From the Archives: How Austin Fire Department Built a Pioneer Drone Program with Jason Burnside

Welcome to dronecast Rethinking Public Safety One Drone at a Time, a podcast by DroneSense. We explore real world applications of drones and emergency response, offering a close examination of evolving trends in drone technology and its impact on public safety. I'm your host, John McLeod, director of customer success here at DroneSense. Jason shared so many incredible insights that we just couldn't bear to cut anything. So we split this episode into two parts. Let's get into the first half now. Hello and welcome to Dronecast. I'm your host, John McLeod at DroneSense. So thank you for joining me today. Today our guest is the wonderful and talented Jason Burnside from the Austin Fire Department. And Jason's not only just a great guy all around to talk to and an amazing asset to Austin Fire and its mission here in Central Texas, but he, Austin leads Austin Fires Robotics emergency deployment team. And the red team is really well known and respected not only in our community and in Texas in general, but really all over the world and has this great reputation of being this innovator in the UAS space, particularly in public safety, but really notably across the board, just for their generosity in working with people and sharing their knowledge and training people. And it feels like you've probably trained everyone who just wants to have a controller in their hand at this point. And that's really generous of you guys sharing those insights. And what we know about you also, Jason, is that you're a private pilot, so you're not a stranger to kind of UAS and kind of these difficult concepts and higher concepts just of aviation and manned aviation in general. So it's just a great resource. And so I'm super happy to talk to you today, particularly about the intersection of unmanned aviation and firefighting. Hopefully looking a little bit over the horizon and thinking to as this technology evolves and matures, what does it hold for the fire service? What does it hold for emergency management in general? Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate the work you guys do in our community to keep us safe and your partnership. So thank you for all of those things. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's entirely our pleasure. So thank you. Let's get started a little bit. In my experience, no one really goes to the truck trouble of getting a private pilot's license and a 107 license, because it's a lot of work sometimes unless you're really super interested and excited about aviation in general. And so I'm curious how that started in you. It was one of those things that growing up when I was in high school, I was introduced at some point to Top Gun. And that being completely honest, that just set off the firestorm of excitement of, man, that looks amazing. So for my 16th birthday, my dad ended up getting me a Discovery flight when we were living in Denver. I went and did that and I got to sit in the up front and they let me actually fly the plane for a little bit once we got up in the air. And man, it was absolutely exhilarating, addicting. It was something that I was really into. I wasn't in a point where I could start lessons with high school full time doing that. I was also in high school doing a lot of theater and other things. And I had other kind of curriculars. And so I knew that aviation was something I was interested in, but it took a back seat. I went a different direction in college. And actually once I first got to college, I was literally studying two things. I was studying aviation and I was studying theater and trying to figure out which direction, which branch did I want to go. And I actually ended up choosing theater. And it wasn't until I would say probably five years ago that I ended up in a place where I had the time, the money and the wherewithal to sit down and buckle down and start with my lessons. And I started. I got probably about 40 hours in, 50 hours in, and then I had my first child, my son Wyatt, come completely my focus went to that for a number of years. And I'll never forget my last flight before my son was born. I ended up meeting, I parked the plane with my last lesson. I met this guy coming out who was going to be the next student. And he said, man, if I could give you any advice, he was like, knock this thing out before you have a kid. And I was like, man, that's great advice, thank you. And little did I know he was entirely right. And it wasn't until probably a couple years later that I finally was able to re engage. I buckled down and knocked it out. And yeah, I've had that now for a year and a half. It's been amazing. You kind of alluded to there, but you had this parallel track in your life around the creative and performing arts. That's so interesting to me. And I think it's also kind of given you this really great ability when I've watched you train to communicate. But what's fascinating to me is you studied that and then you kind of transitioned to this career where sometimes we lovingly call hose dragger in that world. And I'm Just so curious sometimes about what was the inspiration for that because it's a really big change and also just because I'm someone who was in a band and I would have thought also in the creative arts at one point around that age. How did you explain that to your friends who are performers? I ended up getting my degree in theater. I have a Bachelor of Arts in theater with an emphasis in acting from the University of Northern Colorado, the UNC that no one knows of. And so after that I ended up moving out to Los Angeles. I had friends that everybody was choosing either coast and I went out to la. Absolutely loved it, had an amazing experience. But it was also very eye opening to the reality of living out there and what it was going to take to succeed. Just as becoming famous aside, just literally just surviving out there as someone working in that industry full time was coming into direct competition with other wants and needs that I had as I was getting older with wanting to start a family. I didn't want to do that out in Los Angeles having kids. I was at a crossroads at one point where I was trying to figure out what could I do that I didn't feel like I was giving up on one dream, but I was changing, exchanging one dream for another. And I was actually working the cliche as a server in la and one of the other servers was actually studying to become a firefighter. And we were talking for weeks on end and he was telling me more and more about what his experience was like and man, it just sounded really cool. Sounded like something that I thought would be something that I could do that was there was value there. And I felt like I would be helping other people. And I don't have that story of somebody who wanted to be a firefighter since they were five. I came into it later in life and then at 30, I ended up moving to Austin, getting a job with the Austin Fire Department. And I've been here for 11 years now. It's been an adventure and I absolutely love it. The saying goes that when you get a job as a firefighter that you've won the lottery. And I could not agree more. Yeah, it's so interesting because the performing arts are notoriously unstable. Right. And unpredictable. There's so many people who are competing for the same gigs and you kind of went to the other extreme, working in city life in a muni where it's like very, very stable and very predictable. And that's just really fascinating. Thanks for sharing that with us. I think it gives people a little bit of context on how you're built, which is super great. Turning more towards the UAS side, my limited observations within a fire station and around a fire truck is it's a really fascinating machine, and it's chock a block full of equipment. Right? Really important tools, super useful, very critical to what you do. And everything has a very proper place. It's very consistent. It's very understandable. And when you're in the dark and when you're tired, you can find what you need. So people are very choosy about what they put in that situation. So I'm curious, when you think kind of writ large across the community, when does a drone really earn its place on that truck? Everybody gets it, and it has that kind of ubiquity. You see those other tools. It's one of those things that requires a lot of patience on the part of anybody starting a drone program. It's like with any tool, firefighters need you to demonstrate the value and the reason why they would use that tool. Show me why I need to care about this thing. Show me why it's important to have it on the fire ground. And we've been doing this job for hundreds of years without a drone. Why do we need this now? And that's this. It's part of the history of the fire service. There's tons of tradition. And the same thing happened when we were trying to get people in the fire service to start using air packs. Why do we need air packs? We've been charging in there. What's the big deal? And then we learned more about cancer, and we learned about our ability to endure environments like that for longer periods of time. And so we start selling that. The benefits and the why behind it all those kinds of things. Us moving towards different types of power tools. And one of the new things now is power tools that are all electric. For a while, you had people like, oh, there's no way. There's no way it's going to compete with the pneumatic tools. And then you get your hands on some and we. We start practicing with them and do that kind of research and development on our own as a department. And the same applies for drones. It's one of those things that early on, we've been a program for 10 years now, and over those 10 years, it has been just chipping away at that kind of attitude of, why do we need this? And so much of it is just being willing to be patient with that mentality and understand that they are skeptical for a reason. Everybody's trying to sell a Public safety, something. It's the next greatest thing. But it's been a challenge to just continually show up on fire scenes and put the drone up and get new people in front of that screen and let them see exactly the benefit. Just this morning we had a three alarm fire down South Austin and it was an apartment complex. I got on scene and ended up throwing the drone up. And we already had aerial master streams going where we've raised the aerial ladders and they're flowing big water into this thing, just trying to put it out. And I end up using the thermal on our aircraft and getting up on the pedestal with the aerial driver. And I was able to show him my screen of where the hotspots were so they could angle and make sure that they were hitting the hotspots with intention instead of just kind of like, yeah, I think this is hot, or we're just going to flow this for 10 minutes and then turn it off and see where smoke pops up again. And he was really into it. And he, one of the things he even told me, he said, man, I joined like 10, 15 years ago. And he's like, if somebody would have told me when I first joined the department that I would be using a smartphone and a drone to fight fire, I would have told him to get out of here. He's like, first of all, I'd be asking them what a smartphone was. But he's like, second, you know, he's like, there's no way. I would have never thought that this would be a thing. And he's like, and yet here we are. And so a lot of it is just one at a time showing the value for different crews. And over time that buy in starts to become a thing. What really helps is if you have your chain of command who from the beginning sees the value see as tech forward and they want to start it from the top. So if it comes from the top, so much easier than if you're starting from the ground up and trying to win hearts and minds from that level. It's still a challenge. You know, it's interesting too, when I think about being in a fire station. You guys have let me kind of experiment with thermal cameras before that are handheld, but when you think about sticking one 100ft in the air looking down, you just have this entirely new perspective that's so interesting to add that in. I think we're still discovering all the things it could do because people go, huh, if it could do this, I wonder if it could do this other thing right? And I See these two routes that you're alluding to with the organizations we work with about how like their program came to be. And the first one is, and I think it's a little bit representative of your program, which is it was very ground up, like somebody's kid, or they got a drone for Christmas and they're playing around with it in the front yard and they went, this could be really useful. Right. And then they had to convince command to do those sort of things and make that investment and win over skeptics. Right. Who are. Because there's a lot of traditionalism in the fire service, and it's very useful in a lot of ways. The other way I'm starting to see a lot more of, though, is I think what you're talking about is command driven, where they've read something, they've seen something, and you have someone often who's a chief, who's the nerdiest fireman, is how I like to think of it. They're very tech forward and they like playing with things, and when they see utility in it, they kind of lean in. And so I know you talk to some, if not all of those people, it feels like who maybe they got voluntold by a chief. Like the chief saw you fix a printer one time and they're like, you can figure this out. But when that's the situation, especially if you don't have any experience with the hardware, it can be incredibly overwhelming to get started. It can feel really uncomfortable when you're thinking through. Every time you turn around, you're like, oh, it's one more thing I have to do get started is I've got to work with the faa, I've got to learn how to calibrate a compass. And all those things really add up to be a disincentive, and they can really slow progress. And so I imagine there's a little bit of work you're doing, again, out of generosity when you're talking to these folks, trying to help them get over that hump. But I'm really curious if you're seeing trends or there's something you've observed that maybe is the first tier in terms of that disincentive, is it regulatory? Is it just familiarity with. Or is it overcoming tradition? Right. Overcoming the experience? What works? What's worked for you your whole career? And do you really want to rely on this new piece of technology when your brothers and sisters are at risk? So I'm just curious how you think about them. When we talk about this, we always Go back to the analogy of the axe. You look at a hand tool like the Axe or a Halligan tool. It is simple, it does a job, it does a multitude of jobs very well. It is not overly complicated. It doesn't require software or firmware updates, it doesn't need to connect to the Internet. You grab this thing off and it's going to work. And it's easy to train people to use. And so that's one of those big hurdles that we have to find is that we all know drones are anything but simple. The idea is that it's sort of like ignore the man behind the curtain kind of deal. I'm back there yanking on a bunch of stuff, pushing buttons and things like that. But when I get on scene, I want it to look like I take a drone out of a box, I press a button, it flies and they have a screen and it's like, wow, that was easy. When they have no idea about the man behind the curtain sweating bullets and talking with the FAA and figuring out all the firmware updates and all this kind of stuff. It's a little bit of both worlds. But knowing that in order for that acceptance to happen, you have to have the people on the backside that are willing to put in the blood, sweat and tears and figure out all the logistics and fight those fights with legislation that is emerging and communicating with the FAA and all those things. So trying to find a way to make it so that if we have someone who is voluntold that hey, you're going to join the red team or you're going to learn to fly these drones, that we make it as we set the correct expectations, but we do everything we can to make it as user friendly as possible and position to them that the benefits so far outweigh any of the cons, that it's worth the frustration and the troubleshooting and the things like that, that this device is worth the work in the long run. We have several pilots on our team, that they're in a position that the department has determined. It's our field training officers, FTOs. It's been determined by the department that they will be pilots. They respond to almost every major incident and they have a drone on their unit. So once they get on scene, it's a kind of a match that makes absolute sense. They're already going to be there on scene. Why not give them a drone? They can throw up, throw the drone up and use that for an after action report. They can use that for education for the department and not to mention for actual putting out fire and, or whatever the rescue situation is. We've had a few of those guys that had no experience with video games, drones. Their biggest ability with troubleshooting a computer is turning it off and turning it back on again. So there is a challenge there, finding ways in which we can simplify all this and demystify, justify all this. I think that there's a lot of entities and a lot of groups out there that we're working towards that so that the agencies who maybe haven't wanted to jump in yet because of intimidation or feeling like this is beyond something they could grasp or want to invest their money in. We're trying to, on a lot of levels with the IFF and iafc. We have a robotics working group that we are trying to put together the big agencies across the country who have a ton of experience. We're collaborating to simplify this process so that when somebody wants to buy in, whether it be an entire agency or you have that one lone firefighter who is known to have that, that savviness with tech can have access to this information that is, it's like a roadmap that's not intimidating and it's a way for people to, to get to where they need to be and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. With mixed metaphors here, it totally makes sense. One of my observation is, because we work all over the world, is how the fire service works in the US is so different than other places, right? Like our fire services here are very much in some ways a mirror image of those communities and they're dialed in to those community things. It could be geographic, it could be a political conversation. And you compare that to places in Europe where there's one fire service for the whole country, right? And so one of the things we see is it's different than a normal SaaS company, if you're thinking about Microsoft or something like that, is we really have to reach out against and from just talking about the four corners of the screen, right? And we have to talk to people about hardware and environmental conditions. And one of the challenges because of the differentiation in the US is at the same time you have big city departments like you guys and fdny and you guys have a way to approach it. And you're also become very sophisticated over time about how you think about a lot of different things. And so we see this interesting spectrum of like between you guys and a volunteer fire department in a small town, like maybe the volunteer fire department trains four times a year or something like that, that's how much time they can spend on doing things. And so their preference is when they think about the user experience using our software, using our drones, where it's a single sheet of glass, they really need easy mode when they're working in those things, right? And then you have power users like you guys. And as those drones have become much more complex, the things they can do with camera settings, with basically it's just air performance, you can really dial that stuff in. And so, you know, we have this big challenge which is we have this huge amount of data revealed when we pull in data from a drone, right? And if we put it all on the screen, it might be really helpful to power users. But even probably would be really overwhelming, like you just wouldn't know where to start. It would be a distraction. And like I said, we get a little bit of both. And so often when we're designing we're like, what's the commonality between these groups? How do we steer into that? Do we have multiple experiences? Is there one experience that kind of serves everybody pretty well? And so I'm curious where you guys feel when you think about the future, if there was a spectrum between the easy button and kind of a more robust experience that you can customize to you or something in between. I'm just curious what you think. That's an interesting question. I feel like you're alluding to it's got to be easy, but at the same time there has to be kind of a happy medium, right? You don't want too much information, but you need enough to where everyone can meet in the middle and be happy. No one's overwhelmed and no one's underwhelmed kind of deal. It's like when we are flying and using either the using drone sense or if we're using even the native software, I think that everybody has it dialed in pretty well to where the same information is available. One of the things that it's interesting because, and maybe I'm from a perspective, a bias perspective of I know what I'm looking at when I'm looking at a heads up display, a hud in a way it's similar to like a glass cockpit. And what I'm referencing, for example, is the Matrice 30T. When you're in the, yeah, FPV mode or first person view, it has this kind of really cool and interesting HUD that displays showing you your aircraft's telemetry, vertical speed, horizontal speed, altitude, wind direction. All those kinds of things are displayed upon first glance, you almost need a decipher to understand what all this is, especially if you're new. I feel like that same information is conveyed just in a more. I think, I don't say simplified format, but a more user friendly user experience is a little more understandable for something like DroneSense, where at the bottom you have that attitude indicator, you've got the wind right in the middle and everything is displayed around in a logical fashion. I think that it would be interesting if we were talking about having variations. I think like what you guys have right now is manageable. It's digestible for a beginner as well. I think we had another alternative version to take that same information and transition it to a heads up display. I think the advantage to that would be for more of a power user you typically there's a little bit more information displayed there, but at the same time it's overlaid over the image in almost a less obtrusive fashion. I don't know if that's even the right word. It's something where I still can see most of the image but I still have that information there if I'm looking at that. If not, otherwise I'm looking through it, if that makes sense. It does. You bring up an interesting point and something we're actually prototyping and have been for a while, which is augmented reality. Different ways of displaying that information that are helpful in the situation. You see this expansion of technology, particularly in Meta and Apple with kind of these VR goggle sort of situations and it's not fully baked yet. Like we don't really know what it is that technology needs to do to be truly useful and adopted. But even you're alluding to heads up displays like in a lot of kind of the higher end cars like a Corvette and Mercedes, like that's just becoming norm and people will start to pick that up, which is really fascinating. You know, I think the hardest part is again not overwhelming the user, just figuring out like what's the critical information. Because FPV is great, but it's also disorienting for some people as well too. But I'm super excited to see how that shakes out. And we're like, we would like to breathe into that quite a bit because we feel like we communicate with our users really well. And we also have so many former public safety people on staff who really have that firsthand knowledge. So love the feedback you guys give as we're thinking through that. Love sharing prototypes with you guys and really letting you tell us like well, this was crap and this was really good and letting us reflect on stuff. This sounded good on paper, guys, but this is really not a great idea because we can have all these hypothesis in our head. But I'm not out there at six o' clock in the morning flying over an apartment fire. It's just not how my life is organized. Right. Fundamentally I'm a software designer. And so it's just really interesting to, instead of assuming, really get direct feedback from you guys and say, tell me what your life is like, tell me how we make that just a little bit easier. Because I try to live in your shoes as much as I can. I try to appreciate that. I don't. At the same time, thanks for all that feedback. When I'm thinking about also, fire department's not static, there are people retiring, there are people coming into the service, and there's a lot of mentorship between those two groups. This really critical functioning system. There's a lot of tribal knowledge, there's a lot of encouragement. And so I'm thinking if you are a new fireman, like you've just finished a lot of your education, going through your practical education, if you're in a department has drones like, you're never going to question it because you just assumed it was always there in some way because that's your reality. If you're 20 years into your career, maybe a few years of it, this technology has been around. Right. And you can be reluctant to that idea. Right. And people express that a lot of different ways, saying, I honestly just don't feel like taking a risk on it. And so I know you encounter that right from time to time and have definitely during your career. And you are such a talented communicator in that space. When I've watched you train people, that really stuck out to me. And so I think about those things a little bit as we talk to people. But I'm curious what you've learned that's worked over time. Like how do you frame that? How do you put some of those fears to ease? Is it repetition? Is it demonstrating the solution or are you talking people into it? I don't really know. So I'm curious. It's a little of all of those things. I think the big thing that I keep coming back to is the demonstration of the value of this product. Another big thing that we lean on is that this tool doesn't just do one thing. Show me a multitude of things that this thing can be applicable for. And that's when you start increasing or showing the value for somebody who's been in for 20 years. The other thing is, let me show you how this thing is going to either make your job easier or get you back to the fire station sooner and so that you're not sitting on something for an extended period of time, all because of a lack of information that we could have with this drone. I think, too, in the fire service, there are the agencies that every fire service looks up to, and you have those that live in that kind of have this mystique and mystery, and that are the old fire departments. Fdny, Boston Fire, Chicago Fire. These massive departments that have been around for a long time, steeped in tradition, that really tend to lead the way when it comes to trying to test out new equipment because they are so large, because they are in the metropolitan areas that they're in, they tend to get a huge influx in grant funding and just money in general. And so they tend to be the departments that lead the way in a lot of areas for emerging technology, whether it be public safety in general or fire service specifically. And so being able to point to those guys and say, let me tell you how FDNY's doing it, and every firefighter's ears perk up because, oh, okay, cool. When we can point to those big agencies and say, that's how FDNY is doing it, I think that lends credence and that lends legitimacy to their ability to say, okay, all right, well, if those guys are doing it, then you have my attention. All those things are useful. I think, truly believing in what you're doing. I feel for anybody in any career that is voluntold to do something that you may not be excited about. I think it really helps to have people who are bought into what this is and what this can be for the future of the fire service, how this can make us better at our job, how this can help make us safer. So our sisters and brothers in the fire service and other public safety agencies are going home at the end of the day, how we can better serve our communities. It's funny because there's not one thing out there that is a do all for all things. But the more we have the opportunity to learn about what drones can do for us in so many aspects of public safety, I feel like it's really tearing down walls of any kind of resistance or hesitation from the community to people within the fire service, public safety, things along those lines. I think it's getting to a point now where it's really hard for people to ignore and to sit on the sidelines and watch other people have these wins and these successes with this technology. One of the interesting observations I've had recently, because I came from previously the artificial intelligence world and I'm seeing kind of the speed of technological innovation just super accelerate. If you had told me then that my daughter, who's a high school senior, would be using ChatGPT in her English class as part of the curriculum, I would not have believed you and not understood what that meant. Right. And I had a pretty good understanding of the technology. And I see the same thing with drones. Like these equipment manufacturers in particular or makers of the aircraft are spending a fortune in R and D right now. They're really driving things forward and trying to figure something out. And so like the lifespan of a drone is not like on a five year depreciation schedule. Like a lot of machines and hardware in a municipal or state environment, like an aircraft really may be useful for two years before, like it doesn't have the processing power to do this kind of stuff. And so what's very opaque to me sometimes is what is it going to look like in five years? Like, I know what's going to look like in six months. Like, I have a pretty good idea that. But the five to ten year window to me is both very exciting and very unclear in terms of what capabilities are going to come forward. I know you're an early adopter personality and you think about that stuff as well too. And so I'm curious when you hear stuff in the media or popular culture also people within our industry about, gosh, I'm excited about hearing this thing might come into our world and be very accessible. I'm just curious, like, what features or capabilities that don't exist today that you're like, I kind of understand what I can do with what I have today, but gosh, if I had that, it'd be really cool. It's funny that you talking about this as I tell our pilots all the time, who knows where we'll be in five years, 10 years, if we're even still flying these things. It could very well be that it's one of those things that as the Red Team, we are now maintaining this equipment and it lives in a box on top of a fire station across the city that opens up autonomously at the press of a button at our dispatch center and it sends that drone to that location, which we already know is being tested and trialed in multiple different places across the country with Trula, Vist, Pearland, things along those Lines. What's exciting for me is seeing when we can get that technology that is going to be more accessible and we don't have the regulatory hindrances of requiring a visual camera system that is monitoring the airspace. That is a prerequisite to have this. That software or the camera system is more expensive than the drone and everything else. It's prohibitively expensive for most agencies. I think if we can get to a point where we have the ability to track this stuff similar to the way that we do with manned aviation, crewed aviation with like Flight Radar 24, you can pull up that app and you can see where everything's located for deconfliction purposes and things like that. I don't know if remote ID is necessarily going to be that. If we could get to the point where we have this Venn diagram lined out of where drones can fly across the city and we have those strategic locations that drones are positioned on, structures or things like that, fire stations, police stations, municipal buildings that we can then just launch at the press of a button and it gets on station faster than most of our resources would get there and then start providing actionable intelligence and real time footage. That to me is I think where this whole thing is going. I think that's going to be inevitable. I think probably we still will have pilots manning the aircraft, but in a different way way. The drone sense remote that you guys are working with, I think that is probably going to be the path. You will have drones on standby across the city and one or two pilots that will be on shift probably at dispatch or something like that, that will have the ability that once that drone is launched, they have the ability to take control at any point. And you would again in theory have one or two pilots on shift for the entire city, for your entire fleet of aircraft. I can easily see that's the way that things are going and that is going to open up a ton of options for us. And not to say that will completely replace having a drone on a truck and being able to go mobile with that. I think there's obviously going to be those use cases and the needs for that, but a combination of those things and hopefully with regulation going as it is, I know that the FAA is working with areas like the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex on coming up with that advanced air mobility corridors and what that's going to look like for drone deliveries, for vertiports and things like that, people movers. I think it's coming. I think it's going to be. It's going to be really interesting to see how quickly this evolves, but I think we're probably still five years out on the drone side of things and then maybe 10 years out before we're fully integrating the airspace with these air taxis and things like that. And that might even be optimistic. Oh yeah, for sure. Thanks, Jason. That's a really interesting approach and we can't wait to hear the rest of your insights. Next time on Dronecast rethinking public safety Dronecast rethinking public safety, one drone at a time is brought to you by DroneSense. To find out more about DroneSense and how our comprehensive situational awareness platform can help you fly, share and manage your drone program, please visit DroneSense.com that'S-R-O-N-E-S-N-S-E.com and then make sure to search for Dronecasts and Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are found. Please don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at DroneSense, thanks for listening.