The Motorola Solutions Foundation, which is the charitable arm of Motorola Solutions, has awarded the Airborne International Response Team (AIRT) a grant that it will use to expand its DroneResponders program, which focuses on supporting the awareness and education of UAS use by public safety agencies and first responders across the globe. “We are very honored to have been selected as one of the Motorola Solutions Foundation 2019 grant awardees,” says Christopher Todd, executive director of AIRT. “This funding will help DroneResponders make an even greater impact in supporting first responders using drones for good in their local communities and beyond.”

RelmaTech, a remote identification and tracking company based in London, has incorporated in the United States to market to the worldwide remote ID market for identifying drones. Based in Greenville, South Carolina, RelmaTech Inc. will take over the lead from its parent company to market its systems, including the Secure Integrated Airspace Management (SIAM) system, its flagship remote ID product. RelmaTech says SIAM is a lightweight, low-cost module that can be installed on a variety of unmanned aircraft to provide remote identification and tracking with low latency.

To serve the “rapidly expanding constituency of international members joining the DroneResponders movement,” the DroneResponders Public Safety Alliance has created the DroneResponders International Advisory Council (DIAC). According to DroneResponders Director Charles Werner, the DIAC’s primary mission is to help formalize the plan for how DroneResponders can best serve members that represent a wide range of regions, languages, and cultural traits, with an ultimate goal of “building bridges facilitating information sharing and interoperability across borders.” Right now, the DIAC is having conversations with several international members that have expressed interest in serving in a leadership capacity for the organization.

Members of the Airborne International Response Team (AIRT) formed a joint-reconnaissance team with members of the Southeast Florida Region 7 All-Hazards Incident Management Team (SEFL-R7 AHIMT) to survey damage across the hardest hit areas of the Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands in the Northern Bahamas following Hurricane Dorian. Using UAS, the team conduced damage assessment operations at the University of the Bahamas – Northern Campus, and nearby neighborhoods that were hit hard by the deadly hurricane. “We saw first-hand the damage that this hurricane leveled upon the Bahamas,” says Nigel Baker, team coordinator and incident commander of SEFL-R7 AHIMT.