December 10, 2025 • 44 mins
Drones have gone from hobbyist toys to decisive tools of war and essential infrastructure for industry. Few people have had a better vantage point on that shift than FenixUAS founder Dr Andrew Shelley.
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, the economist and aviation specialist explains how a decade of incremental innovation has transformed uncrewed aircraft into platforms that can reshape modern warfare, agritech and even search and rescue.
From DIY quadcopters to smart weapons
New Zealand’s first drone rules arrived ten years ago, when the technology was still rudimentary and often home‑built.
“Pretty much every part of drone technology has improved,” Shelley said.
Better batteries and lighter and stronger materials have almost doubled flight time, while mass‑manufactured airframes have brought the price of drones down. and far more capable sensors and onboard software. Other advances, such as sensor technology and onboard software, have flowed into features many consumers now take for granted, such as obstacle avoidance, rock‑solid position hold and follow‑me modes, as well as increasingly autonomous flight profiles.
The Ukraine war, now approaching four years in duration, has been characterised by the use of drones by both Ukrainian and Russian forces.
The changing face of warfare
Shelley recalled watching footage of a small first‑person‑view drone in Ukraine flying straight past a Russian electronic warfare vehicle “festooned with antennas” and striking the armoured vehicle ahead of it. The drone was trailing a hair-thin fibre-optic cable, allowing it to avoid radio jamming systems.
“To a certain extent, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is that the old is new again,” said Shelley, pointing out that the current generation of drones echo some of the cruise‑missile tactics from the early 1990s.
Shelley traces a clear line from ISIS workshops that assembled drones from AliExpress parts, through Turkey’s TB2 Bayraktar successes and Russia’s use of DJI’s Aeroscope detection tools, to today’s battlefields where consumer‑grade quadcopters handle intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and precision strikes.
The West, he argues, has been complacent: “Turkey was leading the way with its Bayraktar TB2, Iran is clearly leading the way with its Shahed series drones and we are playing catch-up,” he said, pointing out that the US is now reverse‑engineering an Iranian drone rather than setting the pace.
Artificial intelligence is only beginning to make its mark in commercial uses in New Zealand, but Shelley says the leading edge is already visible in applications like Christchurch‑based SPS Automation’s large agricultural drones. These systems can autonomously identify wilding pines and apply “a small amount of chemical herbicide” to individual plants, an approach he argues could transform conservation economics by reaching areas that are “almost impossible on foot” or too expensive to service with crewed aircraft.
Agritech, data and the search and rescue gap
If the military implications dominate headlines, Shelley sees at least as much untapped potential in agritech and emergency response. He cites spray drones that can drop slug bait on vulnerable crops in muddy conditions where tractors would churn up soil and helicopters are cost‑prohibitive, turning marginal blocks into productive land.
Pasture management is another frontier. Instead of consultants walking paddocks with pasture meters or towing instruments behind quad bikes, he expects drones to fly automated grids soon to map grass cover and optimise feed wedges across entire farms, backed by “clever software” to interpret the imagery.
Search and rescue, he argues, is “one of the things we haven’t done well with”, despite New Zealand’s vast coastline, mountains and national parks. Shelley believes agencies need to change their mindset and accept that in bad weather or hazardous terrain, “we have to move into a mindset where we’re happy to lose the technology,” risking a $100,000 drone instead of a multi‑million‑dollar helicopter and its crew to find people in distress.
Building a drone industry – and workforce
FenixUAS sits at the centre of the fledgling drone ecosystem, training over a thousand civilian and government oper
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The war in Ukraine has turned the humble quad copter
into one of the most important weapons of the modern battlefield.
With cheap first person viewed racing drones now hunting tanks,
artillery and infantry at close range, consumer gear you can
buy off the shelf, DJI style camera drones, FPV racers,
(00:23):
even three D printed parts and Ali Express components have
been hacked, hardened, and networked into a vast lethal drone ecosystem,
stretching from trench lines to deep behind enemy territory. I'm
Peter Griffin from Business Desk, and in this episode of
the Business of Tech, Powered by Two Degrees, we dive
into how a nearly four year war in Europe has
(00:47):
quietly rewritten the playbook for air power, not with stealth bombers,
but with drones that started life in hobby shops and
electronics stores. Those viral cockpit style FPV clips on social
media are just the visible tip for much larger transformation.
Commercial off the shelf drones have democratized air power, giving
(01:09):
small units and even non state actors precision strike and
real time surveillance once reserved for superpowers. So this week
I'm talking to Fenix uas founder and drone expert, doctor
Andrew Shelley, one of New Zealand's foremost authorities on unmanned
aircraft operations, regulation and training. Andrew unpacks what Ukraine, the
(01:32):
Middle East and other recent conflicts really tell us about
the future of drone warfare, from fiber optic, tethered FPV
drones and visual navigation guidance to how electronic warfare and
counter drone systems are revolving. We also bring a story
back home looking at how New Zealand companies and agencies
are using drones today in agritech conservation, infrastructure, inspection and training,
(01:58):
and where the real productivity game will come from. Andrew
explains why search and rescue is still an unrealized opportunity
when it comes to drones, how AI enabled agrotech drones
could transform everything from wilding pine control to pasture management,
and what needs to change in New Zealand's regulatory settings
to unlock that potential while managing emerging security risks. So,
(02:23):
if you want to understand how backyard drone tinkering turned
into a defining technology of modern war and what that
means for New Zealand farms, forests, coastlands, and defense planners.
Stay tuned for my conversation with doctor Andrew Shelley. Andrew Shelley,
(02:44):
Welcome to the Business of Tech. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
OHI thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Well, really great to have you on. I think Andrew,
you're probably New Zealand's foremost expert on drones, both from
in a practical sense but also in a theory medical
sense as well. You've done at least two degrees, the
focus of which was on drones. You're an economist, you've
been involved in the aviation sector for a long time
(03:10):
and currently you are the founder of Phoenix Uas, which
is you've got a team of people. They're probably one
of the biggest consultancies in New Zealand focused in this area.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Oh yes, that's right. It would be the largest consultancy
focused on the area. A big part of what we
do is training, so we have multiple instructors. We'd be
running courses for most weeks of the year. We run
at least one course, might be multiple courses and multiple
(03:42):
locations across the country. We'd have over a thousand people
through our training school each year, and that includes both
civilian and government people, including New Zealand depends forts, so
we see all of the regulations from both sides of
the fence. We also are one of the major writers
(04:06):
of what's called expositions. So if someone wants to obtain
certification from the Civil Aviation Authority to do something that
sits outside the basic part one in one rules, you
need to provide an operating manual of how you'll do
that and how you do it safely. Civil Aviation Authority
assesses that and requests changes if they need to, and
(04:28):
then ultimately you get certification granted and you operate in
accordance with that manual. We have as clients over one
hundred and fifty of the three hundred that are currently certified,
we've got about another seventy that are in the process
of going through that. So again from that perspective, we
have a broader overview of what everyone's doing with drants
(04:51):
then perhaps anyone else in the country.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Well, and we're going to get into that shortly, both
the commercial and civilian use cases that are emerging in
New Zealand, and also look at the military aspects as well,
which has been sort of in the media spotlight in
recent years, mainly due to the war in Ukraine. But
Andrew really keen just to get your perspective if you
(05:14):
look back over the last five to ten years, just
the massive sort of innovation that's gone on in the
drone space.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I remember probably about seven or eight years ago, I
bought a DJI drone. You know, the rules and regulations
were just sort of in the early stage in New Zealand.
I would take that out to a remote area, put
it up and you know, out of the woodwork would
come people, you know, shouting at me, why are you
filming my house? The seagulls and the magpies were dive
(05:45):
bombing me. So I sold it very quickly. I think
you were writing around the time twenty eighteen twenty nineteen
that we needed better regulations for sort of amateur drone
use in New Zealand. Talk about how things have evolved there,
But in terms of the technology, what are some of
the key breakthroughs that have happened sort of in the
(06:06):
last ten years that have made drones so versatile for
such a wide range of uses.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
If you go back ten years, that was when we
first introduced our drone rules here in New Zealand. So
it was obvious that drones were going to be a thing,
and a lot of them were fairly rudimentary at that stage.
A lot of people were building their own and DJI
was pretty new on the scene ten years ago. And
then if we look what's happened in that ten years,
pretty much every part of drone technology has improved, not
(06:33):
all in one big bang incremental improvements. Batteries have improved,
so now rather than getting maybe twenty five minutes like time,
you might get forty five minutes flight on. We're using
lighter and stronger materials. Some of the manufacturing has been
streamlined a lot, so that we've got the cost productions
that come with massive production three D printing of components
(06:56):
that were previously hand manufactured or machine And then think
about some of the senses. Just the camera on your
phone in that period of time has vastly improved. The
same senses are there on the drones, and that's also
gone to things like obstacle avoidance technology. Those are all
the things you can see. What you can't see is
that software on board, and that's continuous iteration and development
(07:21):
of those systems as well, so there's much better obstacle
avoidance than there ever was much better ability to hold position,
do advanced things like follow me mode, fly around a
point of interest, those sorts of things. That's all been
a huge series of incremental improvements.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
And the buzzword obviously in the last few years is
artificial intelligence. The generative AI revolution has that also come
to drones as AI making a big impact on how
drones are operated in what they can do.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I don't think in the consumer or commercial market yet
that it really is and and of course AI is
goes across a bit of a spectrum. For the last
thirty years, there's been talk about using algorithms to be
able to interpret data and predict what comes out of that.
(08:14):
But we are starting to see now some I guess
more leading each applications where AI is quite significant. I'll
drop a few names as I go through through the podcasts.
There's a new Zealand firm SPS Automation, and what they're
focused on is building large agricultural drones that can identify
(08:35):
wilding pints autonomously and go and deposit a small amount
of chemical herbicide on those just the wilding pint to
deal with that problem. And that's something that could be
done by an individual drone with an individual pilot, but
can be done so much more efficiently if you've got
an AI based system that can visually detect which these
(08:59):
plants are. So there's certainly applications like that which are
on the verge of becoming commercial, which could make a
significant difference.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, and we've seen some pretty impressive demonstrations a lot
out of China actually in terms of drone swarms, and
you know these potentially have military applications, but also for
entertainment purposes. You know, you can do some very impressive
light displays with them. But introducing autonomy into drones, like
(09:30):
you say, with the wilding pine example, if you can
send off a few drones to automatically identify a pine
tree that needs to be eradicated, you don't need one
operator with a joyster controlling each drone. That's going to
be a bit of a game changer for certain applications.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well will, and for that particular one, it's using drones
by themselves enables you to get to places that would
almost be impossible on foot and which might be prohibitably
expensive to do with mand aviation. And then once you
can go well, actually we've got maybe half a dozen
of these, maybe ten of these, which can go out
(10:09):
over a wide area. We can then do things which
at the moment which just aren't being done at all.
And so we do have this wild and pine problem
on the South Island also in central North plind and
it's just been cost prohibitive to be able to effectively
address it. So there's a conservation application effectively for us
(10:30):
that the use of ALI is going to make so
much easier and more cost efficient.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And in terms of there's drones, but there's also sort
of the ground equipment and it's very much around safety
and military applications as well, detecting, intercepting drones, jamming drones.
We saw these incredible photos out of Ukraine kilometers of
fiber optic cable strewn across the battlefield which is connected
(10:59):
to it drone to try and avoid that drone being
basically jammed and taken down through jamming off the radio
signals that operate it. So we're seeing well this sort
of innovation I guess as well happening. Airports are deploying
this technology to make sure that a drone doesn't come
into airspace and potentially cause an accident, and we seeing
(11:22):
a lot of innovation there as well.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Absolutely, And when you talk about the Ukraine case with
the fiber optics, I remember it might have been early
last year seeing a video of taken from an FPV
drone and there was two Russian vehicles that were coming
out of one road and turning on to another, and
you could see with the perspective of the drone the
(11:46):
front vehicle was some sort of arment vehicle. The one
behind it was festooned with the antennas. It was the
electronic warfare vehicle that was supposed to be jamming the
ability of any drone to attack, and this little drone
just flew straight past that one with all the electronic
warfare equipment on it and hit the armored vehicle in front.
We didn't have another view to show us just how
(12:09):
big the damage was because obviously the drone that had
been taking the photo is now blurt up. But that
illustrated one of the early uses of that fiber optic.
But I think part of that also illustrates that to
a certain extent, what we're seeing in Ukraine is that
the old is new again. So and by that wire
guided missiles, I think they came into effect in the
(12:33):
earlier in the nineteen seventies, so it's been around for decades.
And now we've gone from radio control for these strike
drones back to wyre guiding with a fiber optic link.
The other thing that is sort of the old has
become new again. As I'm old enough to remember Peter
Rntt broadcasting from Bagdad with my hero the Gulf War.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
That's why I went into journalism, watching how on top
of the building in Baghdad and nineteen ninety or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, nineteen nineteen, nineteen ninety one. I remember actually watching
Golf War footage at my when I got married that
My stag doer was like, we've all got CNN on,
we're watching the Golf War footage all that. But one
of the things then was that the cruise missiles they
did have crew GPS guidance, but their terminal guidance was
(13:27):
based on visual navigation, so you had images of the
terrain that they're flying over, images of the buildings so
that they could accurately navigate. Well, we've gone back to
that because GPS can so easily be jammed. We're now
using visual navigation for drones. If we're talking about autonomously
sending them to a location, they'll have visual navigation guidance,
(13:50):
and so yeah, it's interesting to see we've gone sort
of in a bit of a loop. The high precision
GPS guidance can be jammed, and so we need something else,
visual navigation. Back to the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And it's really incredible. And in terms we talk about
dual use technologies, stuff that comes out of Silicon Valley,
great innovation can be used for consumer purposes but also
for military applications. And I think drones and UAVs really
epitomize this. And it's become so obvious to the public
as a result of the Ukraine War. Just how that
(14:23):
is so true. How something that could be a very
lightweight sort of quad copter drone that you would typically
buy to put up to take beautiful photos and maybe
a real estate agent would use to take footage of
a house because they're trying to sell it. Suddenly these
first person drones have become integral to a war effort,
responsible for more deaths than missiles and bombardments and other
(14:49):
things that they're doing on the battlefield. It's really quite incredible.
It must be really eye opening for you as someone
who understands this technology and seeing it for the first
time deployed on a massive scale those sides of the war.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
It is, although it's not entirely surprising. So if you
look at the Middle East conflicts that preceded Ukraine, we
could see that this was starting to be an issue
with what ISIS was doing. So ISIS didn't have a
traditional air force, so it was starting to use drones,
(15:24):
be anything from your Dji Phantom twos, threes and fours
with a being able to drop a single munition to
actually having they had drone and manufacturing workshops that essentially
brought all their parts from the likes. I think it
was early express that they bought their parts from and
(15:45):
they could manufacture drones from the parts they purchased, and
so they were using those for ISR. They were using
them to drop munitions, not with the same effect as
one thousand pounds long, but certainly enough to suddenly mean
that the United States no longer owned the skies and
that now Western troops had to be worried about what
(16:07):
was in the sky above them as well. So we
went from that then Syria, there was a lot more
going on there than what we probably realized in this
part of the world. That's where Turkey was perfecting the
use of its TB two by Actar drone and the
Russians were perfecting the use of technology to detect drones,
(16:29):
particularly the djieroscope to detect DJI drones. So then after
that we go to the Niguno Carabac war between azer
Vaijan and Armenia, and the Turkish TB two drone was
used to great effect there to destroy armen and that's
what Ukraine used it for in the opening days of
the Ukraine War. And then Russia's experience with this djieroscope
(16:55):
and being able to pick up DJI consumer drones from
up to forty kilometers away, that was put into a
great effect by Russia in the opening days of the
Ukraine War as well. So as these drone enthusiasts said, well,
we've got drones we can fly, we can use them
to identify what Russia's doing, what China effectively did is
(17:16):
it disabled Ukraine's ability to use the auroscope system to
detect drones, but allowed Russia to keep using it. And
so there's plenty of videos out there circulating where someone
would fly a djidrone, it would come back and within
eight seconds there'd be an artillery round that was landing
(17:37):
within a very short distance of where that drone had landed.
So Russia had already perfected how to integrate drone detection
and targeting with artillery.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And there was the fascinating footage this sort of master
stroke often attacked by the Ukrainians on military planes that
Russia owned, and they managed to destroy a huge number
of planes, very expensive planes as well, And that really
was what was interesting about that was that wasn't a
long range drone attack because you would run out of
(18:09):
battery power going behind enemy lines into Russia. They were
able to somehow get those into the country, pike them
up in a truck, and deploy them from that truck.
So just the innovative things they're doing around the operation
and deployment of these drones as well, they're becoming sort
of quite deadly and used in really sort of ingenious ways.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Well they are, and I guess there's a couple of
other examples which would add to that as well. And
so if you look at the Hamas attacks on October seventh,
the opening attacks, there were a very modern combined arms operation.
You had cyber attacks, you had drones dropping munitions onto
(18:55):
cameras on the border posts to take those out, and
then you had their soldiers flying across the Israeli border
and paragliders and paramotors and things like that. So a
really modern form of combined arms operation. We think of
tanks and ground forces supported by air, supported by artillery
(19:17):
and that sort of thing. Their combined arms operation was very,
very modern, completely different from what we've seen there. And
then if we fast forward in that, an offshoot of
that conflict was the twelve day Israel Iran War, and
Israel had also had operatives inside Iran who had been
manufacturing small drones and they were able to deploy those
(19:42):
small drones from within Iran to disrupt some of the
air defense systems and the missile systems, so similar in
effect to Ukraine been able to assemble or deploy those
small drones within Russia, transport them a long distance on
the back of a truck. So it's a very different
(20:03):
but very brave way to use the small drones. You've
got operatives that are behind enemy lines, enemy territory in
order to be able to do that.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, it's incredible and I think all of us watching
around the world other countries have really studied the tactics
that are being used there, the technologies that are being deployed,
the first person view ones, sort of a lot of
viral videos of those. But there are big drones that
are being used as well. There are companies now that
(20:35):
Dji is famous as a commercial drone maker, but there
are big companies in Europe tech ever. I think it's
called the Portuguese company. It's now valued at a billion dollars.
So that's just in recent years has become huge staric
in Germany. We've got SIOS here in New Zealand out
of Tawonger that's done a deal with the UK Defense Force.
(21:00):
So it's really led to this flurry of innovation around
the world. And interested in your views sort of looking
through the lens of New Zealand where we're probably more
an I part of the world, interested in keeping an
eye on our realm, exclusive economic zone, search and rescue,
deploying drones to look for lost sailors and that sort
(21:22):
of thing. What's your view on how we have interpreted
what's going on in places like Ukraine and started to
prepare for our own drone needs here.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, I don't think the West is particularly well prepared anywhere,
And it's sort of like this year, we've suddenly waken
up and gone, oh my goodness, we need to do something.
And we've seen that in our defense Capability Plan, the
government's intent that we need to have long range strike drones.
(21:52):
But in reality the United States is actually not any
further well, they're a little further ahead than us, but
essentially they were doing the same thing. At the beginning
of the year. Pete Hesget was standing up and saying,
we've got this plan for American drone dominance because they
realized that they didn't have it. Now, just this morning,
I was reading an example of how much the US
(22:15):
does not have drone dominance. The announcement is that they
are now manufacturing a facsimile of the Iranian Shahib one
three six drone, which Russia is using to great effects
in Ukraine. Now the United States is going to be
manufacturing something that they've reversed engineered from that, and they're
(22:35):
going to be deploying it in the Middle East. So
it's not a US innovation that's leading the way. This
is an Iranian innovation and the US is copying that.
So I think this is symptomatic of actually the West
having been complacent in this area. We've got Turkey was
leading the way with its bi actor TB two. Iran
(22:59):
is clearly leading the way, whether it's series drones, and
we are playing catcher. But that's not a bad place
to be if you try to innovate fast is to
actually have to be playing catcher.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And it's great that we have at least one drone
company here that it has attracted international attention in the
form of Sios. It's won a number of awards this
year for its innovation. Anything you can tell us about
what makes that company particularly special in the drone space.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
At the moment, I think it's really just can do attitude.
Here's this problem and we can do it. Listening to
your podcast you did with Peter Beck, it's actually not
too different. It's like, here's this space that's dominated by
some big companies that are doing things fairly inefficiently. Well, surely,
(23:48):
as kiwis, we can do something about this, and we
can make something happen until you win some big overseas
contract that's worth millions and millions of dollars. You're happy
to do that on a shoestring and rely as much
as you can on innovating to do things as efficiently
as possible.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
I guess there's a sense that you know, this David
and Goliath war in Ukraine, that it's sort of drones
were able to level the playing field to some extent
in warfare, that you could have a small, less wealthy
nation and less resource nation that could really pack a
punch as a result of using these fpvs, this consumer
technology that's been repurposed, is that the reality of it,
(24:35):
I mean, this technology is now so accessible, as you've said,
around Russia, China, they really have led the way in
developing drones to some extents. It's I guess the nature
of the technology. It's so ubiquitous, the thresholds to entry
are so low that everyone has it now, so it's
not really as though any one country has a particular
(24:57):
advantage anymore with drones.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So certainly the ability to have a good isr intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance.
Good visual imagery is really important on the modern battlefaird
so you can see what the other side is doing.
But it's difficult to say how much being well resourced
actually necessarily makes it different. I think it's a very
(25:19):
conflict dependent. When we're looking at the Russia Ukrainian situation,
that looks like it's going to be a battle of
attrition that comes down to who can sustain the production
barms the longest, who can keep grinding away at that
And at the moment, both US administrations, the current US
administration and the previous US administration haven't really wanted Ukraine
(25:44):
to win. We've resourced them to the level where they
can keep going, but not that they can win. So
that's been an interesting issue in itself. But in terms
of how much do you need this technology? Does technology
give you an edge? So I was looking at some
statistics yesterday. If we look at Afghanistan in Ukraine, So
(26:05):
Afghanistan has population of about forty one million, Ukraine has
a population of about thirty eight million, about the same
amount of people GDP per capita. Ukraine is sitting at
about sixteen thousand US dollars per capita. Ukraine's it about sorry,
Afghanistan's at about two thousand. So Ukraine is fabulously wealthy
compared to Afghanistan, and yet it would be would be
(26:27):
hard pressed to say that the Taliban didn't win the
conflict in Afghanistan. It had the ability to outlast the
United States with all its fabulously expensive technology. It's exquisitely
expensive drone systems. Our predator is the latest estimate for
(26:47):
Predator is about US thirty million dollars for system. And
this guy was full of predators and armed predators, and
yet the US lost. So it's not always a case
of resource. And so this is one of the issues
when we think about what lessons as the West taking
(27:07):
from Ukraine, what lessons are Western military is taking. We
have to spend a bit of time sitting through how
much is that conflict representative of where we might be
in future? How much are other conflicts representative? And if
we're thinking about where is New Zealand going to potentially deploy,
(27:29):
we would most likely be deploying, I would suggest in
the Western Pacific or into Southeast Asia. And at that
point you've got a lot of jungles, a lot of
terrain that's really hard to navigate. Perhaps the mountains of
Afghanistan are better, although they're not so much vegetation, Perhaps
(27:52):
they're a better analogy for what will encounter rather than
the flat planes of Ukraine. Although then when Ukraine it's
the wet season and you've got all the mud, an
arm I can't move through the mud. Something happens in
the jungles, right, So there's certainly it's not clear cut
that there's one set of lessons that we can can draw.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, you can imagine we've got sort of limited firepower
in terms of air force fleet. It's not really decked
up for that since we sort of retired our jet fighters.
But we could have drones if we did have some
sort of rogue ship or something that was coming towards us,
drones would be an ideal sort of means of attacking them.
But in terms of like non state actors, criminal groups
(28:36):
that may co op this technology to do things in
New Zealand's terrorist attacks or whatever, are we preparing for
that sort of thing in terms of using technology to
jam drones to detect where they are. Is that becoming
a thing here in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Well, it wasn't until the Civil Aviation Act twenty twenty
through E that the legal powers actually existed for anyone
to do anything about it. That came into effect. Fourth
of April this year, so the legislation was passed and
it took two years for it to come into effect.
So there is the ability there now, but we don't
(29:14):
have processes in place to approve state agencies to do
anything much about it. Police automatically have an authorization under
the Civil Aviation Act to be able to develop processes
and take counter drone action. Other state agencies could, but
they have to be approved by the Civil Aviation for it.
And so interesting thing about that is that, to my knowledge,
(29:39):
no other state agencies have taken that step. Prisons are
a huge issue for contraband. Once upon a time, it
was putting a sock a tennis ball on the end
of a sock and stuffing some stuff in there and
swinging around, throwing it over the fence and having someone
pick it up. Now you can have a drone fly
at high speed across the prison at a preordained time,
(30:02):
have a release mechanism, and whatever the payloaders drops could
be drugs, could be cell phones, could be razor blades,
all of that sort of stuff. And so I don't
think New Zealand really has taken this seriously. The policy
people tend to be focused on this scenario of what
happens if there's a small drone that hits an airliner
(30:24):
and airliner crashes and then there's terrible loss of life.
In that ten years that drones have been a thing,
there's been like about four incidents worldwide where the report
has turned out that maybe it actually was a drone
and two of them actually hit the airliner and bounced
off it, and then when there's engineering inspection, it was like, oh,
(30:45):
not a problem. So this whole thing about recreational use
of drones being a problem for airline aircraft is not
really a thing for airline aircraft. You have to be
more concerned about someone who's gotten nefarious attend someone who's
decided they're going to replicate what they see overseas and
fly a first person view drone with explosives into an engine.
(31:07):
Something like that. It's certainly possible, particularly if it's on
the ground. Maybe even if it's coming into land or
take off. Something like that, that is possible. We haven't
actually seen that happen yet, but it's certainly a possibility
that could occur, and I'm not sure that we're ready
for it at all. One of the reports I've seen
is that innovations in the Ukraine are taking about twelve
(31:31):
months to get to Central America where the cartels are
in their adopting them with drone technology. Takes about another
six months for it to then get to Africa, to
the Sahel where there's various conflicts going on there. And
from there though, once it's made its way to the
cartels in Central America, if you've got transnational organized crime
(31:52):
groups that linked to us in some way, then you
should expect that we could have the same technology here.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
It's obviously evolving rapidly, Andrew. If we look at the
commercial civilian use cases off it, the one that's been
promised for a long time has been piloted by Amazon
and others as drones an easy way to deliver a
product a pizza was the classic one. Domino's probably five
years ago at least now did a demo of that
(32:21):
in Auckland sort of went nowhere. Yeah, Amazon, as they said,
has been trialing it for a long time, and there
are some good startups that are finding good ways to
efficiently deliver packages with drones. How far away do you
think are we from that becoming mainstream?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I think a long one when it comes to pizza delivery.
I'm not a fan of the pizza delivery model, partly
because the technology isn't necessarily as folk proof as you'd
like it to be. For that, if you're flying into
an urban area with lots of people around, coming and
hovering over a place so that you can lower down
this pizza, you have to have it so that nothing
(32:58):
can go wrong. And I just don't trust software that much.
Once upon a time I was a computer programmer. I
just don't trust software to get that right all the time.
And you could have other systems that will fail. What
happens when one of these solid state motors has an issue?
What is the meantime between failure for these We don't know.
That model, though, would work for transporting small loads to
(33:22):
remote locations. There was a trial done. I can't remember
it was earlier this week. I think it was last week,
and Towering are taking a medical payload out to met
Cartna Island and then bringing something back. That's a perfect
use case for it. It's flying over a location where
there's not going to be hardly any people, and it
can do that journey quickly and efficiently. When you're coming
(33:45):
to an urban area. My response there usually is we'll
have people who have teenagers on the scooters and that's
going to be a faster and more efficient way to
transport these payloads.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, I'll be surprised, I think if we have corridors
of drones constantly zipping around delivering you know, maybe in
certain cities where that works in Tokyo something like that,
but I doubt we'll see it here. But in terms
of where we get the productivity gains, where this can
really improve efficiency, I guess you know you've touched on
(34:17):
conservation and that, but agrotech is where it's at, really,
isn't it. We've got all this land we need to
monitor to keep eyes on. You can do that to
some extent with satellites, but so much more efficient to
just put a drone up to survey some land to
look at your crops or your pasture. With the sensor
technology now you can detect various gases and things like that.
So that's really I guess the sweet spot for us,
(34:38):
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, And I think there's still a lot of growth
to occur in that area. So one of the things
that we're seeing a lot of is people now using
the agricultural drones, particularly spraying. There's opportunities there to perform
tasks very efficiently with the spray drones. There you could
do with other means, but necessarily as well. Like one
(35:01):
of the great examples is using slag bait, applying slag
bait to a crop, to a market garden crop. Now,
if this happens in typically fairly wet weather when the
ground gets all muddy, and you could apply it by
tractor and then you're turning up to the MUDs and
you're probably destroying part of the crop, or you could
(35:22):
do it on foot, and that's really inefficient. It's cost
prohibitive to use a helicopter for that, and so this
is where drones can come in there and actually suddenly
that one plot of land becomes much more productive because
we're not having half the crop eaten by slaves. So
you've got something like that which is really good. Then
we can move on to thinking about some other innovations
(35:44):
that New Zealand's already achieved in pasture management. So one
of them is that on dairy farm you'll typically find
that they have consultants coming in working with them and
what you call a feed wedge and feed wedge says
looks at all your power and ranks them in order
of how much grass is in there, and so you know,
this one's got a lot of grass in there, that's
(36:05):
the best one that I should be putting the cows
and to get ximum productivity. And you're also checking to
make sure that you don't let the grass grow too
long and too much, because then its feed value goes down.
And so you can do all of that and the
technology that's traditionally been well, I guess traditionally now been
used for that is either walking across a paddock and
(36:26):
having a what they call a past gameter, which is
a physical device you put on top of the grass
and it tells you in that spot how thick is
the grass. And then that evolved into having something you
could tow behind your quad BikeE as you drove across
the pasture. And now the potential exists that we should
be able to get drones to be able to do that,
(36:47):
fly across a paddock and get for the entire paddic
what's actually the grass cover like. Now that requires a
bit of clever software and stuff from behind that, but
it certainly an approach that's the air and it could
yield significant increases in productivities.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
If you look out say ten years, which is a
long time in the development of this technology, how are
we going to be using this? How will it evolve?
Do you think what will surprise us about how drones
are used in everyday life?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Well, I think one of the things that will surprise
us is that a lot of the things that have
been well, some of the things that have been talked
about the most won't have them. So like that whole
pizza delivery things, there's too many challenges involved in that
for it to be be something that's particularly viable. We
hear of the advanced air mobility, the flying car concept.
(37:40):
People aren't going to have a flying car that means
in their driveway. In order to have something that works,
it actually has to be quite large. So I've seen
two seater flying cars which take up entire with the
two lanes of the road. So yeah, you've got things
things like that. It's going to be think of those
(38:01):
as more being electric helicopters and whatever is. Maybe they
have a cost efficiency relative to traditional helicopters, But I
think what we're going to find is that some of
the existing uses will become more widespread. Infrastructure inspection. We're
finding that, say, in the power line side of things,
(38:24):
firms have been starting in the last couple of years
to move into power line inspections using drants, but they're
still limited by what the rules allow, and that's limited
in part by the technology as well. So you can't
just sit here in your office, press a button and
have a drone go and fly one hundreds of kilometers
along power lines to conduct an inspection. You've still got
(38:45):
to have linemen out there doing that. So I think
there's a space there that we'll see quite a change,
and we can then extrapolate that out to other sorts
of infrastructure, like maybe natural guest pipelines and things like that.
As we get tech that develops has more safeguards built
around it, it opens up more of those potential opportunities.
(39:05):
One of the other things I think we haven't done
well with is search and rescue. Drones would be ideal
for search and rescue, but by and large they haven't
been utilized to great effect there, and so I think
again there's an opportunity there for us to significantly improve
how they use.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, and a hugely important area for us with our
mountainous regions, our national parks, and a vast ocean. You
know a lot of people unfortunately come to grief in
those areas. So instead of putting up a P eight
with a whole crew and hundreds of thousands of dollars
per hour, if we could put out drones to try
and get eyes on someone in trouble, that's got to
(39:45):
be hugely efficient.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Well, absolutely, And when we think about some of those
sorts of search and rescue situations, so maybe we're thinking
of maybe around a coast where it's quite rocky, hard
to access, and maybe the winds and visibility aren't ideal
for a helicopter to be there either. We have to
(40:07):
move into a mindset where we're happy to lose the technology.
We don't want to lose a man helicopter with people
on board, absolutely not. But if we've got a fairly
sophisticated complex drone system maybe costs US one hundred thousand dollars, well,
actually the potential to lose that as opposed to a
(40:28):
couple of million dollars on helicopter, and then the lives
we might need to be recalibrating how we think about
some of the potential for loss of equipment.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
And you've studied very closely our regulations, policies, you've done
a PhD in this space. Is there any one thing
that you would change now to steer drone development in
a positive direction in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Years And it doesn't actually require any rule changes at all.
So one of the issues we've had over the past
ten years is we've had this rule system that had
Part one to one. These are our standard operating rules
Part one O two. If you want to operate outside that,
you need to have certification from the Civil Aviation Authority,
and then there's been a lack of guidance as to
(41:11):
what would be acceptable. So I was listening to I
was at the Aerospace in New Zealand summer recently listening
to I think it was James Power from Dawn talking
about their experiences and how they had to invent everything
from scratch, including how they could satisfy the Civil Aviation Authority. Well,
what they were doing was safe, and so that's fine
(41:33):
as an organization that's trying to build something absolutely world
leading to do that, But then you've got subsequent developers
come along and you wanted to do something that's not
nearly as close to the edge of the envelope as
what Dawn's doing. But there's no guidance from CILIA as
to what would be acceptable. And what's happened is that
in the past the policy team from CILIA have gone, well,
(41:54):
this part one or two rule is infinitely flexible, so
if we provided clear guidelines, that would be limiting people's flexibility.
But what it's done is it's meant it's really hard
for people to know what's acceptable and what's not. So
the one thing that I would change is to provide
some clear guidance from Civil Aviation Authority. This suite of
(42:14):
measures is something that we would accept. You may propose
something else that would also accept, but we can tell
you that this suite of measures here is given what
we've approved day and experience we've had, these are things
that would be acceptable that would make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Well, that's good that practical advice, and they are revisiting
these regulations on a regular basis, so hopefully they'll take
that on board.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
On there. I'd like to say that there has been
a change in the senior leadership at CIA just this
year and it's been an absolute breath of fresh air.
Got a lot of almost excitement to see what's going
to happen. It's been a complete culture change at the
top and we've certainly we've seen it now with the
(43:01):
engagement with industry, with what the Civil Aviation Authority is
looking to do. So yeah, pretty positive about where we
might go in that space.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Hey well Andrew, thanks so much. It's been a fascinating
look at drones, how they're developing, how they're being used,
drawing on your incredible expertise, So good luck with Phoenix
UAS it's obviously thriving business. Will put links up to
how people can find out more about you. And thanks
so much for coming on one of our last shows
of the Business of Tech for the year.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Great, thank you for having me on. It's been a
fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
That's it for this episode of the Business of Tech,
the penultimate episode for the year. Thanks so much to
doctor Andrew Shelley from Foenix UAS for sharing his insights
on drone warfare regulation and the rapidly evolving drone ecosystem
here in Tauroa, New Zealand. And thanks to you for
listening to the business of tech. Make sure you follow
(44:05):
the show in your podcast app, and we'll catch you
for the final episode of season three next Thursday. Right here,
I'll catch you then.
The war in Ukraine has turned the humble quad copter
into one of the most important weapons of the modern battlefield.
With cheap first person viewed racing drones now hunting tanks,
artillery and infantry at close range, consumer gear you can
buy off the shelf, DJI style camera drones, FPV racers,
(00:23):
even three D printed parts and Ali Express components have
been hacked, hardened, and networked into a vast lethal drone ecosystem,
stretching from trench lines to deep behind enemy territory. I'm
Peter Griffin from Business Desk, and in this episode of
the Business of Tech, Powered by Two Degrees, we dive
into how a nearly four year war in Europe has
(00:47):
quietly rewritten the playbook for air power, not with stealth bombers,
but with drones that started life in hobby shops and
electronics stores. Those viral cockpit style FPV clips on social
media are just the visible tip for much larger transformation.
Commercial off the shelf drones have democratized air power, giving
(01:09):
small units and even non state actors precision strike and
real time surveillance once reserved for superpowers. So this week
I'm talking to Fenix uas founder and drone expert, doctor
Andrew Shelley, one of New Zealand's foremost authorities on unmanned
aircraft operations, regulation and training. Andrew unpacks what Ukraine, the
(01:32):
Middle East and other recent conflicts really tell us about
the future of drone warfare, from fiber optic, tethered FPV
drones and visual navigation guidance to how electronic warfare and
counter drone systems are revolving. We also bring a story
back home looking at how New Zealand companies and agencies
are using drones today in agritech conservation, infrastructure, inspection and training,
(01:58):
and where the real productivity game will come from. Andrew
explains why search and rescue is still an unrealized opportunity
when it comes to drones, how AI enabled agrotech drones
could transform everything from wilding pine control to pasture management,
and what needs to change in New Zealand's regulatory settings
to unlock that potential while managing emerging security risks. So,
(02:23):
if you want to understand how backyard drone tinkering turned
into a defining technology of modern war and what that
means for New Zealand farms, forests, coastlands, and defense planners.
Stay tuned for my conversation with doctor Andrew Shelley. Andrew Shelley,
(02:44):
Welcome to the Business of Tech. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
OHI thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Well, really great to have you on. I think Andrew,
you're probably New Zealand's foremost expert on drones, both from
in a practical sense but also in a theory medical
sense as well. You've done at least two degrees, the
focus of which was on drones. You're an economist, you've
been involved in the aviation sector for a long time
(03:10):
and currently you are the founder of Phoenix Uas, which
is you've got a team of people. They're probably one
of the biggest consultancies in New Zealand focused in this area.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Oh yes, that's right. It would be the largest consultancy
focused on the area. A big part of what we
do is training, so we have multiple instructors. We'd be
running courses for most weeks of the year. We run
at least one course, might be multiple courses and multiple
(03:42):
locations across the country. We'd have over a thousand people
through our training school each year, and that includes both
civilian and government people, including New Zealand depends forts, so
we see all of the regulations from both sides of
the fence. We also are one of the major writers
(04:06):
of what's called expositions. So if someone wants to obtain
certification from the Civil Aviation Authority to do something that
sits outside the basic part one in one rules, you
need to provide an operating manual of how you'll do
that and how you do it safely. Civil Aviation Authority
assesses that and requests changes if they need to, and
(04:28):
then ultimately you get certification granted and you operate in
accordance with that manual. We have as clients over one
hundred and fifty of the three hundred that are currently certified,
we've got about another seventy that are in the process
of going through that. So again from that perspective, we
have a broader overview of what everyone's doing with drants
(04:51):
then perhaps anyone else in the country.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Well, and we're going to get into that shortly, both
the commercial and civilian use cases that are emerging in
New Zealand, and also look at the military aspects as well,
which has been sort of in the media spotlight in
recent years, mainly due to the war in Ukraine. But
Andrew really keen just to get your perspective if you
(05:14):
look back over the last five to ten years, just
the massive sort of innovation that's gone on in the
drone space.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
You know.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I remember probably about seven or eight years ago, I
bought a DJI drone. You know, the rules and regulations
were just sort of in the early stage in New Zealand.
I would take that out to a remote area, put
it up and you know, out of the woodwork would
come people, you know, shouting at me, why are you
filming my house? The seagulls and the magpies were dive
(05:45):
bombing me. So I sold it very quickly. I think
you were writing around the time twenty eighteen twenty nineteen
that we needed better regulations for sort of amateur drone
use in New Zealand. Talk about how things have evolved there,
But in terms of the technology, what are some of
the key breakthroughs that have happened sort of in the
(06:06):
last ten years that have made drones so versatile for
such a wide range of uses.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
If you go back ten years, that was when we
first introduced our drone rules here in New Zealand. So
it was obvious that drones were going to be a thing,
and a lot of them were fairly rudimentary at that stage.
A lot of people were building their own and DJI
was pretty new on the scene ten years ago. And
then if we look what's happened in that ten years,
pretty much every part of drone technology has improved, not
(06:33):
all in one big bang incremental improvements. Batteries have improved,
so now rather than getting maybe twenty five minutes like time,
you might get forty five minutes flight on. We're using
lighter and stronger materials. Some of the manufacturing has been
streamlined a lot, so that we've got the cost productions
that come with massive production three D printing of components
(06:56):
that were previously hand manufactured or machine And then think
about some of the senses. Just the camera on your
phone in that period of time has vastly improved. The
same senses are there on the drones, and that's also
gone to things like obstacle avoidance technology. Those are all
the things you can see. What you can't see is
that software on board, and that's continuous iteration and development
(07:21):
of those systems as well, so there's much better obstacle
avoidance than there ever was much better ability to hold position,
do advanced things like follow me mode, fly around a
point of interest, those sorts of things. That's all been
a huge series of incremental improvements.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
And the buzzword obviously in the last few years is
artificial intelligence. The generative AI revolution has that also come
to drones as AI making a big impact on how
drones are operated in what they can do.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I don't think in the consumer or commercial market yet
that it really is and and of course AI is
goes across a bit of a spectrum. For the last
thirty years, there's been talk about using algorithms to be
able to interpret data and predict what comes out of that.
(08:14):
But we are starting to see now some I guess
more leading each applications where AI is quite significant. I'll
drop a few names as I go through through the podcasts.
There's a new Zealand firm SPS Automation, and what they're
focused on is building large agricultural drones that can identify
(08:35):
wilding pints autonomously and go and deposit a small amount
of chemical herbicide on those just the wilding pint to
deal with that problem. And that's something that could be
done by an individual drone with an individual pilot, but
can be done so much more efficiently if you've got
an AI based system that can visually detect which these
(08:59):
plants are. So there's certainly applications like that which are
on the verge of becoming commercial, which could make a
significant difference.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, and we've seen some pretty impressive demonstrations a lot
out of China actually in terms of drone swarms, and
you know these potentially have military applications, but also for
entertainment purposes. You know, you can do some very impressive
light displays with them. But introducing autonomy into drones, like
(09:30):
you say, with the wilding pine example, if you can
send off a few drones to automatically identify a pine
tree that needs to be eradicated, you don't need one
operator with a joyster controlling each drone. That's going to
be a bit of a game changer for certain applications.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well will, and for that particular one, it's using drones
by themselves enables you to get to places that would
almost be impossible on foot and which might be prohibitably
expensive to do with mand aviation. And then once you
can go well, actually we've got maybe half a dozen
of these, maybe ten of these, which can go out
(10:09):
over a wide area. We can then do things which
at the moment which just aren't being done at all.
And so we do have this wild and pine problem
on the South Island also in central North plind and
it's just been cost prohibitive to be able to effectively
address it. So there's a conservation application effectively for us
(10:30):
that the use of ALI is going to make so
much easier and more cost efficient.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
And in terms of there's drones, but there's also sort
of the ground equipment and it's very much around safety
and military applications as well, detecting, intercepting drones, jamming drones.
We saw these incredible photos out of Ukraine kilometers of
fiber optic cable strewn across the battlefield which is connected
(10:59):
to it drone to try and avoid that drone being
basically jammed and taken down through jamming off the radio
signals that operate it. So we're seeing well this sort
of innovation I guess as well happening. Airports are deploying
this technology to make sure that a drone doesn't come
into airspace and potentially cause an accident, and we seeing
(11:22):
a lot of innovation there as well.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Absolutely, And when you talk about the Ukraine case with
the fiber optics, I remember it might have been early
last year seeing a video of taken from an FPV
drone and there was two Russian vehicles that were coming
out of one road and turning on to another, and
you could see with the perspective of the drone the
(11:46):
front vehicle was some sort of arment vehicle. The one
behind it was festooned with the antennas. It was the
electronic warfare vehicle that was supposed to be jamming the
ability of any drone to attack, and this little drone
just flew straight past that one with all the electronic
warfare equipment on it and hit the armored vehicle in front.
We didn't have another view to show us just how
(12:09):
big the damage was because obviously the drone that had
been taking the photo is now blurt up. But that
illustrated one of the early uses of that fiber optic.
But I think part of that also illustrates that to
a certain extent, what we're seeing in Ukraine is that
the old is new again. So and by that wire
guided missiles, I think they came into effect in the
(12:33):
earlier in the nineteen seventies, so it's been around for decades.
And now we've gone from radio control for these strike
drones back to wyre guiding with a fiber optic link.
The other thing that is sort of the old has
become new again. As I'm old enough to remember Peter
Rntt broadcasting from Bagdad with my hero the Gulf War.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
That's why I went into journalism, watching how on top
of the building in Baghdad and nineteen ninety or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, nineteen nineteen, nineteen ninety one. I remember actually watching
Golf War footage at my when I got married that
My stag doer was like, we've all got CNN on,
we're watching the Golf War footage all that. But one
of the things then was that the cruise missiles they
did have crew GPS guidance, but their terminal guidance was
(13:27):
based on visual navigation, so you had images of the
terrain that they're flying over, images of the buildings so
that they could accurately navigate. Well, we've gone back to
that because GPS can so easily be jammed. We're now
using visual navigation for drones. If we're talking about autonomously
sending them to a location, they'll have visual navigation guidance,
(13:50):
and so yeah, it's interesting to see we've gone sort
of in a bit of a loop. The high precision
GPS guidance can be jammed, and so we need something else,
visual navigation. Back to the early nineties.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And it's really incredible. And in terms we talk about
dual use technologies, stuff that comes out of Silicon Valley,
great innovation can be used for consumer purposes but also
for military applications. And I think drones and UAVs really
epitomize this. And it's become so obvious to the public
as a result of the Ukraine War. Just how that
(14:23):
is so true. How something that could be a very
lightweight sort of quad copter drone that you would typically
buy to put up to take beautiful photos and maybe
a real estate agent would use to take footage of
a house because they're trying to sell it. Suddenly these
first person drones have become integral to a war effort,
responsible for more deaths than missiles and bombardments and other
(14:49):
things that they're doing on the battlefield. It's really quite incredible.
It must be really eye opening for you as someone
who understands this technology and seeing it for the first
time deployed on a massive scale those sides of the war.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
It is, although it's not entirely surprising. So if you
look at the Middle East conflicts that preceded Ukraine, we
could see that this was starting to be an issue
with what ISIS was doing. So ISIS didn't have a
traditional air force, so it was starting to use drones,
(15:24):
be anything from your Dji Phantom twos, threes and fours
with a being able to drop a single munition to
actually having they had drone and manufacturing workshops that essentially
brought all their parts from the likes. I think it
was early express that they bought their parts from and
(15:45):
they could manufacture drones from the parts they purchased, and
so they were using those for ISR. They were using
them to drop munitions, not with the same effect as
one thousand pounds long, but certainly enough to suddenly mean
that the United States no longer owned the skies and
that now Western troops had to be worried about what
(16:07):
was in the sky above them as well. So we
went from that then Syria, there was a lot more
going on there than what we probably realized in this
part of the world. That's where Turkey was perfecting the
use of its TB two by Actar drone and the
Russians were perfecting the use of technology to detect drones,
(16:29):
particularly the djieroscope to detect DJI drones. So then after
that we go to the Niguno Carabac war between azer
Vaijan and Armenia, and the Turkish TB two drone was
used to great effect there to destroy armen and that's
what Ukraine used it for in the opening days of
the Ukraine War. And then Russia's experience with this djieroscope
(16:55):
and being able to pick up DJI consumer drones from
up to forty kilometers away, that was put into a
great effect by Russia in the opening days of the
Ukraine War as well. So as these drone enthusiasts said, well,
we've got drones we can fly, we can use them
to identify what Russia's doing, what China effectively did is
(17:16):
it disabled Ukraine's ability to use the auroscope system to
detect drones, but allowed Russia to keep using it. And
so there's plenty of videos out there circulating where someone
would fly a djidrone, it would come back and within
eight seconds there'd be an artillery round that was landing
(17:37):
within a very short distance of where that drone had landed.
So Russia had already perfected how to integrate drone detection
and targeting with artillery.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
And there was the fascinating footage this sort of master
stroke often attacked by the Ukrainians on military planes that
Russia owned, and they managed to destroy a huge number
of planes, very expensive planes as well, And that really
was what was interesting about that was that wasn't a
long range drone attack because you would run out of
(18:09):
battery power going behind enemy lines into Russia. They were
able to somehow get those into the country, pike them
up in a truck, and deploy them from that truck.
So just the innovative things they're doing around the operation
and deployment of these drones as well, they're becoming sort
of quite deadly and used in really sort of ingenious ways.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Well they are, and I guess there's a couple of
other examples which would add to that as well. And
so if you look at the Hamas attacks on October seventh,
the opening attacks, there were a very modern combined arms operation.
You had cyber attacks, you had drones dropping munitions onto
(18:55):
cameras on the border posts to take those out, and
then you had their soldiers flying across the Israeli border
and paragliders and paramotors and things like that. So a
really modern form of combined arms operation. We think of
tanks and ground forces supported by air, supported by artillery
(19:17):
and that sort of thing. Their combined arms operation was very,
very modern, completely different from what we've seen there. And
then if we fast forward in that, an offshoot of
that conflict was the twelve day Israel Iran War, and
Israel had also had operatives inside Iran who had been
manufacturing small drones and they were able to deploy those
(19:42):
small drones from within Iran to disrupt some of the
air defense systems and the missile systems, so similar in
effect to Ukraine been able to assemble or deploy those
small drones within Russia, transport them a long distance on
the back of a truck. So it's a very different
(20:03):
but very brave way to use the small drones. You've
got operatives that are behind enemy lines, enemy territory in
order to be able to do that.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, it's incredible and I think all of us watching
around the world other countries have really studied the tactics
that are being used there, the technologies that are being deployed,
the first person view ones, sort of a lot of
viral videos of those. But there are big drones that
are being used as well. There are companies now that
(20:35):
Dji is famous as a commercial drone maker, but there
are big companies in Europe tech ever. I think it's
called the Portuguese company. It's now valued at a billion dollars.
So that's just in recent years has become huge staric
in Germany. We've got SIOS here in New Zealand out
of Tawonger that's done a deal with the UK Defense Force.
(21:00):
So it's really led to this flurry of innovation around
the world. And interested in your views sort of looking
through the lens of New Zealand where we're probably more
an I part of the world, interested in keeping an
eye on our realm, exclusive economic zone, search and rescue,
deploying drones to look for lost sailors and that sort
(21:22):
of thing. What's your view on how we have interpreted
what's going on in places like Ukraine and started to
prepare for our own drone needs here.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Well, I don't think the West is particularly well prepared anywhere,
And it's sort of like this year, we've suddenly waken
up and gone, oh my goodness, we need to do something.
And we've seen that in our defense Capability Plan, the
government's intent that we need to have long range strike drones.
(21:52):
But in reality the United States is actually not any
further well, they're a little further ahead than us, but
essentially they were doing the same thing. At the beginning
of the year. Pete Hesget was standing up and saying,
we've got this plan for American drone dominance because they
realized that they didn't have it. Now, just this morning,
I was reading an example of how much the US
(22:15):
does not have drone dominance. The announcement is that they
are now manufacturing a facsimile of the Iranian Shahib one
three six drone, which Russia is using to great effects
in Ukraine. Now the United States is going to be
manufacturing something that they've reversed engineered from that, and they're
(22:35):
going to be deploying it in the Middle East. So
it's not a US innovation that's leading the way. This
is an Iranian innovation and the US is copying that.
So I think this is symptomatic of actually the West
having been complacent in this area. We've got Turkey was
leading the way with its bi actor TB two. Iran
(22:59):
is clearly leading the way, whether it's series drones, and
we are playing catcher. But that's not a bad place
to be if you try to innovate fast is to
actually have to be playing catcher.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And it's great that we have at least one drone
company here that it has attracted international attention in the
form of Sios. It's won a number of awards this
year for its innovation. Anything you can tell us about
what makes that company particularly special in the drone space.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
At the moment, I think it's really just can do attitude.
Here's this problem and we can do it. Listening to
your podcast you did with Peter Beck, it's actually not
too different. It's like, here's this space that's dominated by
some big companies that are doing things fairly inefficiently. Well, surely,
(23:48):
as kiwis, we can do something about this, and we
can make something happen until you win some big overseas
contract that's worth millions and millions of dollars. You're happy
to do that on a shoestring and rely as much
as you can on innovating to do things as efficiently
as possible.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
I guess there's a sense that you know, this David
and Goliath war in Ukraine, that it's sort of drones
were able to level the playing field to some extent
in warfare, that you could have a small, less wealthy
nation and less resource nation that could really pack a
punch as a result of using these fpvs, this consumer
technology that's been repurposed, is that the reality of it,
(24:35):
I mean, this technology is now so accessible, as you've said,
around Russia, China, they really have led the way in
developing drones to some extents. It's I guess the nature
of the technology. It's so ubiquitous, the thresholds to entry
are so low that everyone has it now, so it's
not really as though any one country has a particular
(24:57):
advantage anymore with drones.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
So certainly the ability to have a good isr intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance.
Good visual imagery is really important on the modern battlefaird
so you can see what the other side is doing.
But it's difficult to say how much being well resourced
actually necessarily makes it different. I think it's a very
(25:19):
conflict dependent. When we're looking at the Russia Ukrainian situation,
that looks like it's going to be a battle of
attrition that comes down to who can sustain the production
barms the longest, who can keep grinding away at that
And at the moment, both US administrations, the current US
administration and the previous US administration haven't really wanted Ukraine
(25:44):
to win. We've resourced them to the level where they
can keep going, but not that they can win. So
that's been an interesting issue in itself. But in terms
of how much do you need this technology? Does technology
give you an edge? So I was looking at some
statistics yesterday. If we look at Afghanistan in Ukraine, So
(26:05):
Afghanistan has population of about forty one million, Ukraine has
a population of about thirty eight million, about the same
amount of people GDP per capita. Ukraine is sitting at
about sixteen thousand US dollars per capita. Ukraine's it about sorry,
Afghanistan's at about two thousand. So Ukraine is fabulously wealthy
compared to Afghanistan, and yet it would be would be
(26:27):
hard pressed to say that the Taliban didn't win the
conflict in Afghanistan. It had the ability to outlast the
United States with all its fabulously expensive technology. It's exquisitely
expensive drone systems. Our predator is the latest estimate for
(26:47):
Predator is about US thirty million dollars for system. And
this guy was full of predators and armed predators, and
yet the US lost. So it's not always a case
of resource. And so this is one of the issues
when we think about what lessons as the West taking
(27:07):
from Ukraine, what lessons are Western military is taking. We
have to spend a bit of time sitting through how
much is that conflict representative of where we might be
in future? How much are other conflicts representative? And if
we're thinking about where is New Zealand going to potentially deploy,
(27:29):
we would most likely be deploying, I would suggest in
the Western Pacific or into Southeast Asia. And at that
point you've got a lot of jungles, a lot of
terrain that's really hard to navigate. Perhaps the mountains of
Afghanistan are better, although they're not so much vegetation, Perhaps
(27:52):
they're a better analogy for what will encounter rather than
the flat planes of Ukraine. Although then when Ukraine it's
the wet season and you've got all the mud, an
arm I can't move through the mud. Something happens in
the jungles, right, So there's certainly it's not clear cut
that there's one set of lessons that we can can draw.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yeah, you can imagine we've got sort of limited firepower
in terms of air force fleet. It's not really decked
up for that since we sort of retired our jet fighters.
But we could have drones if we did have some
sort of rogue ship or something that was coming towards us,
drones would be an ideal sort of means of attacking them.
But in terms of like non state actors, criminal groups
(28:36):
that may co op this technology to do things in
New Zealand's terrorist attacks or whatever, are we preparing for
that sort of thing in terms of using technology to
jam drones to detect where they are. Is that becoming
a thing here in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Well, it wasn't until the Civil Aviation Act twenty twenty
through E that the legal powers actually existed for anyone
to do anything about it. That came into effect. Fourth
of April this year, so the legislation was passed and
it took two years for it to come into effect.
So there is the ability there now, but we don't
(29:14):
have processes in place to approve state agencies to do
anything much about it. Police automatically have an authorization under
the Civil Aviation Act to be able to develop processes
and take counter drone action. Other state agencies could, but
they have to be approved by the Civil Aviation for it.
And so interesting thing about that is that, to my knowledge,
(29:39):
no other state agencies have taken that step. Prisons are
a huge issue for contraband. Once upon a time, it
was putting a sock a tennis ball on the end
of a sock and stuffing some stuff in there and
swinging around, throwing it over the fence and having someone
pick it up. Now you can have a drone fly
at high speed across the prison at a preordained time,
(30:02):
have a release mechanism, and whatever the payloaders drops could
be drugs, could be cell phones, could be razor blades,
all of that sort of stuff. And so I don't
think New Zealand really has taken this seriously. The policy
people tend to be focused on this scenario of what
happens if there's a small drone that hits an airliner
(30:24):
and airliner crashes and then there's terrible loss of life.
In that ten years that drones have been a thing,
there's been like about four incidents worldwide where the report
has turned out that maybe it actually was a drone
and two of them actually hit the airliner and bounced
off it, and then when there's engineering inspection, it was like, oh,
(30:45):
not a problem. So this whole thing about recreational use
of drones being a problem for airline aircraft is not
really a thing for airline aircraft. You have to be
more concerned about someone who's gotten nefarious attend someone who's
decided they're going to replicate what they see overseas and
fly a first person view drone with explosives into an engine.
(31:07):
Something like that. It's certainly possible, particularly if it's on
the ground. Maybe even if it's coming into land or
take off. Something like that, that is possible. We haven't
actually seen that happen yet, but it's certainly a possibility
that could occur, and I'm not sure that we're ready
for it at all. One of the reports I've seen
is that innovations in the Ukraine are taking about twelve
(31:31):
months to get to Central America where the cartels are
in their adopting them with drone technology. Takes about another
six months for it to then get to Africa, to
the Sahel where there's various conflicts going on there. And
from there though, once it's made its way to the
cartels in Central America, if you've got transnational organized crime
(31:52):
groups that linked to us in some way, then you
should expect that we could have the same technology here.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
It's obviously evolving rapidly, Andrew. If we look at the
commercial civilian use cases off it, the one that's been
promised for a long time has been piloted by Amazon
and others as drones an easy way to deliver a
product a pizza was the classic one. Domino's probably five
years ago at least now did a demo of that
(32:21):
in Auckland sort of went nowhere. Yeah, Amazon, as they said,
has been trialing it for a long time, and there
are some good startups that are finding good ways to
efficiently deliver packages with drones. How far away do you
think are we from that becoming mainstream?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
I think a long one when it comes to pizza delivery.
I'm not a fan of the pizza delivery model, partly
because the technology isn't necessarily as folk proof as you'd
like it to be. For that, if you're flying into
an urban area with lots of people around, coming and
hovering over a place so that you can lower down
this pizza, you have to have it so that nothing
(32:58):
can go wrong. And I just don't trust software that much.
Once upon a time I was a computer programmer. I
just don't trust software to get that right all the time.
And you could have other systems that will fail. What
happens when one of these solid state motors has an issue?
What is the meantime between failure for these We don't know.
That model, though, would work for transporting small loads to
(33:22):
remote locations. There was a trial done. I can't remember
it was earlier this week. I think it was last week,
and Towering are taking a medical payload out to met
Cartna Island and then bringing something back. That's a perfect
use case for it. It's flying over a location where
there's not going to be hardly any people, and it
can do that journey quickly and efficiently. When you're coming
(33:45):
to an urban area. My response there usually is we'll
have people who have teenagers on the scooters and that's
going to be a faster and more efficient way to
transport these payloads.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yeah, I'll be surprised, I think if we have corridors
of drones constantly zipping around delivering you know, maybe in
certain cities where that works in Tokyo something like that,
but I doubt we'll see it here. But in terms
of where we get the productivity gains, where this can
really improve efficiency, I guess you know you've touched on
(34:17):
conservation and that, but agrotech is where it's at, really,
isn't it. We've got all this land we need to
monitor to keep eyes on. You can do that to
some extent with satellites, but so much more efficient to
just put a drone up to survey some land to
look at your crops or your pasture. With the sensor
technology now you can detect various gases and things like that.
So that's really I guess the sweet spot for us,
(34:38):
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, And I think there's still a lot of growth
to occur in that area. So one of the things
that we're seeing a lot of is people now using
the agricultural drones, particularly spraying. There's opportunities there to perform
tasks very efficiently with the spray drones. There you could
do with other means, but necessarily as well. Like one
(35:01):
of the great examples is using slag bait, applying slag
bait to a crop, to a market garden crop. Now,
if this happens in typically fairly wet weather when the
ground gets all muddy, and you could apply it by
tractor and then you're turning up to the MUDs and
you're probably destroying part of the crop, or you could
(35:22):
do it on foot, and that's really inefficient. It's cost
prohibitive to use a helicopter for that, and so this
is where drones can come in there and actually suddenly
that one plot of land becomes much more productive because
we're not having half the crop eaten by slaves. So
you've got something like that which is really good. Then
we can move on to thinking about some other innovations
(35:44):
that New Zealand's already achieved in pasture management. So one
of them is that on dairy farm you'll typically find
that they have consultants coming in working with them and
what you call a feed wedge and feed wedge says
looks at all your power and ranks them in order
of how much grass is in there, and so you know,
this one's got a lot of grass in there, that's
(36:05):
the best one that I should be putting the cows
and to get ximum productivity. And you're also checking to
make sure that you don't let the grass grow too
long and too much, because then its feed value goes down.
And so you can do all of that and the
technology that's traditionally been well, I guess traditionally now been
used for that is either walking across a paddock and
(36:26):
having a what they call a past gameter, which is
a physical device you put on top of the grass
and it tells you in that spot how thick is
the grass. And then that evolved into having something you
could tow behind your quad BikeE as you drove across
the pasture. And now the potential exists that we should
be able to get drones to be able to do that,
(36:47):
fly across a paddock and get for the entire paddic
what's actually the grass cover like. Now that requires a
bit of clever software and stuff from behind that, but
it certainly an approach that's the air and it could
yield significant increases in productivities.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
If you look out say ten years, which is a
long time in the development of this technology, how are
we going to be using this? How will it evolve?
Do you think what will surprise us about how drones
are used in everyday life?
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Well, I think one of the things that will surprise
us is that a lot of the things that have
been well, some of the things that have been talked
about the most won't have them. So like that whole
pizza delivery things, there's too many challenges involved in that
for it to be be something that's particularly viable. We
hear of the advanced air mobility, the flying car concept.
(37:40):
People aren't going to have a flying car that means
in their driveway. In order to have something that works,
it actually has to be quite large. So I've seen
two seater flying cars which take up entire with the
two lanes of the road. So yeah, you've got things
things like that. It's going to be think of those
(38:01):
as more being electric helicopters and whatever is. Maybe they
have a cost efficiency relative to traditional helicopters, But I
think what we're going to find is that some of
the existing uses will become more widespread. Infrastructure inspection. We're
finding that, say, in the power line side of things,
(38:24):
firms have been starting in the last couple of years
to move into power line inspections using drants, but they're
still limited by what the rules allow, and that's limited
in part by the technology as well. So you can't
just sit here in your office, press a button and
have a drone go and fly one hundreds of kilometers
along power lines to conduct an inspection. You've still got
(38:45):
to have linemen out there doing that. So I think
there's a space there that we'll see quite a change,
and we can then extrapolate that out to other sorts
of infrastructure, like maybe natural guest pipelines and things like that.
As we get tech that develops has more safeguards built
around it, it opens up more of those potential opportunities.
(39:05):
One of the other things I think we haven't done
well with is search and rescue. Drones would be ideal
for search and rescue, but by and large they haven't
been utilized to great effect there, and so I think
again there's an opportunity there for us to significantly improve
how they use.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Yeah, and a hugely important area for us with our
mountainous regions, our national parks, and a vast ocean. You
know a lot of people unfortunately come to grief in
those areas. So instead of putting up a P eight
with a whole crew and hundreds of thousands of dollars
per hour, if we could put out drones to try
and get eyes on someone in trouble, that's got to
(39:45):
be hugely efficient.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Well, absolutely, And when we think about some of those
sorts of search and rescue situations, so maybe we're thinking
of maybe around a coast where it's quite rocky, hard
to access, and maybe the winds and visibility aren't ideal
for a helicopter to be there either. We have to
(40:07):
move into a mindset where we're happy to lose the technology.
We don't want to lose a man helicopter with people
on board, absolutely not. But if we've got a fairly
sophisticated complex drone system maybe costs US one hundred thousand dollars, well,
actually the potential to lose that as opposed to a
(40:28):
couple of million dollars on helicopter, and then the lives
we might need to be recalibrating how we think about
some of the potential for loss of equipment.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
And you've studied very closely our regulations, policies, you've done
a PhD in this space. Is there any one thing
that you would change now to steer drone development in
a positive direction in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Years And it doesn't actually require any rule changes at all.
So one of the issues we've had over the past
ten years is we've had this rule system that had
Part one to one. These are our standard operating rules
Part one O two. If you want to operate outside that,
you need to have certification from the Civil Aviation Authority,
and then there's been a lack of guidance as to
(41:11):
what would be acceptable. So I was listening to I
was at the Aerospace in New Zealand summer recently listening
to I think it was James Power from Dawn talking
about their experiences and how they had to invent everything
from scratch, including how they could satisfy the Civil Aviation Authority. Well,
what they were doing was safe, and so that's fine
(41:33):
as an organization that's trying to build something absolutely world
leading to do that, But then you've got subsequent developers
come along and you wanted to do something that's not
nearly as close to the edge of the envelope as
what Dawn's doing. But there's no guidance from CILIA as
to what would be acceptable. And what's happened is that
in the past the policy team from CILIA have gone, well,
(41:54):
this part one or two rule is infinitely flexible, so
if we provided clear guidelines, that would be limiting people's flexibility.
But what it's done is it's meant it's really hard
for people to know what's acceptable and what's not. So
the one thing that I would change is to provide
some clear guidance from Civil Aviation Authority. This suite of
(42:14):
measures is something that we would accept. You may propose
something else that would also accept, but we can tell
you that this suite of measures here is given what
we've approved day and experience we've had, these are things
that would be acceptable that would make a big difference.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Well, that's good that practical advice, and they are revisiting
these regulations on a regular basis, so hopefully they'll take
that on board.
Speaker 2 (42:39):
On there. I'd like to say that there has been
a change in the senior leadership at CIA just this
year and it's been an absolute breath of fresh air.
Got a lot of almost excitement to see what's going
to happen. It's been a complete culture change at the
top and we've certainly we've seen it now with the
(43:01):
engagement with industry, with what the Civil Aviation Authority is
looking to do. So yeah, pretty positive about where we
might go in that space.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
Hey well Andrew, thanks so much. It's been a fascinating
look at drones, how they're developing, how they're being used,
drawing on your incredible expertise, So good luck with Phoenix
UAS it's obviously thriving business. Will put links up to
how people can find out more about you. And thanks
so much for coming on one of our last shows
of the Business of Tech for the year.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
Great, thank you for having me on. It's been a
fantastic conversation.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
That's it for this episode of the Business of Tech,
the penultimate episode for the year. Thanks so much to
doctor Andrew Shelley from Foenix UAS for sharing his insights
on drone warfare regulation and the rapidly evolving drone ecosystem
here in Tauroa, New Zealand. And thanks to you for
listening to the business of tech. Make sure you follow
(44:05):
the show in your podcast app, and we'll catch you
for the final episode of season three next Thursday. Right here,
I'll catch you then.
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