Brian started his aviation career flying helicopters in 2008, and is a commercial helicopter pilot and Certified Flight Instructor. He was employed by SDGE Aviation Services Department in 2009 as a helicopter dispatcher for the Sunrise Powerlink project, and began flying drones in 2013. Brian has been an SDGE UAS pilot since 2016.

Mr. Young started his career in aviation in 2012 as a civilian helicopter pilot where he acquired his commercial, instrument, and Flight Instructor ratings, accruing ~1000 hours of flight time. He moved to full time UAS utility work in 2015, specializing in heavy lift LiDAR mapping. In 2018 the demand across California for detailed inspections for wildfire mitigation took off. Since then, he focused on these detailed inspections, leading inspection crews. For the last year and a half, Mr. Young has acted as our Operations Coordinator at the Aviation Services Department within our utility.

Frederic Farin is a UAS Operations Support Specialist, training instructor and certified Thermographer, specializing in sUAS detailed inspections of utility infrastructure, Precision Line Pulling, aerial thermography and CH4 methane gas detection for SDG&E Aviation Services Department since 2021 with a focus on program refinement. Fred began his career as a Remote Pilot in 2013, diversifying his sUAS mission set as a contractor in Aerial Cinematography, Orthomosaic mapping, progressing into Transmission and Distribution Overhead Visual Inspections in 2019, working with every major California utility company and their respective Wildfire Mitigation programs.

Rook has been in the commercial drone industry since 2017. Initially as an independent company providing agricultural and construction mapping services, as well as training.He started his career at SDG&E per diem as a consultant in 2018, eventually moving to full time in 2022 developing maintenance related Standard Operating Procedures, sUAS fleet servicing and backup RPIC on specialized missions such as Precision Line Pulling, LiDAR and Drone in a Box operations.

Small UAS commercial operator for 10 years as pilot, flight operations coordinator and data analyst. Specialized in asset inspections and mapping in RGB, multispectral, IR and lidar.Education – Background in GIS and B.A. of Anthropology and B.A. of History from University of California San Diego. Started working with UAS as an archaeologist and transitioned to full time mapping UAS operations in 2016.

Grant leads the North American solutions engineering team at DJI, helping enterprise users deploy drones successfully. He graduated from Indiana State University with a degree in Unmanned Systems while also earning his private pilot’s license and Part 107 remote pilot certification. Previously, Grant worked in the utility industry where he trained new pilots, conducted UAS operations inspecting critical infrastructure, and developed custom object detection models using AI to improve post-processing of UAS photos. Grant is motivated by seeing the positive results of drone operations across industries, whether it’s saving lives, delivering blood, or helping restore power. He is passionate about showing organizations how drones can improve efficiency, productivity and safety.