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Where does your mind go when you think of Portugal?
Blue waters and bronzed skin? Piri-piri chicken and fruity port wine?
While it certainly means all of those things, here at Cyberhawk it means something else too. Portugal is where we took our team of pilots – both trainee and experienced – for a unique set of warm weather training.
UK weather doesn’t always lend itself well to drone flight and can
often offer obstacles that hinder pilot training or asset inspection.
Rain
is no friend to electronics at the best of times but can cause
particular issue – and ultimately lots of risk – when it concerns
something that takes flight.
High winds affect the stability and
direction of our drones – which not only is a safety issue but affects
our inspection work as it becomes more difficult to take good quality
footage when the drone is being moved around involuntarily.
Despite
this, we weren’t going to let bad weather affect our pilots’ training.
So we devised a solution that would not only get our guys trained up, but we were going to do it in record time.
We were going to Portugal.
While Portugal was the ideal choice because of its perfect weather
conditions, there was a second reason why we chose it as our
destination.
Our trip took us south of Lisbon, specifically to a
small town named Setubal. There, amongst various industrial parks,
exists a decommissioned powerplant.
It was like the training ground of our dreams.
One of the reasons we chose Setubal Power Station was because of its
substantial size and the number of assets and components that its made
up of. These factors make it the perfect training ground for a new
geovisual pilot and ideal for learning how to take orthophotos,
panoramics and sphericals.
It’s not possible to train utility pilots in a live environment with functioning towers as it presents high levels of risk as accidental drone collisions with live power lines can have deadly consequences.
For that reason we usually simulate the would-be tower with something
lower-risk but similar in size, such as a lighting column.
Because
Setubal was decommissioned in 2013, that risk was lowered completely
and allowed our pilot the golden opportunity to train with real towers.
Similar to utility pilots, oil and gas ones must train with simulated assets.
Chimney
stacks with billowing smoke or flares with unrelenting flames can both
present very different, but equally dangerous, challenges to even the
most experienced pilot.
Again, our decision to choose Setubal
paid dividends as perhaps the most striking part of its make-up are the
two enormous chimney stacks that sit in its middle.
Our pilot was gifted the chance to get up and close and personal with these magnificent monuments.
Over the course of one week, we managed to fully train a team of three pilots over three separate levels successfully.
This
was due in no small part to the excellent conditions that the
Portuguese climate can boast, but also because of the fantastic assets
that became our training facilities.
If we had stayed at home, our guys would likely not have been a quarter of the way through their training. Instead, they arrived home qualified and ready to get on the job as soon as they got off the plane.
One flight done, on to the next one. That’s the Cyberhawk way.