Ghost Town: How an Abandoned Mining Town Became a Cutting-Edge Drone Training Ground

Company uses deserted town as DFR training site

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

A police-operated drone flies along a deserted street in a small town, searching for victims of a tragic incident at a school. The UAV spots a figure lying on the ground, a young boy, and the remote operator relays the information to an incident commander to affect a rescue operation.

Fortunately, the above scenario is simply an exercise, part of an ambitious program designed to train law enforcement officers in the use of drones as first responders (DFR). The scene is made all the more realistic because of the setting, an abandoned mining town in the California desert, whose paved roads, houses and other buildings mimic the real-world settings for DFR trainees.

The company behind the program, Flying Lion Inc., recently opened the site, dubbed FLI Town, in the deserted town of Eagle Mountain, once the home of a Kaiser Steel iron ore mine. FLI Town is the first town-sized DFR training site in the country.

Flying’s Lion vice president and partner Steven Katz said the drone service provider, which had been working with law enforcement agencies to help them set up DFR programs for about a decade, saw the need for a specialized training ground that allowed DFR trainees to fly in a secure, remote environment with no ground risk and minimal conflict with crewed aircraft.

“We realized that there’s no place to really train law enforcement officers besides sitting next to them at their agency and flying over their city,” Katz said in an interview. FLI Town provides a setting for pilots-in-training to learn the tactics and techniques of a DFR program while flying remotely from their workstation at whatever police agency across the country that they belong to, he said.

Flying Lion operates FLI Town as a privately owned training, testing and collaboration center. As abandoned towns, Eagle Mountain is a fairly young one. Unlike many 19^th-century ghost towns spread across the U.S. West, Eagle Mountain was built in the 1940s. It remained as a thriving company town with more than 4,000 residents and 400 homes before its closure in the early 1980s.

Katz said the site was originally developed as a gold mine, but as the miners used drills to search for gold, they found that their drill bits kept breaking. They realized that the soil was full of iron. Kaiser Steel, then a major steel producer in the eastern Los Angeles area, bought the mine and began producer iron ore for its steel mills.

At the peak of operation, the town produced enough iron ore to fill 100-car trains going west to Kaiser’s mills. “So, out in the middle of the desert, they ended up having to build a whole town,” Katz said.

After economic factors forced the closure of the iron mine, the town briefly served as the site of a low-risk prison. Surrounded on three sides by Joshua Tree National Park, the FLI Town site offers a secure, remote environment where DFR pilots-in-training can fly under near real-world conditions, without interfering with the public or competing for airspace with manned aircraft.

More than 20 DFR flight scenarios developed

Flying Lion has developed more than 20 flight scenarios involving situations that future DFR pilots could encounter in the real world. They include distinguishing an armed person on a rooftop from an innocent civilian, locating a lost hiker or wounded person, and identifying license plate numbers as seen from a drone.

The company has secured an FAA Part 107 BVLOS waiver up to 400 feet AGL (with no human visual observer), enabling 24/7 remote training flights from any location with an internet connection.

“Somebody flying from Dallas or Chicago, or any small town in Georgia, can remotely fly and train their police officers or civilians — whoever is flying their drones – as a first responder,” Katz said.

Flying Lion has partnered with DRONERESPONDERS and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide DFR training. The company has also partnered with about 16 UAS industry groups — involved in sensor technology, hardware, communications and software solutions — on its FLI Town project. Some of its partners include DJI, Nokia, StarLink, T-Mobile and FlightOps.

Currently FLI Town utilizes drones and equipment from Nokia and DJI. The Nokia drone is compatible with Motorola Cape for DFR software, and almost all DFR software supports the Dock 2. However, the FLI Town VFR training program itself is drone vendor-agnostic.

“We also can support a Skydio training. We can support anyone,” he said.

Most police agencies across the U.S. still deploy DJI-produced drones, but there is a transition under-way, as more and more states adopt statutes limiting the use by law enforcement agencies of drones produced in China.

“It’s a mix … it depends on if it’s a police agency in Florida, they can’t use Chinese drones,” Katz said. “We’ll support any of the drones in the market.”

He said the company is working to build out its avionics and communications systems to allow it to conduct training missions with greater range duration and safety.

“Our first beyond line of sight waiver was for 200 feet with ADS B. Then, just two weeks ago we received the final approval on beyond line of sight up to 400 feet and that’s utilizing an Iris system plus ADS B,” he said. The Iris Automation system enhances the drone’s detect-and-avoid capabilities.

The company is also working to build out its Starlink network for greater connectivity.

“There’s a cellular tower about 11 miles away. That’s pretty far away. So how do we get all the connectivity and things such as that? We have power, but the majority of it is through Starlink,” he said.

Beyond serving as a DFR training site, Flying Lion plans to take advantage of FLI Town’s desert location to employ the site as a testing ground for operating drones and supporting technologies in harsh environmental conditions. The California Desert provides an extreme environment for hardware stress testing, with 110-plus-degree summer temperatures, under three inches of annual rainfall, and 348 days of sunshine per year.

Although Flying Lion currently is focused on serving the law enforcement market, the company also is poised to deploy its FLI Town site to provide UAS training and services to commercial customers.

“We’ll support any vendor, any hardware or software solution combination,” he said. “You don’t go there. It’s done 100 percent remotely.”

Read more:

• Flying Lion Achieves Milestone: Over 50,000 Drone as First Responder Flights Completed
• Drone as First Responder, with Airspace Awareness: Flying Lion and Iris Automation Partner
• The Future of Drone as First Responder (DFR) Programs: Insights from the National Public Safety UAS Conference

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.