My answers are from 3 viewpoints.
One as a First Responder who runs a Fire Department and Beach Patrol drone fleet.
Two as a drone services small business
Three as a hobbyist.
1: How do you feel the ban would affect emergency services (such as wildfire fighting and fire fighting) overall?
ALL of my city's police, fire and beach patrol drones are DJI models. A ban would shut down our drone operations. Most flights are public safety and can include search and rescue, hostage taking, standoffs, tracking, fires, hazardous materials but we also use our drones for preplanning, inspections, city asset support and mapping beach erosion.
2: do you think a suitable replacement drone company (servicing both commercial and consumer) will become readily available?
There are replacements available from other companies and some of them are comparable in some ways. But they tend to be much more expensive and also lack some of the features we take fro granted. FLight Hub 2 is free to low cost situational awareness software that has no comparison in terms of features to cost. While we could rebuild a new fleet, it would be much more expensive and would lack software solutions that we currently take for granted.
3: How do you feel the ban would affect hobbyists and small businesses?
Hobbyists would also suffer as DJI makes the best hobby drones. What you get for the price is unrivaled.
4: do you think it is ok for the government to ban DJI drones?
Not at this time. There is no non-politically motivated study showing that DJI drones are "spying" on us. I do feel though that in the case of war with China, that DJI drones would be very suspect and would need to be looked into. I think they could be made to spy and possibly do other malicious things, but this is a much longer response.
5: What is your view on a timed ban on DJI drones?
My view is to continue to ban DJI drones on sensitive work (critical infrastructure, military areas and other common sense places). But allow comeptent people to choose for themselves the security risk. Use police, fire and EMS leaders to work with their IT departments to look at and mitigate riskss as we are trained to do.
6: Do you think the security threats are serious, and do you think there should even be a ban?
I think the security threats are real, but allow people to assess and mitigate the risk. There should be no outright ban as once again, there is no smoking gun that DJI is "spying" on us. DJI drones have proven their worth in many industries, public safety, agriculture, inspections etc. and a common sense risk based process should be used in each use case.
selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov
