of aviators. Company Risk Managers consistently utilize USI’s program. That has helped grow the academic side because those companies need a future certified workforce. As a result, our programs have trickled down to middle schools. When these students enter high school, they can get our certifications. This gives them real career options and pathways to jobs in aviation.

Dawn Zoldi: Is there anything new at USI that you want to discuss?

Josh Olds: We just designed a new management software in the VISTA® tool, which will launch soon. This tool empowers an organization to deploy a program at scale, with all of the educational and organizational pieces in one place. This will make it easy to manage large operations and flight departments with a turnkey foundational infrastructure.

Dawn Zoldi: Anything else, Josh, that you wanted to say in closing?

Josh Olds: Thank you so much for speaking with me. I am really excited for the future of this industry and how USI can help build success, across the board.