A drone program that did not exist four years ago flew its 100,000th sortie last Monday. On Tuesday afternoon the man who built it collected the highest honor in American public safety aviation.
DRONERESPONDERS presented the Eric Talley Public Safety UAS Excellence Award to Greg Whiting, technology integration cell director and sUAS program manager for the Texas Military Department, on the opening day of Commercial UAV Expo at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Roughly 80 full-time pilots now fly for the program he stood up from nothing.
The number that should interest anyone running a drone unit is not the 100,000. It is the rate underneath it. Whiting told the room that about one sortie in every 30,000 involves pilot error.
A General Asked For A Drone Program By The End Of The Month
Whiting’s account of the founding was the best story told on that stage all day. In March 2022 the commanding general of the Texas National Guard walked into his office and asked him to start a drone program.
Whiting asked when it needed to be operational. The answer was that there was no rush, but the end of the month would be great. The timing lines up with the record: Major General Thomas Suelzer became the 53rd adjutant general of Texas on March 14, 2022.
His first move was to call for help rather than to buy hardware. He went to the Texas Department of Public Safety, to Texas Parks and Wildlife, and to the Austin Fire Department, and once they finished laughing at the timeline they handed over their curricula, sat him in on their classes and walked him through their failures as well as their successes.
There is a neat circle in that. The Texas DPS drone program was being run at the time by Jason Day, who has since built it into the largest public safety UAS operation in the country at roughly 400 aircraft and 400 operators, and who now serves as deputy director of DRONERESPONDERS. Day opened Tuesday’s ceremony from the podium before Rowland presented the award Whiting accepted.
The One-Week Course Became Three Weeks
Whiting took the roughly one-week public safety course he had been given and, in his words, militarized it. That meant stretching it to three weeks and adding to it until graduates could fly at night in congested airspace, work a radio, and talk ground teams onto a target.
The first class graduated in under a year. Within that same year the Texas Military Department had one of the largest drone programs in the state.
The course now draws instructors from state, local and military partners, and it is the mechanism behind the safety numbers rather than a separate achievement. Whiting was direct about the culture he wanted. These are not, he said, little plastic things you buy on Amazon. They are aircraft in the national airspace, flown by pilots who are treated as pilots. He accepted the award in a Technology Integration Cell polo rather than a suit, which felt about right for the point he was making.
The Mission Numbers Sit Alongside The Safety Numbers
The program’s primary work is supporting border operations, and Whiting gave the audience the figures behind the 100,000 sorties. About 47,000 of those flights produced an interaction with some form of illegal activity. He put the share of detected activity that gets away at roughly 1%, and said the program has contributed to the seizure of close to $10 million in narcotics.
The other half of the mission is disaster response. When catastrophic flooding hit central Texas, the Texas Military Department was part of the aviation response, and DRONERESPONDERS credited Whiting with coordinating crewed and uncrewed aircraft over the same ground while keeping responders separated in the air. Airspace deconfliction during a flood is the least glamorous work in this field and the fastest way to kill someone if it goes wrong.
Those figures come from Whiting and the award citation rather than an audited public record. The safety rate is the one an outside program manager would most want confirmed independently.
The Award Carries A Boulder Officer’s Name
Officer Eric Talley was killed on March 22, 2021, responding to the King Soopers shooting in Boulder, Colorado, one of ten people who died that day. He was 51 and the father of seven, and he had joined the Boulder Police Department in 2010 after a career in information technology.
He joined the department’s newly formed drone program in 2017 and took part in more than 100 drone operations, and his chief later described him as the technical guru of the department. DRONERESPONDERS, which runs under the Airborne International Response Team, describes him as Boulder PD’s UAS program manager and presents the award each year in his name.
Last year’s recipient handled this year’s presentation. Matt Rowland, a 20-year Fort Wayne Police Department veteran who helped found its Air Support Unit in 2017 and worked with DRONERESPONDERS and the FAA to secure the first Part 107 waiver permitting drone-as-first-responder flights without a visual observer, retired last month and took the award to Whiting on stage. Sponsors including Axon, BRINC, DroneSense, Esri and Pilot Institute funded the award package.
DroneXL’s Take
I have watched this award go to a city cop, a fire captain and now a National Guard officer, and the through-line is the same every time. None of them won it for buying drones.
Whiting won it for the boring part. A three-week course when a one-week course was on offer. A safety management system in a program that scaled fast enough to justify skipping one. Pilots assigned and treated as pilots. The 100,000 number will get the headlines, and the 1-in-30,000 is the one that should get the phone calls from other program managers.
The border mission is going to make some readers uncomfortable, and I am not going to pretend the politics are not there. What I will say is that the award is for how the flying gets done, and a program that puts 80 full-time pilots in the air every day without a serious accident record is a public safety achievement regardless of what you think of Operation Lone Star. DroneXL covered the Texas floods response and the same aircraft and the same crews did that work too.
The part I keep returning to is the phone call. Faced with an impossible deadline, Whiting did not issue an RFP. He called three agencies that had already made the mistakes and asked them what went wrong, and they told him. That is the thing this industry does better than almost any other, and it is exactly what DRONERESPONDERS built its search and rescue working group to do at a national scale.
Watch what happens to that three-week curriculum next. DRONERESPONDERS launched a two-day Program Managers Course at this week’s show after its own 2025 survey found training to be the biggest gap in public safety UAS, and the agencies now holding more than a thousand drone-as-first-responder waivers need a syllabus more than they need another airframe. Whiting has one that has survived 100,000 flights. Somebody should ask him for it.
Sources: DRONERESPONDERS award presentation, Commercial UAV Expo, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, September 1, 2026; DRONERESPONDERS Eric Talley Award; Texas Military Department Office of the Adjutant General
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
