In part one of a two part interview, Brian Wynne, President and CEO of AUVSI took some time to speak with ANN on day two of AUVSI XPONENTIAL and shared his thoughts on the future -- as well as how the community has expanded in unexpected ways during the pandemic.
“As usual XPONENTIAL is high energy, it’s very dynamic, just like this community,” he says. “We might be a little bit diminished in our numbers this year, we don’t have international visitors for the most part, some people started to waver a little bit toward the end because of the COVID spike. The people that are here are just thrilled to be together, and we knew that was going to be the case. There's a lot of good business going on, there's lots of partnerships being formed. It’s been a difficult time, but a time when the industry has in some ways advanced,” Wynne reflected.
“Technology really played from strength during the pandemic. People really started to look at this and say, wow if they can do that under waivers, think of what we could do with this technology at scale to bolster the supply chain, serve people in remote areas and so forth. That's been really good for greater recognition of the benefits to society that we talk about all the time, but now people can see it in very visible ways."
“Second thing was we really were able to carry on with a lot of work with the regulators, and of course with the beginning of the year we saw remote ID, flight over people, flight at night,” he shared. In some ways, the remote aspects of the pandemic have allowed progress in the industry.
“There’s no question about the fact that people being sequestered and being available to one another at the 'drop of a zoom', you know, it’s allowed us to progress. This is just an intrepid community. We are just gonna keep running between the tackles anyway,” Wynne says.
As far as regulations go, it’s hard to say if things are moving fast enough, but no doubt they will keep moving. XPONENTIAL 2022 will be taking place in April in Orlando, Florida. In part two of this interview, Jim and Brian discuss the coming year and what AUVSI will be focusing on.
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