Chula Vista PD Drone Program Enlists AirData to Provide Community Transparency

by DRONELIFE Staff Writer Ian M. Crosby

Chula Vista Police Department’s nationally recognized drone program has enlisted the aid of drone fleet management industry leader AirData UAV in order to help provide drone flight transparency to the public. AirData now enables Chula Vista residents to view and understand the exact location, flight path, and purpose behind each police drone deployment.

“Transparency and accountability are key components in the success of our drone programwhich has been an invaluable tool in maintaining the safety of our officers and the public,” said CVPD Chief Roxana Kennedy. “We pride ourselves on ensuring the public has access to our drone flight information in upholding the trust of our community.”

Chula Vista has been a trailblazer in the field since unveiling its Chula Vista PD drone program in October of 2018. The program has since continued to expand its capabilities, and is now providing additional transparency to constituents through the partnership with AirData. The CVPD Drone Program Historical Flight Data is available to view on a dedicated webpage.

AirData supplies CVPD with a simple solution to track and manage all of the flight data from their missions. Officers are able to focus on keeping the community safe with drone technology, while the integration provides effortless data collection and automatic reporting. Federal compliance, reporting, maintenance notifications, and logging are time-intensive tasks, and AirData manages these tasks in the background, allowing police departments to focus on keeping the community safe

“We are excited to work closely with Chula Vista to provide full transparency of the police department flights to the community,” said Eran Steiner, AirData UAV’s Founder and CEO. “AirData enables officers to focus on the community, while AirData performs the mundane and time-consuming work of flight data collection, federal compliance tracking, and crash prevention through tracking drone health. Chula Vista offers its residents an open AirData-driven web page, enabling the public to be well informed of drone-related law enforcement activity.”

AirData UAV provides a robust integration for departments seeking to benefit from a comprehensive Drone as First Responder (DFR) program. Communities benefit greatly when using DFR callouts by saving lives, reducing response times, and saving tax dollars while increasing citizen and officer safety.

Ian attended Dominican University of California, where he received a BA in English in 2019. With a lifelong passion for writing and storytelling and a keen interest in technology, he is now contributing to DroneLife as a staff writer