Dad, husband, e/acc drone founder. Reindustrialize 🇺🇸
Nashville, TN
Joined November 2019
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For the past year I've been building connected situational awareness for high-consequence work.
You bring your safety system, rules, documents, and data connections. Ledger runs them live: every operation checked, anomalies routed to the person who decides, every decision timestamped and verifiable offline.
Here's what that looks like ↓
Most compliance and safety software is just a digital filing cabinet. These are forms people fill out after the fact, or email read-receipts nobody actually opens.
In high-consequence operations, three things have to stay separate in the database:
1. What the data/sensors reported
2. What deterministic rules checked
3. What a qualified person actually saw and signed
AI can notice and flag anomalies, deterministic rules gate the workflow, and only a named human can accept risk or sign.
Organizations running complex operations already have the rules, the procedures, and the data streams, they're just trapped across disconnected tools, PDFs, and spreadsheets.
Connecting them into one live, verifiable timeline turns compliance and safety from post-hoc paperwork into real-time situational awareness.
More on what I'm building at lightconesystems.com
I used Grok Bot to make a podcast of tech X. It reads ~2000-3,000 posts from the last 24hr and makes it into a show for me. tbh it’s actually really good! Autonomously assembles, records, edits, and poasts it so it’s ready for my morning drive to the gym.
Spotify above, and Apple here for the gentleman of taste:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Got set up at my @Newlab Detroit desk! Very excited about this next phase for my startup Lightcone Systems
A sufficiently intelligent agent could exploit vulnerabilities not just in software, but in physics as well
I find it so strange that almost no one I talk to seems to understand what's coming with drones. They are going to be a physical internet, the scaling is going to be amazing as long as we can address the bottlenecks fast enough
Grok Bot used Cursor cloud agents to cook me up a live weather radar display for my Tesla. This is such a cool futuristic experience, especially combined with Tesla FSD
Ok, real talk about commercial drones under proposed FAA Part 108 and BVLOS ops at scale as it's currently drafted. Obviously we are probably about to see the final version as it exits the rulemaking process, so some of this may remain true and some of it may change, but here's what I think and why I'm building what I'm building.
Scaled UAS autonomy is going to require a lot of record keeping. Just look at the draft 108.40 for more details and AC 120-78B for what the current guidelines are for digital record keeping systems. Record keeping is at its best when it is not a post-hoc logbook but instead one of the first-party screens on the desks of the operator.
Sure the ADSP or the manufacturer could do some or most of this, but for a record to be its most defensible under regulatory or enforcement scrutiny, it should be on its own neutral platform. It's probably what most larger operators will want anyway. If you are at an ADSP or an operator, or just more familiar than I am with the opinions of these stakeholders, please comment and let me know what your thoughts are. These are just my off-the-cuff thoughts on the matter and I'd love to hear your perspective.
Like everyone in the UAS industry and community, I want Part 108 to be able to scale as safely and efficiently as possible. Bringing the record keeping and compliance checks into the dispatch and flight operations as they occur seems like one of the best ways we can ensure that this happens.
I got my first pilot rating almost 20 years ago. In that time we have gone from small UAS being RC field, nitro-powered, crash-happy, 72 MHz toys to all-electric powerful platforms that can actually see and understand their own environment. We are now finally entering the days that I daydreamed about so many times as a kid, building free-flight gliders and crashing the best foamy RC airplanes that Wal-Mart had to offer while imagining tiny autopilots and cool BVLOS missions.
So that's my thesis. I think that the growth and safety of the next generation of drone operations is going to benefit from a really useful platform where the compliance record, flight records, safety records, personnel records, and everything else that will be required is recorded as it happens, in one place, easily searched and referenced internally, and just as easily shared with regulators, commercial partners, and insurers.
Message me if you'd like to get started integrating with or using our platform for BVLOS proof and recordkeeping. It's called Ledger, and we built it as the platform we'd personally want for BVLOS ops.