McDonald was among the speakers assembled at the Greene County Career Center by U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Dayton, to provide an update on efforts to lure the UAS industry to the region and to answer questions for representatives of business, government and academia.
That test center — the Ohio/Indiana UAS Center and Test Complex — opened on July 22 in Springfield’s Nextedge Applied Research and Technology Park and gained its first director last month when retired Air Force Reserve Col. Dick Honneywell was appointed by Gov. John Kasich.
The center hopes to win Ohio and Indiana a joint FAA test site designation this year, but it also will serve as the state’s hub for economic development in the nascent drone sector and will manage designated airspace in the region.
As Turner said, the FAA-designated test sites are to prove a concept — that unmanned aircraft can safely share the skies with manned aircraft. The explosion in business, he said, will occur after the two-year test period.
He compared it to the advent of the automobile industry.
For some already in the business, Ohio can’t move fast enough to open its skies to commercial UAS.
“We’re ready to test now,” Robbie Robinson, vice president of business development for Textron Systems, told the panelists.
Textron is the maker of the Army and Marines’ RQ-7B Shadow UAS and has been paying to use government airspace in Arizona that’s “hit and miss to get in” to test its unmanned aircraft, which are manufactured in Maryland.
“I would love to be able to help Ohio and the region out if we had this infrastructure,” Robinson said. “If the price was competitive, we’re prepared to come here.”
Honneywell, who most recently was vice president of aerospace at the Dayton Development Coalition, assured Robinson that Ohio’s pricing will be “very competitive” when flying begins in May 2014.
For his part, Turner championed the work of Congress, which, despite the political gridlock, has aggressively pushed for the UAS industry.
It took an act of Congress, he said, for the FAA to move toward integrating commercial and civil UAS into national airspace.
Earlier, he said, the Pentagon had been “adamantly against” the arming of drones — like the MQ-1 Predator, which is remotely operated from the Springfield Air National Guard Base — until congressional pressure ultimately changed the way wars are fought.
“Innovation has brought us to this point,” Turner said.
Others came to Wednesday’s panel discussion to explore how they can get in on the ground floor of the predicted boom in commercial UAS.
Urbana University is updating its strategic plan and wants to include UAS curriculum, said David M. Ormsbee, the university’s vice president of enrollment management.
“If Ohio is going to be UAS focused, we want to see how we can be UAS focused as well,” Ormsbee said, adding that 80 percent of Urbana alumni reside in Ohio.
Panelists encouraged Ormsbee to explore the field of human-machine relationships, along with IT and software development.
“Ohio,” Ormsbee said, “has a chance to be a leader or a lagger.”
Sinclair Community College in Dayton has approved $1.4 million to support an expansion of its UAS programs, which focus in part on first responders and precision agriculture, said Adam Murka, the school’s director of public affairs.
Sinclair, which has special FAA approval to train students using three types of UAS at the Springfield and Wilmington airports, has 22 students enrolled in a new class this fall called UAS Standards, Regulations and Law.
Murka cited the coming availability of good-paying jobs in the UAS industry.
“We don’t know where it’s going,” he said, “but we know it’s worth going there.”
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