I know there are many in the DIY community who also do UAV/UAS work as their profession and are members of AUVSI. I cast my ballot this morning and the leadership is still very top heavy in Defense Corporations and Mega Corps. This year we do have a chance to have our DIY and small business voice represented with two people who are up for election.
Ben Miller (http://benforauvsi.com/), of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office, is running for the Public Safety Board position. Ben currently operates my companies aircraft, Falcon UAV. We used to run Procerus/Lockheeds Procerus autopilot but have now converted all of our aircraft to APM and Ben is fully on board with that. In fact this week Ben and I executed some Falcon/APM mapping missions over in Mesa County. He is a firm believer in the power of open source, member of DIY Drones, and supports two COAs for Falcon and Falcon Hover running the APM autopilot.
Mark Blanks, Kansas State University, is running for the Academia Board position. Mark is a very common sense down to earth guy. Their university team is very much a DIY team putting together platforms for Agriculture and Public Safety uses. Mark is currently running a program dealing with airworthiness certification and will be an advocate for small businesses who don't have the money and funds to put their aircraft through an expensive airworthiness certifications and will apply common sense to how small businesses would operate.
If you are a member of AUVSI and want the voice of the little guy heard I highly recommend you put your vote in for these two candidates.
Thank You,
Chris Miser
Lead Falconer
Falcon UAV
Comments
Done :)
Done.
Thanks for posting this. I am an AUVSI member and have been trying to figure out who to vote for. I met Mark at the KSU UAS conference last fall. They are a great group at KSU and definitely think like most of us DIY types.
I am very worried about certification standards. This could be our biggest hindrance to commercial operations. Three to five pound foam airplanes don't need an A&P to change the 9" plastic prop.
I'm voting for Ben and Mark.
Dennis Lott