Episode 3 – Building the Future: Drones in Public Infrastructure with Jonathan Woodham

[00:00] Chris Tonn: All right, guys and gals, we're back again for another episode of Aerial Perspectives. I'm your host, Kristen. And today we have another special guest, Mr. Jonathan Woodham. So Jonathan, great to have you on the show. Good to be here. Absolutely. I'm doing a podcast. Yeah, it'll be interesting. Love to hear that. Well, I've got a little brief intro about you, and then we'll dive right in. Um. Of course. Joining us today is Jonathan Woodham, UA's manager at the Alabama Department of Transportation, where he's been pioneering drone operations since twenty sixteen. Jonathan played a key role in establishing a Alabama Dot UAS division and has led numerous projects with a focus on construction and environmental initiatives. He particularly enjoys the precision and hands on skill of manual flying, which he puts to work in a diverse range of projects. Notably, he was part of the team that won the twenty twenty Civil and Structural Engineering Drone Video of the year. Jonathan is guided by the motto there are two things you control your attitude and your effort. So with that, again, welcome, Jonathan, and thank you so much for the time.

[01:15] Jonathan Woodham: Ah you're welcome. Oh it's actually Albert. Yes.

[01:18] Chris Tonn: Thank you for that.

[01:19] Jonathan Woodham: So there's, uh, each state has their own, you know, f dot m dot. There isn't a dot, but we go by.

[01:28] Chris Tonn: I'm guessing I was dropping a little love to Alaska. In that case, maybe.

[01:31] Jonathan Woodham: Uh, I can't remember. Which one is it?

[01:33] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[01:35] Jonathan Woodham: I know we're al Dot so.

[01:36] Chris Tonn: Well. No worries. And thank you again for being here. Obviously, always like to kick off the show with a little bit of background on how you first got involved with drones. Where was kind of the first time you were exposed to a drone?

[01:49] Jonathan Woodham: It was at a vegetation conference, of all things. Uh, my previous life at Aldot, I was a agronomist, so I was involved in the vegetation management side of things. So anything that wasn't a bridge, concrete or asphalt, we kind of dealt with the herbicide program, molding program, that kind of stuff. So we were at a national convention in Roanoke, Virginia. I think it was twenty late twenty fifteen. There was a speaker there who was talking about how his company was using drones for asset management. You know, guardrails, bridges, signs, that kind of stuff. And so I got home, talked to somebody in our front office, and I said, hey, I was at this conference. They were talking about this. He said, well, it's kind of interesting. Our director, Mr. Cooper, was at a conference not too long ago where somebody else was talking about this, and he came to me and said, you know, maybe Aldot needs to needs to look into this to see if this is something that would be beneficial for us as a department. So early twenty sixteen, JD Darville, who is my boss, a guy named John Russell and myself were kind of approached and asked if this was something that you would be interested in, you know, starting or see if this is a viable thing for, for us. So we had concurrent duties twenty sixteen where we were still doing I was still doing agronomy stuff, and then when we had time, we would do drone stuff. It took about three years for us to get the positions, uh, done through state personnel, because it just wasn't anybody else, you know? Hey, we can't go look at another state or this other industry to see. Hey, what are the qualifications for this position? So it was a really long process because of that. So it really took three years. And in January of twenty nineteen, I officially became the UAS administrator. And drones was the only thing that I did. J.D. was the administrator. Drones was the only thing that he did at that point in time.

[03:53] Chris Tonn: Very cool. And was this something that at the time when y'all were at this conference, was it something small or big? Was it?

[04:03] Jonathan Woodham: There were probably three hundred people from across the country at this, and it was one of the larger asset management companies that was, uh, infrastructure that was starting. I think they were based out of Texas. Okay. And, uh, just kind of happened. I thought it was kind of neat and said something, and the big boss said, hey, this is something we need to look at. Just kind of snowballed from there.

[04:30] Chris Tonn: Did it did it become something that once you you got home personally that you, you wanted to explore even further on the personal side, or did it stay more of a work focus? What was the a.

[04:39] Jonathan Woodham: Little bit, you know, everybody goes and buys those those cheap, you know, twenty dollars drones and they end up getting caught under the couch or, or they fly away. And I was like, this is madness. You know, I don't I don't know if this is quite, quite what I want to want to do. And then once you start getting into the industry. And back then it was the P4. So when you fly something that has GPS outside, it's a whole lot easier than, you know, a nineteen twenty dollars drone you bought at the middle of the mall kind of thing. So once you start getting in there and realizing, hey, this isn't an impossible thing to do, it does become a lot more fun. It's like, you know, maybe, maybe there is a career path here.

[05:19] Chris Tonn: No, absolutely. Well, was it very much longer that you had a personal drone and, you know, and started to gain some experience beyond the the indoor ones? Did you go to like the Phantom Four and things of that nature or.

[05:34] Jonathan Woodham: No. It worked out to the point where I was getting enough flight time in at the office where I didn't necessarily need to go out and, and, and okay, what am I going to do this weekend to work on my skills? We're getting plenty of that at the office. And I was getting my fill at the office after after a little while we became so busy that the drones were pretty much my herbicide, or my agronomist boss was like, hey, I know you got a lot of stuff to do in here. So he took some things off off of my plate, which allowed me to focus more on the drone side of things. So I was my cup was was getting filled up at the office. I didn't feel like I needed to go out and spend all weekend working on my skills and that kind of stuff.

[06:18] Chris Tonn: No, that makes total sense. And, uh, you know, just going over to, you know, the Pelican drone side of the business, um, on our side, we were we were involved with, uh, Florida Department of Transportation on two larger projects in the area. Just around that same time, about twenty sixteen to twenty nineteen window, they were redoing a section of I-10, and they were redoing the three mile bridge between Gulf Breeze and Pensacola. And what was really neat about it was they were using this, these, uh, images to track not just the progress, but also kind of what's going on with risk mitigation, what's going on with certain weather? Aftermaths of if they've had a big storm run through also where the supplies are, you know. Are they in the right staging areas and who's on who's on site this day? Who's not on site? This day.

[07:06] Jonathan Woodham: Out.

[07:06] Chris Tonn: There? Yes, yes.

[07:08] Jonathan Woodham: We're being charged for.

[07:09] Chris Tonn: Exactly, exactly. And it quickly became so interesting to me that dots across the country. Would be looking at this technology to not just monitor progress, but to do so much more. On volume metrics, getting into, uh, you know, the risk mitigation, other things. Can you tell me a little bit more about how. That kind of started when you guys started to dabble with the asset management, but how it grew into much more.

[07:39] Jonathan Woodham: We, um, found a kind of difficult because a lot of large organizations, established organizations. This is the way we've always done this. So why are we going to look at doing something else? The way we've done it in the past has worked for us. So we faced a little bit of a struggle on the beginning of that, but luckily we had all the backing in the world from the front office. And for a dot type situation, if you don't have backing from the front office, it's going to be very difficult for you to be able to get a program like this started. So they're very instrumental in this is something we're going to do. This is something everyone needs to look at. And once you started doing some things for people and realized, hey, we're not trying to take your job away. I had a bridge inspector tell me you're not taking my job away from me. And I said, you're right. I don't want your job. I want to help you do your job. I don't want to be a bridge inspector because I don't want my name on that form if something happens. Sure, you have a need for pictures that you can't get to call me. That's how I want to want to help you. But our big breakthrough. We were flying a project in mobile one fifty eight ninety eight corridor going to Mississippi state line.

[08:51] Chris Tonn: Okay.

[08:52] Jonathan Woodham: We're flying some stuff down there, and our stormwater coordinator for the mobile region came and was like, hey, you know, what are y'all doing? So we showed him. He goes, I see three things right now that the contractor needs to fix. I want you to fly all of my projects. Yep. And so he had four or five projects going on at that time. So every six weeks he would have to go out and do an inspection. You either walk or drive that project. Well, if you're walking this is a seventy eight mile project.

[09:21] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[09:21] Jonathan Woodham: It's, you know, too much. It is too much. You're not going to be paying attention by halfway through. You're going to be like, I don't see anything. Or riding down the road. But when you're two hundred feet over the project, looking down, you see everything.

[09:34] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[09:35] Jonathan Woodham: And once he realized that that was going to be a great asset for him, he said, do everything that I've got. I want you to do it every six weeks. And we're like, okay. So we started talking to some of the other stormwater coordinators, and it just kind of snowballed from there. And I would say probably eighty to eighty five percent of what we do is a construction, environmental related project, because we've got so much going on for the state. And the environmental side of things is such a important aspect of what we're doing, that for us to be able to go out there, we can fly something and within an hour they can have the information that they need. The software that we use, we can upload it, it processes it and it sends them an email saying, hey Panos, for whatever project are available for viewing, they can get on there, look at it and say, hey, we've got issues, we need to call a contractor. And we had one. We flew that contractor called and said, hey, I'm out of rock, I need to, I need to buy some more rock. And the guy was like, no, you got bigger problems. You've got the wrong rock out there. Because no, I don't. He goes. I'm looking at the pictures from an hour ago. I can tell you've got the wrong rock out there. You need to pull all that rock up and get the right rock in there first. Yeah, but he didn't even have to travel to the project. He could look at everything from his office. So it. Saving him time, saving the state time and money by not having people traveling all over looking at these projects. The information came straight to him. So once those things started happening, they started talking to other people across the state and saying, hey, you know, these guys have really helped us out. You need to be using them. And then they would say, you know what? Let's let's give it a try. And everybody who has been a naysayer on the front side has come around and said, hey, you know, it is beneficial having you guys around. You're not going to take our jobs.

[11:35] Chris Tonn: You're sounding like drone business experiences in a nutshell. You know from whence they see it. It's such how did I do this without it? Kind of moment of realization. It's interesting too. I feel like that's how ChatGPT in a way helped AI, you know, just grow awareness wise so quickly. It's like, what do you mean? I just gave it five ingredients and it just gave me fifty recipes that I could make, you know, it was it was a it was a very eye opening, uh, you know, exposure moment. And in drones, when you take them to somebody's work place and you show them either a how we can be more efficient. B in your case, how you just discovered three things right off the bat that helped this, you know, person save money or catch it before it started going even further and more costly. Uh, it just continues on and on of benefits that folks see and one that you, you may have touched on but didn't identify it directly, is, is some of the imagery that we can see helps us see how the water run off or the elevations change on the ground. So with environmental, for example, as you were saying, I'm guessing y'all can use that to say, hey, this isn't in the optimal, you know, uh, uh, degree of tilt or whatever it may be for runoff. Is that something I'll use to.

[12:53] Jonathan Woodham: Somewhat more than more than likely what we're looking for or the stormwater coordinator is looking for is, is the sediment staying where it's supposed to be staying?

[13:02] Chris Tonn: Gotcha.

[13:02] Jonathan Woodham: So are the best management practices of the hay bales or the silt fences, those kind of things or those up and operational. Because if they're not.

[13:12] Chris Tonn: It's a.

[13:12] Jonathan Woodham: Problem. It's a it's a major problem. But you can also see that from the drone imagery, either with an ortho or panos, depending on the size of the project, we may do both. We also may do a photo plan that's looking upriver or downriver kind of thing. So they've got historical data from every time we've flown it, so they can scan or slide back and forth and say, okay, you know, we got a big rain. Nothing happened. You know, we're looking good right here or Hey. Yeah, we just flew this. There's mud outside the ears. It's not supposed to be. Y'all got issues? Uh, we don't get too much into the. Hey, this is not correct. We let the the experts on that do that. We just get them the information that they need to make that, to make that determination, which takes a lot of pressure off us because we're just flying. We're not having to call somebody and saying, hey, you've got issues or hey, we've got issues we need to go take care of.

[14:14] Chris Tonn: And I imagine everybody appreciates that. Everybody's there to help. It's just now you've got better views. Yeah.

[14:20] Jonathan Woodham: And sometimes the public's like, hey, what are y'all doing? Or you know, y'all sir I don't. Yeah. They just sent me to take pictures. You call this number if you've got any questions. Yeah. A lot of times they're just curious about what's going on.

[14:33] Chris Tonn: Always always. It's flying around. It's it's doing fun stuff, supposedly, but, uh. Well speaking of of of some of the, you know, getting into the sideline usage, you know, is there a favorite, you know, drone mission that you were ever on or just a fun one where you felt like, wow, that was a that was a neat story or wow, that was a neat experience where now I'm, you know, able to, you know, put that under my belt.

[15:00] Jonathan Woodham: I wouldn't say this, this is a fun one. But a couple years ago when the tornadoes came through and literally destroyed city of Selma.

[15:08] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[15:08] Jonathan Woodham: We got a call or my bureau chief came by my office. Uh, it's either Thursday afternoon or Friday morning and said, hey, the director has told the mayor that we can get out there and and fly all the storm damage. Is that something we can do? It's like, absolutely. Yeah. Give us a little bit of time to kind of get a game plan together. So it was Martin Luther King weekend right before that. So we went out Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, the only weekend and holiday I've ever worked for the Dot, and we flew from sunup to sundown, basically working nine, ten, eleven hours a day. There was four or five of us out there, so we were taking pictures. We were doing videos. We literally mapped the entire storm damage, uh, from city limits to city limits. And it was, uh, it was an eye opening experience because, you see, the storm does not discriminate. Nope. You had the country club got leveled and you had people who didn't have anything. And they're both in the same, same boat. Yeah. They don't they don't have anything to to move forward with. And, uh, so that was a not a fun one, but that was one that really, really sticks out.

[16:29] Chris Tonn: No, I know I.

[16:30] Jonathan Woodham: In my mind.

[16:31] Chris Tonn: I can only imagine I was deployed to Hurricane Michael after Panama City got just that, basically Cat five direct hit over at, uh, you know, Tyndall and everywhere else. And I saw major power lines down, you know, high transmission, the ones you don't usually see down the the water towers down, uh, train cars on their side, uh, just absolute carnage. And it was it was just an eye opener, to say the least. And, you know, it's it's been one of those that I think you, you grow to appreciate. One the situation um, and two, how this technology can sometimes, you know, really provide a quick solution of, you know, eyes in the sky of what's going on with the damage or, um, in some cases, it's re-established communications. I know that AT&T, Verizon have some really cool solutions where they can put, uh, where there was a damaged cell tower, they can put up a, a drone that's powered, uh, through a tethered line and a data line, and they're shooting out data for a mile radius and getting folks right back up and running.

[17:42] Jonathan Woodham: Well, that was a that was a tough one for our team. We've got a phenomenal team at Aldot and nobody complained. Yeah. You're not taking a break. You're not taking a lunch. You're just getting out there to to get to get the job done. And, uh, we, uh, were able to get everything flown, processed and delivered within a week. Wow. To the city engineer for Selma.

[18:07] Chris Tonn: And that's that's another thing we don't talk about sometimes is the level of imagery and how it does take a minute to sift through, especially mapping, getting it up there, geotagged, uh, and then put into the hands of those that can better use it. Is it did you find that to be one of the larger footprints that you've done?

[18:26] Jonathan Woodham: It's the second largest one we've done. So we were flying with the forty two megapixel camera. Wow. So as you know, the bigger the camera, the bigger the data. So we found that one image from a forty two megapixel camera is roughly three times larger than a twenty megapixel image that we've taken with, um, with one of our quadcopters after it's been through the processing side of things. So we, uh, we would have one pilot would have three or four videos spread out watching everything. We got one guy whose only job is watching the airspace because you got people flying over in planes. Just want to look to see what's what's going on. And you're having to de-conflict airspace, so you can't do anything like that without a good team. And we've been very fortunate at Aldot to have a core group of guys who've been with us for a long time to really, really help out with that. But like you were saying, you don't realize how big stuff gets when you're dealing with a with a project that big. We had a West Alabama highway. That's the four laning from mobile all the way to Tuscaloosa. Most of that's been done. There's like a seventy five mile stretch. It's not four lane. And they were having some issues with the survey, and they needed to see what all was out there. And so okay, when do you need this done. Like yesterday. So okay. So so the team loaded up. We went over there and there's another another project we work from from daylight to dark. And, uh, no complaints out of anybody on the team. But it ended up being, I think, if I remember correctly, thirty seven thousand images. And once everything was processed, it was just under four Trig of data.

[20:15] Chris Tonn: Wow.

[20:16] Jonathan Woodham: And then I walked it across the hall and I was like, don't know how you want to open this.

[20:19] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[20:20] Jonathan Woodham: But but here's everything that you've asked for. So we're flying basically seventy five mile wide corridor that's three hundred feet wide from, uh, Thomasville area, Alabama, up to just south of Tuscaloosa.

[20:35] Chris Tonn: Wow. Well, that's something I'm sure those that got the imagery really appreciated, and obviously is probably even made its way over to some studies. I imagine you'll share some of this data with universities or you know, where it ended up.

[20:51] Jonathan Woodham: I know some of the. Data got moved to, I think maybe Auburn or some places that got the stuff with Selma. Some other people were able to able to get that. We use that stuff for FEMA reimbursement as well. We fly all of our offices properties across the state every year. In case we do have storms that come through, we can say for insurance purposes, hey, this is what it looked like before.

[21:20] Chris Tonn: Absolutely.

[21:21] Jonathan Woodham: For FEMA, we were able the UAS team was able to, I think, get things around four million dollars back from FEMA because we were able to say, hey, this was a debris site. We took care of it. It's back to what it looked like before. Um, so we found out that some of the paperwork may not have been done right, or the inspection may or may not have been done right, but we go out there with the drone imagery and say, this is what it looks like.

[21:44] Chris Tonn: This is my backup. Yeah.

[21:46] Jonathan Woodham: And so we do that once a year now as well.

[21:49] Chris Tonn: I love that. I there's nothing better than drone imagery. Nothing really escapes the eye of the drone when it comes to, um, backing up what's been what's been done. Well, as far as drone missions go in, in regards of those MacGyver moments or those, you know, just interesting. Wow. We powered through something really challenging today. Was was there any other stories that kind of come to mind as a challenging one?

[22:17] Jonathan Woodham: Bridges.

[22:18] Chris Tonn: Yeah. Um, I can imagine.

[22:19] Jonathan Woodham: Bridges are fun. They're the most technically challenging things that we do. And, uh, the way Aldot is set up, we go through twenty hours of training. When you first come on board. It doesn't matter if you have one hour of flight time or ten thousand hours of flight time, you'll have twenty hours of in-field training with our training coordinator, Mike Kaiser. And there'll be some other guys as well that will take you out and get you exposed to all the different types of projects we do. Projects may consist of one photo or it could be forty thousand photos. It just just depends on what's needed. We also have a bridge training class that you go through as well. We've got a group of instructors up in Huntsville called energies, and they really helped us in the beginning of our program with a lot of our training and stuff. But they handle our bridge training class. So you also have a couple a couple of weeks of bridge training where you do have a final exam down on the bridge in mobile.

[23:23] Chris Tonn: Nice.

[23:23] Jonathan Woodham: Which is, uh, fun at times and when, unfortunately, I came real close to the bridge one time, and.

[23:32] Chris Tonn: Uh, that one's real.

[23:35] Jonathan Woodham: Yeah. Something happened that was, uh, I crossed in my office now with a wreath on it. Due to the, uh, the loss of loss of the drone from from that bridge. But us being able to take a drone that's twenty four inches wide and stick it in a space is thirty six inches wide and be able to move it, take the pictures, get the information that's needed. It's something that I think our whole team prides herself on because it's you're in a GPS denied environment, you're in low light, you can't see the drone, you're relying on your spotter, you can see what's in front of you.

[24:11] Chris Tonn: Yeah, yeah.

[24:12] Jonathan Woodham: But you can't really tell how far away you are from the girders. And sure, situations like over railroads that we may not have the ability to get our snooper trucks underneath because the bridge deck is too close to the railroad tracks, and there's not enough time to get the truck out when the train's coming. So we couldn't expect those sections. So we, uh, went round and round with the bridge inspectors on how how how can we do this? And so let's just put goggles on the bridge, Inspector. So the bridge inspectors can control the the gimbal. He can take a picture or video by tapping on the side of the goggles. Sure. We're not the ones doing the inspection. He's still doing the inspection. We're just putting him in the position to be able to get his inspection done. So those those things are. We all kind of like doing that? It's tricky. It's it's nerve wracking. You feel like you've run a marathon after twenty minutes.

[25:11] Chris Tonn: Adrenaline's up. All of it.

[25:13] Jonathan Woodham: In between the girders. But those are. Those are the ones that I really enjoy doing.

[25:17] Chris Tonn: That's really cool that y'all also are, you know, sharing with those field experts, you know, hey, here's the tools in my toolbox. Maybe you'd like to wear the goggles. You can take pictures. You can move the gimbal. It won't bother me flying, you know. And now all of a sudden, you've got some teamwork which makes the dream work. And, uh, y'all are we we.

[25:35] Jonathan Woodham: Try to operate with a closed cockpit so nobody's right over your shoulder saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, go go back, go back. You know, they can be standing a few feet away from you. They're seeing the same thing you're doing. So if you do have to make a movement for some reason, you're not bumping into somebody, which then knocks your hand, which hits the joystick, which then sends you into to the girder. So it's it's a safe way for us to be able to tackle a tricky, tricky situation. We had one that. Had a crack on the girder that for them to be able to look at it, you have to shut a lane down on a major highway, get all the equipment out there, get underneath, look at the crack, get everything back up on top, open everything back up. And it was going to take them probably a half a day to be able to do all that. Five minutes.

[26:30] Chris Tonn: You know what's going on?

[26:31] Jonathan Woodham: We put a spotter a mile down the track to let us know if a train is coming. That gives us time to even if he's traveling sixty miles an hour. That gives us a minute to get out. Clear the airspace. Literally took us five minutes to go get that picture. We didn't have to disrupt traffic.

[26:45] Chris Tonn: Yep.

[26:46] Jonathan Woodham: And so we didn't have that safety issue there. So we're able to get in and take care of things safer and more efficient. And a lot of times efficiency isn't something that's that's talked about in the government circle. But the drones have allowed us to be incredibly efficient in situations like that.

[27:04] Chris Tonn: I can only imagine. No, that's that's super cool to hear and obviously encouraging to see that it's not just one area of benefit, it's multiple. Um, one of the things also, you know, that I'm sure some of our listeners are wondering is, let's say I'm, I'm interested in this area of, of, uh, mapping or construction or even Department of Transportation. Style of work. Where do you find some of the strong suits of where I might want to spend some time? You know, because I often talk about, you know, the drones, just one chapter. You know, what the drones doing for your industry, whether it's photography or lidar or, uh, you know, uh, a whale snot bot, you know, it can range from all over the place. You know what? What are some of the additional strong suits that a young professional might want to beef up on if they were going into a drone? UAS. Department of transportation.

[27:55] Jonathan Woodham: For us, we don't necessarily care about how much experience you have. We're going to teach you, like we mentioned earlier, we've got the training for just regular flying and for bridge bridge classes, but we're not necessarily worried about how much experience do you have. We want to know, are you teachable?

[28:14] Chris Tonn: Yes.

[28:14] Jonathan Woodham: Because we're going to teach you everything that we need you to know. We're going to tell you why we have to fly it that way. Because there may be certain situations with a property owner, or there may be a ceiling that we're having to deal with from the FAA. So we're going to teach you everything that that we know and teach you everything that we need you to know in order to fly this. We need you to be willing. We need you to be eager to learn and to be patient, because you're not going to come in the best of the I mean, nobody at the Dot is the best drone pilot out there. We're all really good, and we all have things that, uh, are our strong suits that or that we may even like doing better than other things. But we need we need people who are willing to learn, willing to practice, be dedicated to, to to their craft. Because the flying skills for what we want to do may be completely different or say, like the motion picture industry.

[29:16] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[29:16] Jonathan Woodham: You know, we don't have a lot of fast moving shots where you're going after a car chase or something like that. We may have more of the technical side of things, where you're getting six inches away from a structure or inside of a structure. So that's that's probably the biggest thing for us, is willing to learn and being eager to, to get out there and just put the time in to become proficient at what we do.

[29:42] Chris Tonn: Yeah, that makes total sense. And I know it's always appreciated when we have, uh, a very learning, friendly style of employee. It just helps all parties when you're a sponge and you're ready to soak it up.

[29:55] Jonathan Woodham: We have a wide variety of backgrounds on our team. Uh, JD Darville is my boss. He's our program administrator. He's got a degree in criminal justice and say early mid nineties. He's always been on the technology side of things at Aldot. And Mike Kaiser is another one of our UAS managers. He came from our Forestry Commission. He started their program and we were able to poach him. Get him over to us. Uh, Kyle Clifford, who is got a law enforcement background. We've got a guy named Eric Lyons who's homeland security. EMS background, Steve Brantley, he's one of our pilots. He's also our tech. So somebody's gotta keep stuff up and running.

[30:40] Chris Tonn: That's true.

[30:41] Jonathan Woodham: He's got an I.T. background. We just hired two more pilots. They both have military backgrounds. Mine's in agriculture. So, you know, there's not necessarily one thing that just makes us as drone pilots, what we do make make us the best at what we do, because everybody's coming from a different place. And I think that allows us as a team to be better, because we've got so many different situations that you're dealing with. Kyle, with a law enforcement, you know, he has to keep cool at all times when we're talking. Before we started, we had a situation where he had a hard time controlling the drone due to interference. But he didn't freak out because of his training that he had in law enforcement. So everybody's background really plays into us being able to be a very effective team.

[31:30] Chris Tonn: That's that's so cool too, that y'all have that. And it's, you know, you have to remind yourself how new drones are to these various industries that we're now seeing as a common tool in the toolbox. Um, you know, do you, do you find that there's bonus points for folks that have had manual pilot training? I mean, I know you mentioned that earlier, flying under the bridge. The GPS doesn't work.

[31:52] Jonathan Woodham: Yes. Well, like we were talking about most of our projects, we're going to every six weeks. So we have autonomous flight set up because the stormwater coordinators, whoever's looking for the exact same thing on, on the project. But what happens when that goes wrong? What happens when the drone doesn't do what it says it's supposed to do? Because the technology, you have to be able to take care of that piece of equipment and get it on the ground safely. So we do training all the time on manual flying. Just even simple stuff. Go out and draw a box. Draw a figure eight. Do it backwards those kind of things. So we're always working on manual flights because a lot of times you can get complacent because you go, you open the box, you do your drone check, make sure everything's good. You go through your work orders, anything changed, and then you start your project and you're watching the ping pong go across the sky and it's taking pictures and it gets done or my picture's there, let's upload them and move on to the next one. So it can be real easy to be complacent, and you have to be ready for when something doesn't go the way you want it to. So that's why we focus a lot on training and the manual flying of drones.

[33:06] Chris Tonn: I think it's a definite strong suit of of skill set that is only going to benefit those that are interested in drone careers in general. It's it's a definite definitely brownie points category as long as you're teachable. I agree that's the that's the number one thing.

[33:22] Jonathan Woodham: And just just practice. Get out there and practice. It doesn't matter what you're flying stick time stick time, regardless of whether it's a bridge or a stretch of roadway or, you know, some of the racing type stuff that y'all are doing, anything like that is going to make you a better pilot in the long run. And I say documented as well.

[33:42] Chris Tonn: Yes.

[33:43] Jonathan Woodham: Document your flight time. Your flight hours. Uh, is it daytime flights? Night time flights? You know, all those things count. Yeah. Because you don't want to be able to. Or you don't want to have a situation where you've got to go out at night. You've never had a flight at night. What do you can't see the drone as easily as you can.

[34:04] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[34:04] Jonathan Woodham: And we had a situation back during Covid. There was a girl that went missing, and JD and Mike got called out in the middle of the night to go help look for the drone. So Leah or state troopers have a helicopter with a lidar unit. Okay, so they would fly, but a helicopter ran out of fuel. They'd have to go refuel. JD and Mike was in the drone up and continued looking. And then when the helicopter came back, they would land, helicopter would take back over. So just all of the training that you think that you might need, just go ahead and do it. It's going to be fun flying anyways. And just make sure you're documenting and recording that training, because when you do go apply for a job, if you lie and say, hey, I've got three hundred and fifty hours worth of training or flight time, and then you can't even get the bird off the ground, you know it's going to tell on you. But if you can document it and say, hey, this is what I've got and it's going to go a lot better for you in the long run.

[35:06] Chris Tonn: Absolutely. If you're if you've got that many hours, you can rest assured these employers will probably put you to the test pretty quick on proving some of that of what's on paper. So that's that's great advice. I love that. Um, any other, um, just, you know, looking to the future in this sector of Department of Transportation, of what you all work on, is there some stuff that you all are looking forward to that might be around the corner or some stuff that you're already looking to?

[35:34] Jonathan Woodham: We've been testing lidar. Yep. We've tested, I think, six or seven different units, and we've had our, uh, another group from our location.

[35:46] Chris Tonn: Uh, GIS.

[35:47] Jonathan Woodham: GIS and some of our surveyors have been helping out with that because we're looking for one to two centimeter accuracy to be able to do survey grade lidar flights. And you can't just take the salesman's word for it. You have to go out and.

[36:02] Chris Tonn: Test.

[36:02] Jonathan Woodham: It and put put the time in to figure out which one is going to be best. And uh, and also what are we going to be using with that? So over the past year or so we have been testing. So we've done that. Hopefully we'll have a decision next week on which sensor we're going to go with, and then we'll determine which bird we're going to put it on.

[36:24] Chris Tonn: And and that'll be used for more volume metrics surveying. Where are y'all going to maybe use some of that tech.

[36:30] Jonathan Woodham: We might could use it for volume metrics. We use our fixed wing fixed wing or quadcopters for that. Uh, but a lot of our, I think, uh, planning stages, construction, those kind of things, uh, we can, uh, it just opens up a whole new world for stuff, because right now we're just dealing with photogrammetry and getting amazing results and are meeting the need. But with a lidar unit, we can just far and exceed what we're doing.

[37:01] Chris Tonn: Yeah. And I imagine dealing with raw land in some cases, the vegetation, uh, getting down to that ground level of, of, you know, detail and.

[37:09] Jonathan Woodham: Show you the tree tops, but the leader can show you what's underneath the treetops.

[37:13] Chris Tonn: Exactly. So I'm sure that's very helpful.

[37:15] Jonathan Woodham: So we're excited about that. We've we've been looking at that for probably a little over a year now, and it's an expensive proposition. So we want to take our time and make sure that we're getting the right sensor for what Aldot needs. Uh, one of the newest things we just got is, uh, we got a hydrographic survey vessel. So a boat?

[37:35] Chris Tonn: Yeah.

[37:36] Jonathan Woodham: Um, and we've had some issues with a little lagoon pass right there in Gulf Shores. Um, we had to have a certain amount of flow that's coming through. Okay, we can we fly it every six weeks, but you can kind of tell what's going on from the imagery. It's fairly shallow, but with, uh, with our boat, we plan to be able to map it out the same way you map out a drone. You put your points out there. Hey, this is what I want the imagery of. And it determines the most efficient way to do it. So it's got a single beam Sonar unit on it and it's just shoot pictures basically of of the floor of what's underneath. And then we can process that and give that to whoever needs that information, and they can determine how they need to move forward with that.

[38:22] Chris Tonn: That's really great. So Aldot is not just the flying drones. We're now getting into the floating ones. Exactly. Any ground drones yet? Uh, running around?

[38:32] Jonathan Woodham: Not yet.

[38:33] Chris Tonn: Okay.

[38:33] Jonathan Woodham: Not yet.

[38:34] Chris Tonn: It's.

[38:35] Jonathan Woodham: Uh. I don't know if we can get one of the robot dogs to come up there and run around with us. Maybe, but nothing ground related yet. So we got we got the air in the water taken care of.

[38:45] Chris Tonn: That's super cool. I know the pass you're referencing over in Gulf Shores, and, uh, that would be a really helpful tool. I'm sure in certain conditions where either it's brackish or you can't quite see what's going on in trouble spots, this will tell you regardless of it.

[39:02] Jonathan Woodham: Is we have we have a great dive team, but some of these areas are just so murky. They say they can't see their hand in front of their face. So us being able to go out there and get the information without putting them in danger is another safety aspect for us as well.

[39:18] Chris Tonn: Everybody wins. Well super cool. Well, Jonathan, um, I always like to close out with each guest on a topic relating back to our listeners that, uh, kind of comes down to the job, uh, side of this, which we've talked about a little bit of, but any other just last minute advice for those that are interested in coming into, uh, the drone space or beyond, even Department of Transportation.

[39:42] Jonathan Woodham: Flying and everything you can we fly it can be anywhere from one picture to, like we said, up to forty thousand pictures. We do volumetrics for stockpiles for some of our district offices. You know, something like that saves days because we have two guys that go out. They have to shoot cross sections of the stockpiles and they got to go inside, do the math. We can fly that in twenty minutes. Within an hour we tell them what they have. One of the new things we're doing now is helping out with pavement assessment with some of our airports and also vegetation on the approach and departures, so we can go out there and do, uh, take imagery with the drones and tell them, hey, these are certain trees you need to remove. Once we overlay their departure angles, they're not having to go out there and trying to cut every tree. Hey, these five trees you need to remove. This is what your pavement looks like. We videos, we should do a little bit of everything. So just go fly something. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter what it is. Get out there. Go fly where you got five minutes or an all day event on a Saturday. Go, go do it. Get out there and have fun.

[40:51] Chris Tonn: I couldn't agree more. And and log those hours and build that portfolio up. Yep. So. Well perfect. Well Jonathan, thank you again for joining us on another episode here. And we greatly appreciate it.

[41:03] Jonathan Woodham: Thanks for having me.

[41:04] Chris Tonn: Enjoyed it. Absolutely. That's a wrap.