Darryl Jenkins is Chairman and Executive Director of the American Aviation Institute

The birth of the UAS commercial industry came from multiple places. A lot of the technology used in the commercial UAS industry is flowing downhill from Defense in a miniaturized form. At the same time, the UAS industry is also transitioning from a hobbyist to a commercial industry. Commercial UAS is one of the few high tech startups to begin as a black market.

Economics rule this industry and dictate the physics and engineering. The fundamental axiom of all UAS economics is it is a disruptive technology. This means commercial platforms will be small, fly low and not very fast. While the potential economic impact is very large, the economic impact of line of sight UAS is relatively insignificant. The biggest economic impact is when we get to autonomous UAS. The micro-economic uses facing us are rather straight forward and we have abundant case studies to manage these. The macro-economic issues are mostly exogenous threats. The largest exogenous threat is the FAA and lack of industry agreement.

The industry we are really talking about is not UAS manufacturing, but rather remote imagining as that is where we use UAS. The areas of interest to all autonomous vehicles are AI and sensors. It appears autonomous cars are well in the lead and UAS can learn from them.

About the speaker...

Darryl Jenkins is Chairman and Executive Director of the American Aviation Institute. He is the founder of the George Washington University Aviation Institute, a past professor at GWU and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, adviser and consultant to airlines and aviation companies and author of the Handbook of Airline Economics and ten other aviation related books. He is also the author of the forthcoming two volume "Advanced Commercial UAS Economics."