ANRA Technologies: UTM, AI, and the Future of Drone Airspace | Brent Klavon

Brent Klavon, Chief Strategy Officer at ANRA Technologies, joins The Ways We Move to pull back the curtain on Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) — the invisible infrastructure that lets drones, delivery services, and first responders safely share the same airspace. 

From Amazon Prime Air to Dubai's air navigation system to Counter-UAS security at the FIFA World Cup, ANRA is operating at the intersection of technology, regulation, and global airspace complexity. 

And on AI? 

Brent has a refreshingly honest take. 

00:00 Introduction — Season 2 update and two-week hiatus explained 

03:28 Meet Brent Klaxon — Chief Strategy Officer, ANRA Technologies 

03:56 How ANRA Was Founded: Garage startup to NASA partnership (2015) 

05:04 What Is UTM? Uncrewed Traffic Management explained simply 

09:00 How drones fit into already-crowded airspace 

11:46 US airspace structure and why traditional ATC doesn't scale to drones 

13:01 The Three-Circle Framework: Technology, Standards, and Policy 

17:01 Real-world UTM today: Amazon Prime Air flying thousands of flights daily

18:23 Drone as First Responder — prioritization when the lights come on 

21:09 New York Power Authority: UTM for utility infrastructure at scale 

22:22 GPS spoofing, cybersecurity, and how ANRA monitors system health 

25:10 AI in UTM — not a silver bullet: what it actually does (and doesn't) 

25:37 EASA U-Space certification — first and only UTM provider in Europe 

28:19 Building an agnostic global platform: tailoring UTM for each market 

29:13 The Dubai project and the impact of regional conflict on delivery 

34:08 Counter-UAS at the FIFA World Cup 2026: protecting shared airspace 

38:07 Military and dual-use: where the lines are blurring 

39:25 Data privacy, ownership, and the coming FAA data rule. Competition and the state of the UTM market. Brent's personal note — lessons from seven years building ANRA 

🔗 ElectricAirMobility.news 

🔗 ANRA Technologies: anratechnologies.com 

🎙️ Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube 

🤝 Support on Patreon: patreon.com/c/TheWaysWeMove

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, and welcome back to another episode of The Ways We Move, the podcast that talks about innovative mobility solutions and the people behind them. My name is Nicola Zard, and I am your host on this podcast that we are in our second year, by the way, so I'm very excited about that. And yes, we took a two-week hiatus, not because of lack of content. We have plenty of people we're bringing to the show, but mostly scheduling conflicts. And you know, that's how it goes. I thought about bringing you back an old show, a rerun, but I thought, well, maybe we'll just give it a break for a little while. But for today's guest, I'm very excited to uh bring uh Brent Claxon, who is with NRE Technologies, a company that I've known for many years now, a company that does what we call UTM, and that stands for Uncrewed Traffic Management. So basically, what that is, how do we integrate drone flying into our airspace? Now, you probably are aware that our airspace is a little complicated. Yes, you have those big airplanes that fly very high up there, but you also have private airplanes that fly here. You've got helicopters, you've got military, you've got police, you've got ambulance, you have a lot of different things. And now you have swarms of drones everywhere. So, how do we safely integrate these drones into our airspace? And that's what NRA technology does. So I'm really excited about the company because it's one of those surviving companies in this field, and it's extremely complicated to fully explain the system. But think of it as a platform, a sort of a brainiac platform that understands where the drone is, where the drone is going. And Brian also gives us some interesting case scenarios that you have to take into consideration, and also one of which is that they are working right now in Dubai, and with the war happening not too far away, what are the implications of that? Of course, we don't dive into any trade secrets, but you get the idea. So I hope you really like this um episode. I sure did. Brent will be back because there are a ton more questions that I want to ask him. And so, but in the meantime, please like, give us a thumbs up. That helps us a lot. Subscribe if you haven't already done so, and then also share. There might be people who are interested in not just advanced air mobility, but we do try to talk about other topics once in a while. And also please go and read electricairmobility.news. That's our sister website where we talk a little bit more about all of that. And for those of you who are on Patreon, thank you for your support. We do have business intelligent offerings to you, deep dives on each company's what do these companies do? What do these companies are are trying to solve? What kind of problems are they trying to solve? And all of this is available. We feel specifically that investors don't always get a full understanding, a full picture of what advanced air mobility is. And this is where I shine. I have 20 years' experience not only in advancer mobility, but also in the EV industry. And I certainly spot what is missing with about 90% of all these projects, these financial projects out there. So without further ado, we'll have uh Brent introduce himself. And next week, well, we'll have another podcast, hopefully again. Thank you. Well, Brent, thank you for being on the podcast today. Tell us a little bit about who is Brent?

SPEAKER_01 3:33

Thanks, Nicholas. It's a pleasure to be here. So I am the chief strategy officer at a company called ANRA Technologies. We are a U.S.-based company with an international footprint, and I'm based in the Washington, D.C. area. And I've been with ANRA now for almost seven years.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yeah. You guys have been around for a long time. You're one of the veterans of the industry, aren't you?

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Yes, we are. The company was founded in 2015 by Amit Ganju. Uh, it was one of those garage garage startups, and uh he got the attention of NASA in the early days, 15, when NASA was exploring this concept called UAS traffic management. And he presented, Amit presented at an event, and NASA followed up with him and said, you know what, we're trying to figure this thing out called UTM. Uh, would you like to be part of our effort? And so the rest is history. I fast forward now to celebrated our 10-year anniversary last October with ANRA. And uh, since that time, we've been continuously working on our UTM platform and some other adjacent platforms for fleet and airspace management and the digital infrastructure side of the business to help these autonomous systems do what they need to do.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

Yeah, and and definitely there's a lot going on. There's a lot of work. I think, I think most people might understand what UTM is, but for those who are listening or watching who are not familiar with what UTM is, can you give us an idea, 52,000 feet view of it?

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Of course. So imagine years ago when the globe and all the civil aviation authorities, all the international civil aviation authorities, air navigation service providers, had to develop an ecosystem to support manned traffic. So aircraft that are flying today use system of systems where there's air traffic controllers, humans, there's radar systems, there's voice communication. And so that whole system was built up and has been evolved over time to be very safe, very effective. But it requires a human in the cockpit and requires human air traffic controllers to be able to manage and provide aircraft separation services, among many other things. That system doesn't work for today's disruptive technologies that we're seeing in the airspace today, the drones, these larger people and cargo carrying systems, that you know, the Jetsons that are flying may be flying soon. And so we needed to adapt and figure out how do we fit these drones into the today's airspace and do it safely and do it, do it in a way that prevents these drones from bumping into each other or bumping into other aircraft in shared airspace. And so the concept was developed that we had to do this in a way that was networked. In most cases, it's a federated service provider. So there's many providers providing this service, and there's other systems contributing to this ecosystem. Weather is contributing to UTM, other aircraft are providing different services and being able to detect other aircraft as they're flying. And so there's there's a bunch of services and capabilities contributing to this concept of UTM. We often get labeled as a UTM service provider, and I use that term because it helps, because what we do at ANRA is we have software that's software as a service. So it's on the network, it's on the internet. And before a drone takes off, it connects to our system and it looks into the network and files its flight plan. We call it intent. And so that intent is a route that goes from A to B to C or whatever the case is. Maybe it's just the volume of airspace they want to fly around inside of. And it checks to see if anybody else is there. And through international standards, we've been able to create a sharing mechanism that's standardized that allows us to check with other participants in this network to make sure nobody else is in that same volume of airspace or that trajectory at the same time, 4D deconfliction. So that's called strategic deconfliction. And then once everything checks good, the pilot takes off of its drone using our UTM capability, it flies through the airspace. And while it's doing that, we need to make sure that that drone is adhering to its intent. So that's called conformance monitoring. And so that conformance monitoring allows us to ensure that there's no deviation, because once there's deviation, then it causes, potentially could cause cascading events that could be a catastrophic event where the drone wanders off its flight path into somebody else's flight path. And so, in order to be able to ensure that doesn't happen, we monitor the conformance of the drone. And when it does deviate, uh if it's some kind of, you know, whether it's wind or a problem with the aircraft or uh navigation problems, other alerts and notifications are given to adjacent users of that same shared airspace. So those users that are flying in the vicinity of that wayward drone get alerted, and then they could take corrective action and do what they need to do. And so because of this capability, we're able to now take this drone low-altitude economy into many different areas to be able to provide very interesting use cases, everything from drone delivery to drone as a first responder because these skies are getting denser and the need for UTM is becoming more prevalent.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Yeah, yeah, it's it's extremely complex, and I think most people might not be fully aware of it. I also wonder if people know what UTM stands for. Originally it was unmanned traffic management, but now we call it uncrewed traffic management. Potatoes, potatoes, about the same thing. So far, if I have to sum it up, you're offering the logistics of flying into this airspace that's already uh populated with aircraft, and it could be, you know, EMS, it could be military, there's a lot general aviation, there's you know commercial aviation, and your platform somehow meshes this new traffic, right, from advanced air mobility into this already, I wouldn't say crowded airspace, but into this already active airspace. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Yes. So the today's radar systems that look for large steel fuselages and these large aircraft that are flying that are electronically conspicuous, so they're reporting their position, course, and speed. Or I mean they have pilots that are communicating with air traffic controllers, and these air traffic controllers are providing separation services, whether it's vectoring or or whatever the case might be, change your altitude. We can't do that with drones. The radars don't see these little low-altitude drones, so the radars are not going to be able to provide the surveillance that's needed. And the likelihood of being able to hire enough air traffic controllers to manage every single drone out there is it's not possible. And there's no communication capability. So we needed to be able to design a digital system that allows all this to happen in a way that provides the same performance outcomes as we would with a human in the loop. And so these standards that we've been working on for years, and there's actually a published standard that we helped co-write with other industry consensus partners and government that allows this interoperability, this exchange of data. So in this increasingly internet world, I mean you have to be able to share information. And um, this protocol allows the data to be shared in a way that's understood and recognized and can be used to do things like UTM with anybody who subscribes to this standard. And so we're not alone in this. This is not an ANRA thing, this is an international thing. And so anybody that that builds their UTM platform to provide these services, if they use a standard like we're doing today, now we're actually flying thousands of flights today for our customers that are using our license for UTM today. And so it's real, it's happening, and we expect it to continue to expand exponentially as more systems come online, as more businesses come online, more use cases are adapted and understood. I think it really is gonna be an exciting time in the next two, three years.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

Yeah, and I think you you said it well. It's already flying today, it's gonna get more populated. Also, it might be also a good idea explaining uh how our airspace works in the United States. We're not gonna talk about Europe, although we can after that. If I understand really well, ATC, which are really the controllers, the air traffic controllers, these guys handle, like you said, the big boys, the big airplanes that you can see that a radar can pick up, GPS uh locators and things like that. But you're right, when it comes to something that big, that's a totally different story. It's usually low enough. And another thing, too, that I've noticed is that on top of it, helicopters are sort of semi-regulated, right? We don't always know. I mean, it's usually land at your convenience, lend, you know, according to your visual decision making. And so there's a lot of different ways that you need to, a lot of different things that you need to look at, all of that. How did you guys even think about UTM at the time or how complex it was? Because I remember a few years ago, we were only talking about passengers' EV tolls, which, well, turns out, of course, is going to be a little bit longer. Now we're talking about drones, we're talking about cargo. So we're not just talking about one big EV toll, we're talking about 10 smaller uh drones instead of just tracking one big uh EV toll. Sorry if I made this complicated.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

No, it it is complicated, so you're you're spot on. So I'll just talk about it's often referred to as the lone, the low drone altitude economy. So in the United States, 400 feet above the ground and below to the surface is where you see most of this small drone activity. And what's interesting, the way we look at this problem, is just thinking about that low drone altitude economy. There's in our mind three, if you think of a Venn diagram, three circles that we want to operate in to make this a successful enterprise. The first one is the technology. We kind of talked about that already, the the digital, the software that allows us to do that. But there's a lot of other parts and pieces I'll just not talk to and just to keep it simple for now. So there's the technology, there's the standards, which we touched on. And so, much like any heavily regulated industry, whether it's food related or cars or communications, aviation is very heavily regulated. An industry needs a way to understand how to build that technology, that circle of technology, how do you build to that to meet the and satisfy the regulator? And so the third circle, so you got technology standards, which I talked about, there's an international standard for UTM. The third circle in this Venn diagram is policy or regulation. And so all three circles kind of interact. And if you can get more union, meaning more overlap of that Venn diagram, so bingo, you get great success because you need all three to work. You need the policy to be in place to enable innovation, but they need the standard to point to for means of compliance. So industry can build their technology to be able to satisfy that. And that's that's common throughout any industry, whether it's cellular with cell phones. Remember, years ago when you landed in a foreign country, your phone didn't work, and you had to go through all these gymnastics. Today it's you turn it on and people don't even think about it. But we want that kind of interoperability going forward with the low-driven altitude economy. So that's how we kind of look at the problem at ANRA. And we try to be involved in all three of those circles. Obviously, technology is what we do, but we also roll up our sleeves and we have sweat equity in the standards development process, which is uh, you know, that's that's not an easy thing to do to get consensus standards. But then we also we're not lobbyists, but we also help and want to inform not only federal rules, but also at the state level, and maybe even at the local jurisdictional level level. Because I if you recall, Nicholas, you've been in around this long enough. Years ago, it was a very different conversation than what it is today, uh, you know, on the regulatory side. Years ago it was uh nothing but privacy and concerns about surveillance, inappropriate surveillance. There's that's still an issue. It's still a significant challenge. But now it's more about how do we safely fly these things in today's airspace? How do we enable these drones and these larger aircraft to do what we want them to do, to take cars off the street and be able to get your package delivered faster, or have the police be able to use their drone for rescue operation, whatever the case might be.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and I think that's a that's a good point because these drones are, and that's also another, yeah, that's another thing too. Sometimes these drones are flown almost fully in an autonomous kind of way. Sometimes you've got a bunch of people actually really flying them. Sometimes you have people just overseeing it. So it's pretty complex, even with the drone companies or operators that you must have. So you have a wide variety of operations that you somehow have to make it fit under this term we call UTM. So tell us a little bit about that. And then I want to go to the agnostic and the um uh the international aspect of that, because I'm a I'm a you know fervent open source Linux guy at home and everything. So anything that that's agnostic to me, it just it just wins me. But tell me how how complicated it is it to work with all of these different platforms of operators out there.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

We are also very big fans of being agnostic, but to answer your question, where we're seeing the use cases emerge. So, and this is really has taken off in the last, I would say, two years, literally, in that there was a path, and I'll just speak to the U.S. momentarily, underneath the FAA, they opened up a door under something called the Near-Term Approval Process, NTAP, for service providers to come to them and demonstrate that we could bring the necessary technology and governance and service level agreements to be able to provide UTM services to mitigate drone-on-drone collision in shared airspace for BB loss operations. BB loss is beyond visual line of sight. So when the pilot can't see the drone. And that really kind of unlocked commercialization broad scale, nationwide. So now, as an example, ANRA has a customer called, excuse me, ANRA has a customer called Amazon Prime Air. So Amazon Prime Air flies thousands of flights every day delivering product using our UTM capability, our services. And so they are continuously adding more sites across the United States, several increasing to who knows how many by the end of the year, but many more. And this allows them, this service we provide to them, allows them to prove to the FAA that they can mitigate this UA to UA risk, unmanned aircraft to unmanned aircraft risk in shared airspace. Now, you don't need really UTM services in the middle of a rural location where there's only one drone for maybe hundreds of miles. It doesn't make sense. So where these deliveries are taking place are in locations where there's an expectation of more than one in the same airspace. And that more than one, moving on from Amazon to another example of who's using this, drone is a first responder organization. So these are agencies such as police and fire, an emergency response for states that are using drones to be able to do their mission faster, maybe safer, many different ways. And so envision an Amazon flight, and then you have a police officer that has to use their drone for whatever reason. How do they de-conflict their missions? And you can't predict the ad hoc nature of some of the police missions. And today's, or maybe yesterday's, way of doing it was a phone call or a text message. Right. Or in some way, some very manual policy-driven or very uh labor-intensive way of deconflicting, which worked, but it doesn't scale. And so as drone operations increase, we need to automate this way in some way so we don't have human error cause a problem, meaning drone hitting drones. But we also have to give the police prioritization. So, you know, when the lights come on in a police officer's cars are going down the highway, everyone moves out of the way. They get the priority of the lane to drive their vehicle. We want the same prioritization for their drone operations when it's appropriate. And so this same industry cohort that's launched the capability out of Texas called the key site, we have uh the ability now to be able to bring other capabilities out to the community. And one of the things we're about to launch, literally, as we speak, we're doing this is prioritization for organizations who need it to get priority airspace in the air. So, what does this mean for our police? It means that when they file their flight plan to fly their drone and they turn on the button on their software on their UTM device that says priority, high priority, then they win. If there's an Amazon flight trying to take off and use the same airspace. And so that's good news for a drone as a first responder. So lights coming on the car, so you move out of the way on the on the highway. Same concept applies to the drone for getting their drone airborne. And then my uh and there's other things we're working on for DFR organizations. But the last example of uh um someone who's using drones in UTM Army is the New York Power Authority, NIPA, NYPA. They're the country's largest state-owned organization providing utility energy services in New York and other locations. And so their entire network, they have over 100 pilots, over 100 drones, and they use our platform. In addition to some fleet management stuff, they use our UTM services to be able to safely operate across the state of New York. And because of what they do, they also interact in mixed-use airspace with their manned helicopters. So you're probably familiar with these large transmission lines you see that are carrying the higher energy and their massive structures. And so oftentimes they use the manned helicopter. Would not want this job. It looks very dangerous. They fly very low and slow across these transmission lines to check the infrastructure, do repairs, a number of things. Well, sometimes drones in this manned helicopter are in the same space. So we have The ability, it's not necessarily UTM, but we have the ability to uh deconfliction of the man helicopter and the UTM asset that's or the drone that's used in the UTM to be able to operate in the same airspace safely and de-conflict those two operations. So I can go on and on and on, but those are two vignettes, three vignettes that hopefully that helps your listeners understand a little bit more about UTM.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

Yeah, and and I think so. I have an IT background and I'm also familiar with safety, security, and privacy, obviously. But one of the things that we hear about is GPF spoofing and a lot of other types of spoofing data. Also, people turning off their transponders and their airplanes and things like that. So I want to also people to understand how complicated and complex this is. How do you work with uh things like GPF spoofing or even you know terrorist attacks? Because that can also include disabling our our ATM UTM systems.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Yeah, that that is a critical, critical element in all that we do because we're we're 100% software and we rely on other people's data and other system data. So we're we're hopeful that the drone that's flying, which we don't care what drone it is, somebody's bought a drone or built a drone, and they're flying that drone using um some kind of satellite constellation, probably for their navigation system, GNSS, GPS, or whatever the case might be. And so we're hopeful that you know there aren't any spoofing like you're talking about that's making that drone confused. And then that drone telemetry, its position, course, and speed is coming off that drone to us in a data pipe that we use to inform our UTM decisions, everything from the strategic deconfliction I mentioned before you take off to conformance monitoring. So, how do we know in that workflow if everything's good? And so that's become an elevated concern of us just to use your spoofing question. And that there are other service providers out there that's manage the satellite networks and the spoofing concerns, and they're able to identify through a number of technologies that they're able to provide to users like ANRA that there is an issue here. So, in this ecosystem, we're not GPS spoofing experts. We're gonna hire SUSE's GPS spoofing agency and we'll subscribe to their service and we'll offer it in our UTM platform. And there are other very similar services that we would layer into our platform so when the drone pilot before they fly or while they're flying, we can identify any issues and alert them to hey, there's a problem here if they don't already have that capability built into their drone. Now, shifting to cybersecurity, that's also a big deal. And it, you know, not just the spoofing aspect, but you know, is our own software working correctly? Is the cloud architecture working correctly? So there's layers of a systems of systems approach that we need to do and conduct what we call health monitoring. And so we do have technologies that are built into our platform that that are looking, and some of these are AI agents that were looking inside of us.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Our systems are just gonna say clawed.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Yeah, it's not cloud, but we have our you know, a um not a public-facing AI tool. And I'm gonna get way over my head if I start talking to AI here. I only know. But enough to be able to monitor things, and when they see an anomaly, then it gets elevated. And um, that's where we have to maybe step in as human in the loop and start to investigate further as to what's going on with this cyber concern. And then I'll I'll I'll close with this on cyber. We went through as a company, the European Aviation Safety Agencies, that's the ASA, that's the FAA equivalent for all of the European Union. We're the first and only company to go through to get certified as a UTM service provider. In Europe, it's called USpace. Thank you. Yeah, USpace, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Congratulations. That's that's that's a big one.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Yeah, thanks. It is a big deal. And you know, I'm so proud of it that I've memorized some numbers to for your listening audience because I think it helps people understand this is just not a go to summer camping and get the merit badge signed off or learning how to roll a boat. You know, this is this is very intensive. So it took us two years, a couple million US dollars, 27 documents, nine audits, and 15 major meetings. And it's analogous to in many locations outside the U.S., an air navigation service provider provides our traffic control services on behalf of the Civil Aviation Authority. So it's it's maybe it was as rigorous, if not more, because we were the first and only so far. And so I'd say all that because inside of that two-year grind that we went through, we got run out, rung out with the cyber questions and the cyber assurance and you know, processes and procedures. And it's more than just the documents. We had to demonstrate it. We had to build it into our platform. We had to test it and verify for the auditors of the EASA. And um, it wasn't fun, but we're a better company for it. And so we understand the rigor that's required for safety critical systems when you start flying things around that has a consequence when they hit things or hit people. You know, we we're we think of ourselves as an aviation company first and an IT company second.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Yeah, and you know, you just reminded me of a conversation we had many years ago. It's the use of AI and the strategic use of AI, where sometimes I hear um a lot of companies saying, oh, we're gonna let AI take care of all of that. Well, no, that's not gonna happen until I think 2075 at least, right? But you guys are always really good at at the fine line between AI picks up all the data and then will show us what is what stands out, like you said, and then the human comes in and says, all right, this is bizarre, let's look into it. So I think you guys have always had that kind of strategy, and and it's worked out really well in in Europe. Tell us a little bit about also the differences between over here in the United States and Europe, because you you uh I mean, are you operating the same way, or obviously it's a little different, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:19

It's tailored fitted for the region. So every single market is a little bit different. And but we're fortunate to have enough international presence and credentials and work experience and ongoing projects and research that we we have a perspective that I think benefits our customer, even if it's a solely one specific region, whether it's in the Middle East or Europe or the US, we adapt and we have to because the rulesets are not harmonized. So things are a little bit different in each market. And we've built our platform on um microservices, and so rather than having to take the entire platform down to be able to build it up for a specific customer, uh, the rules engine we can pull out of many different services, many different engines, and adapt and push it back in to be yeah, to be tailor-fit. And and you need that for certification. We're I'll use Dubai as an example. So we are we are delivering UTM for the Emirate of all of Dubai. It's a two-year project, and that towards the end of the two-year project, which would be 2027, uh, we're gonna help the air navigation service provider there go through certification uh to have the UTM service certified by the regulator there. And so we have we're in the process of tailoring that so that not only is it uh form-fitted for their regulatory environment, but all the stakeholders for Dubai, which are a little bit different than the United States, which are a little bit different than the UK, which is a little bit different than Europe, and so on and so forth. A little bit different way of doing business. We have to interact um integrate with their um air traffic management service providers there. So um there are many that provide radar services, and there's this thing called SWIM where there's data that's digitized that's shared amongst all the different air traffic control agencies internationally, locally. So then the point being that it's you have to be adaptable for each market.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Yeah, and it's a good one because uh you you said it actually the Emirates has a really interesting airspace, although it looks really simple and everything, but I forgot what is the ceiling where it's general aviation and anything else. It's pretty much military. And in one sense, it looks like it would be way easier than what we have here. Lord knows we have different classes uh of airspace and everything, but that also probably creates a whole new level of uh complexity because now you're you're dealing directly with military, and then all of that ensues with that.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Yes, yes, and even at the local level with the municipalities for law enforcement, and each jurisdiction internationally often has different requirements for how you register your drone and how you connect to the system and what those rules are for being for registration and who can register. And so, yeah, it's it's a very dynamic problem, but there is still a common thread through each one of these deliveries. You know, when you when you step back and say, okay, I'm gonna deploy UTM everywhere in the world. What what are the top five things or so? And everybody needs safety, everybody needs to be able to integrate safely with the current air traffic management world that they're in. It has to adhere to the regulatory environment, you know, those kind of big picture things that never changes. That's always for forefront in every delivery.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Yeah, it's funny because I'm gonna go back to my IT analogy here, but this is very Linux-like where you have a kernel, but then you have a whole bunch of things that you can slap on top of it, and that's how you can tweak the heck out of it and and make it do whatever you want to do compared to other operating systems. I want to say very quickly on the Emirate side of things, with everything that's happening right now, not too far away. Are you seeing things that you might not have taken into consideration? Or is there like a learning curve with, and I'm talking obviously about the war with Iran uh out there? I'm sure you must be getting a lot of data that you maybe hadn't taken into consideration. I don't think I would.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

Yeah, there there has been some there has been disruption, I'll use that word, to how we're delivering the project. And we're very sensitive to the customers' requirements, and and so things are changing a little bit and and how they're envisioning a delivery where six months ago um it wasn't even uh a thought. And so of course. Yeah, so I without getting into specifics, no, it is, I would say it's it's things have changed, and but the basic UTM concept hasn't changed, but how it's implemented is is probably what is going to be tweaked.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm assuming because that with everything new that is happening out there and without going into too much details, like you said, there's probably a lot, it's a it's a good learning experience and a sad one, but uh probably it's needed to to make our our systems more robust. All right, so so tell us a little bit about I I like that whole idea of how you guys are working internationally to have a sort of a well international platform with lots of modular modularity in it or graduality in it. Tell us a little bit of how was it working with all the different groups and what kind of other groups are do you have to work with in order to make this UTM well fit this airspace?

SPEAKER_01 33:39

Yeah, that's a really interesting question, Nicholas, because uh I've only in the past year, and I've been at this for many, many years, but I'm seeing it's no longer just commercial and over there's military. I think. And we've seen this coming, but it's been coming slower, but it's been accelerated, I think, for a number of reasons, ongoing political, geopolitical activities. That now there's there's more of a demand signal on how do we integrate everybody's airspace. And so I'll use the example of the FIFA World Cup that's being hosted in North America. There's many different venues in Mexico, Canada, and the end. There's a very a lot, there's a lot of interest on counter-UAS technologies to be able to sense the airspace around these venues for safety. So you mentioned, you know, not every drone pilot is out to do good things with their drone. And so these bad actors have to be accounted for. And really, there are also there's a category of just the clueless flying after the they don't know they're supposed to fly their drone around the FIFA World Cup soccer game in Miami, that it's, you know, that's going to light off all kinds of alerts and concerns, not knowing what that drone is up to if they're not registered. And so in this counter-UAS world, which is here this year in the United States, there is a lot of movement towards delivering technology that senses the airspace. So think of all the counter-UAS systems that need to look and listen and see whether it's an optical solution or an RF system or a radar system. That all has to be aggregated and shared with the authorities so they know who's flying or what's in that airspace. Now, interestingly, there's been a discussion about what about the rest of the airspace? You know, if Amazon's flying past the stadium where the soccer venue is being hosted, conducting a commercial delivery, how does that information get sent to the right people so they don't think it's somebody that's shouldn't be there? And so there's a there's a growing desire to be able to understand airspace on who's supposed to be there, who's authorized, and who is there but is not permitted to be there. And so you need to be able to describe and understand cooperative, non-cooperative surveillance, permitted, not permitted. Is that drone flying part of the news crew that's videoing the soccer game, the match, or is that somebody that's not supposed to be there? Is this drone over here one of our police force or one of the safety force, whomever? And then hopefully this never happens, but if there's a bad thing that happens, then chaos breaks out. I'll use a bomb. Hopefully that never happens. But if it's that catastrophic, then that airspace gets even more convoluted and the chaos and command and control gets more convoluted. And obviously, the drone deliveries are going to stop if that happens, but you still need to know who's who in that airspace. So, my point in all this is uh it's becoming more interconnected. Those lines are blurring, where it was just, you know, you stay over here and I'll stay over on this side of the fence line, nor the two will ever meet. Now there's a recognition that we too have to use the same shared airspace. So, how do we share that information in a way that's timely and effective?

SPEAKER_00 37:10

Yeah, it it's it's really incredible. Advanced mobility is bringing about a forced modernization of a lot of systems that we've had up until now, and also a bit of a hodspot, obviously a normal hodgepodge approach. We had, I mean, 100 years ago, we had signs of saying, yes, you can go, no, you can't go. Same thing with railways and everything. One thing that you did mention, and and that's a good point. I hadn't thought about asking you this, is I've seen, especially specifically in the drone industry, on the vehicle side of things, how you know the geopolitical reality has pushed things a little bit more on the military side of things. And of course, dual case, dual use now is a big thing. Which funny enough, three years ago, I was in Portugal and we were always talking about that. We thought, wow, everybody should be doing this, but well, there you go. Now everybody's doing it, don't have a choice anymore. But for you guys, is it is it also the same thing? I mean, are you working also very closely with the military in the sense that maybe the military can use your platform too, or is that still segregated?

SPEAKER_01 38:07

It's not segregated, and the answer is yes. Yeah, I I think it's in everybody's best interest that we're able to the capability was always there. It was just a matter of getting the access that the military or security forces would need. And it's not always military or defense, it's also enterprises have a concern about critical infrastructure that they need to understand who's above their nuclear power plant or their electrical substation. You know, those types of operations. And so it's it's more than just the defense agencies and security agencies. So our technology, and I think everybody's technology allows for that, just like aircrafts are the same way. You can use a Cessna to go to fly wherever for pleasure, or you can use a Cessna and put a couple weapons on it and turn it into whatever.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

That's uh that's actually it's a really fantastic point you made. And all of a sudden that the Venn diagram is just getting more and more complicated. And so it's starting to make a heck of a lot more sense, at least the way the way that I look uh at it. Do you um I was thinking also in terms of you mentioned privacy, people looking at drones and everything. Is that something that you guys have run into on the UTM side of things, or is that not really a big concern?

SPEAKER_01 39:25

You know, early days, I'm talking seven years ago. I remember being on a radio show and debating an attorney about privacy concerns with these new fancy drones that were coming out and how they're gonna be looking into everybody's windows, and and we're not gonna have any ability to stop that. And that that was a legitimate concern back then because these are these things kind of burst onto the scene. And so um, I was happy that to fast forward to today, that conversation still exists, but it's more on the data side and yes, it's what the drone is doing. And so this the new drone rule for the United States is is in the pipeline, and there's an expectation it might get published or enacted this year where it actually becomes a rule. And this is common all over the world. And what do you do with the data that goes through your digital system platforms? And it's not just UTM, it's you know, it's everything that we touch today, it's pervasive on this digital economy that we live in. But on the UTM side, there is uh in the FAA's draft rule, there's a need for historical query, just to kind of put a fine point on it. And this would allow, in certain instances, the ability for the FAA to retrieve data, historical data about that mission, that operation, that flight, that sort of thing. And so while that hasn't been turned into a rule, that's one example about so that information that would be handed over to the FAA, do they get everything or do they get a redacted version? Yes. Is there a process between? Is there, you know, we we have no say in the matter as a UTM provider? So these are really interesting questions that have not yet been fully vetted. Maybe the new journal will allow this, but I see this next frontier of hosting an entire ecosystem on a digital platform. The attorneys are gonna have a field day with this on who owns the data.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Insurance and data and uh yeah, uh yeah, attorneys, uh, they're they're they're secured for the next uh decade, I would say, if not much longer than that. Yeah, that's actually uh that's true. I was so one question I wanted to ask you because I really haven't kept up with do you still have competition? Because I remember there were a bunch of other companies around at the time. I haven't really heard that much from these guys. I've just watched you just take off like this. I mean, do you still have competition in the industry? Is it competition or are you guys working? Are there other companies that are doing similar but have different things that they're adding to it? What does that look like right now?

SPEAKER_01 42:04

Yeah, uh thanks for the compliment. We are doing well. I appreciate that. And there are competitors out there. And in our 10 years of existence, sadly, we've seen some of those competitors go for a number of reasons. And some dear friends of ours have unfortunately been swept up in that dissolve when their company disbands for whatever reason. And so there are fewer of us to a degree, but there also there seems to be some pop-up companies that recognize, okay, this UTM thing, this airspace management thing, actually looks like it's more than just um a research project. And they're seeing that it's being codified in different markets, use space in Europe, Dubai, US with our letter of acceptance, next general. So that invites investment because now investors need a stable market to want to put money towards these pop-ups and these startups. And so we're seeing a little bit of that where we have new entrants that think I can take my Claude and I can tell it, type in, make a UTM platform for me.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Oh, yes. I can vibe code then.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

Yeah, and I think there are I think there are people that think that's that's all you need to do. And I'm here to tell you that it's not, you know, when I'll put a you know, the regulator will not allow AI to touch any safety critical things unless you can demonstrate this AI tool that you use. And so AI is great for anything that doesn't touch safety critical aspects of your flight. UTM, there's a lot of safety critical things. So if you want to assess risk, you can use AI all day long just to assess that risk. That's great for something like that. Yeah. But you know, in general, these new pop ups are think that AI is gonna solve the day and it's not. So uh there are we have some dear friends and our competitors today, they're doing they're doing well, maybe not as well as ANRA. So from a business perspective. Perspective that sorry, but it is business. And they understand that at the end of the day, we we all share a pint together.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Yeah, I think I think you said it really well. Unfortunately, uh, it's it's always the same thing, right? I mean, startups are the way they are, entrepreneurs are the way they are. A lot of people see a gap and then just go all in on it. And I think the one mistake that they often do, and this is 20 years of experience in all of these fields, is a lot of them just don't vet their thinking. They don't vet their solutions well enough. They don't go up to the experts and yeah, you're gonna get smacked around. That's part of the game. But you know what? You're gonna come out with a lot more understanding, and then you'll be able to go, all right, well, I was silly, but pull the plug on that, let's do this. So I think, yeah, that still happens, and it'll happen within the next, you know, disruptive technology that'll come along. So we're we're running close to uh the end here. I wanted to ask you a little bit more personal questions, such as give me a little bit about what's your motivation? Why are you doing all this? I mean, you have a we didn't talk much about your your past, but hopefully you'll come back because there are so many other things I want to talk about, certification and things like that. So, open invitation. Please come back whenever you want to. There's a lot more that we can follow up with. But tell us about your motivation. Brent, why are you doing this? Why aren't you either retiring or having a fun little job somewhere? I mean, this is uh this is a puzzle, a pretty puzzle.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

Yeah, thanks, Nicholas. And um, I'll say it now before I forget. I think your podcast and your business analytics that you're you're thinking and and talking to people about is spot on because I think this is where the market needs to go. So thank you for the forum and for asking insightful questions. I know there are others out there you're gonna bring in. So continue to do what you do. I think it helps all of us. Um with respect to you're welcome. Yeah, so that this thing right here is from my Navy days. I was a Navy pilot for 20 years, and wow, I was one of the early guys in the Pentagon when we started taking a serious look at drones and how they would be used as potential part of the Navy arsenal. And back in those days, there was just a handful of us in a sea of manned aviators. So next to me was the F-14 guy, and across the way was the F-18 guy, and so on and so forth. So you know that Star Wars scene in the bar with all these goofy characters in the bar? We were the goofy characters in that Star Wars scene, the drone guys. And fast forward to today, it's flit, you know, it's it's completely different. And so I got I cut my teeth on drone technology in 2002, helped take care of that program. It's called Triton, it's a large high altitude long endurance thing. I actually helped bring it to life, got it funded, and so forth. And then what excites me about the industry is after I retired, I started working for an aviation company, and I was supporting the Virginia Tech test site for drones. And this was several years ago now, and I bumped into these UTM companies that were trying to develop this software technology to manage drones. That's where I met the CEO and founder of ANRA. His name is Amet Ganju. And so Ahmed and I spent many hours in a trailer in a field uh at Virginia Tech trying to figure all this stuff out. I was on the Virginia Tech side as a test director, and he was on the industry side. And then we started to create a relationship, and then um he offered me an opportunity with ANRA, and I took it because I saw I saw the potential. And at the time when I got brought on, this was in 2019, I thought, oh, by 2020, UTM is gonna be everywhere, and everyone's gonna be flying drones, and we're gonna be we're gonna get deliveries every day at our front door, and we're gonna be flying as a taxi zip line all the way. Yeah, exactly. And so my timeline and my reality check, my gut check is now seven years later. Every year I say it's gotta happen this year. It's gonna happen this year. Really, I do see the trajectory, in all honesty, having been in it long enough. In the past year to two years, this we've gone from research to commercialization. Uh so now we're starting to make revenue that's not solely based on research. So that gives me even more excitement to be part of history making. And as I tell our team at ANRA, sometimes we don't realize it. We're making aviation history that we'll look back years from now and say, we were part of that. Uh, you know, when the pressurized cabins happened, when GPS happened, and this whole drone thing, which I think will far exceed either of those two very innovative aviation-changing world. But this is this is generational. This will be one of those things that I look back and say, yeah, this is pretty cool. And with my four kids, they don't get it. They don't understand what I do. But hopefully, when they're flying in a pilotless aircraft, they'll say, hey, pop, it's something to do with that.

SPEAKER_00 48:56

Yeah, I I think you said it well. It's not a cliche to say it's a once-in-a-lifetime revolution, and it is happening, happening right now. And we've got Francy because we've seen the industry mature. It's way more robust and mature today than it ever was. And it's been really spectacular as you look at you guys and and where you've been and where you are going now. And I think you're right, we are definitely stepping into this AAM tube. I don't want to take any more of your time because I know you have uh a next meeting, but I just wanted to thank you for being with us today and explaining a little bit of this very complex topic of UTM. But please, Brent, come back because there's still a lot of questions I'd love to ask. And next time I'm gonna really write down everything so I don't forget halfway through. But I would love to have you back on the podcast. You let me know when, and then we'll get that going.

SPEAKER_01 49:43

Nicholas, it's been an absolute pleasure and thank you for the opportunity to spend a few minutes with you. All the best.

SPEAKER_00 49:49

Likewise, my friend.

SPEAKER_01 49:50

Take care.