Drones fly on Apex Beach
Iqaluit company awarded contract with Transport Canada
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Monday, July 17, 2017
IQALUIT
Located in an old Hudson Bay Company building on Apex Beach about a ten-minute drive from the heart of Iqaluit, Arctic UAV was recently awarded a two-year contract with Transport Canada.
The company specializes in aerial drone imagery using unmanned aerial vehicles. The federal government is currently exploring how unmanned vehicles can be used to replace existing ice patrol aircraft reaching the end of its lifespan.
"What's really exciting is that the federal government has taken this leap of faith. We haven't seen that yet with our own territorial government," said chief of operations Glenn Williams.
The existing aircraft also is in charge of offshore fisheries surveillance on fishing vessels, monitoring ships in territorial waters in Canada and oil-spill monitoring and prevention, among other duties.
"What the Government of Canada have done is they've consolidated all their aircraft," said Williams, adding that everything that's non-military that the federal government has, from the Prime Minister's Challenger to coast guard helicopters, has been brought under the Transport Canada umbrella.
"Transport Canada is investigating potential application of UAVs for what they are currently doing with manned aircraft," he said. "Are they going to replace that aircraft with another aircraft or with drones?"
"It was kind of mandated by Trudeau to use drones for this kind of surveillance work," said chief of strategic partnerships Ken Spencer, who has worked on the strategic and business plan with chief of operations Glenn Williams and chairman and chief economic officer Kirt Ejesiak since 2015.
"Kirt was a hobbyist," said Spencer. "That's where it all began."
The company now includes three others: 19-year-old UAV pilot Keane Sudlovenick, president of commercial sales Eli Turk and director of U.S. operations Jake Weber. Spencer says when brainstorming an initial list of possible applications, the team came up with about 70.
"The business has grown so fast," Spencer said.
The business has grown far beyond a small quad drone. The government contract, and a strategic partnership with University of Alaska Fairbanks, is to help develop procedures, training, and risk assessment tools for operations in larger, beyond-line-of-sight UAVs - meaning the pilot does not have to keep the unmanned vehicle within visual distance.
The contract with the federal government is to develop the concepts of operations and procedures necessary to employ am unmanned aerial system to augment the National Aerial Surveillance Program.
"They need to do two things. They need to test the capabilities of the platforms, but we don't have - we being Canada - do not have procedures or regulations in place for beyond visual line of sight operations in unsegregated airspace," said Williams.
The team partnered with the Alaskan university because it has a whole section which has been researching the technology for a decade, and they own the SeaHunter.
In June, the team worked with the SeaHunter at the UAS Centre of Excellence test range in Alma, Que.
"We did about 20 hours of beyond visual line-of-sight (flying) time during that week in Alma," said Williams.
"All this testing that we're doing right now in southern Canada is a requirement to demonstrate the capabilities of the equipment, programs and systems, then the plan is, next year, to fly it in the North."
Williams says the government approached them because the company operates in the Arctic.
"We're actually one of very few. In Nunavut, I don't think there are any other ones," he said.
Search and rescue operations is another untapped area, with UAVs used to search and a human team going in for the rescue, for example. Williams says people just need to be convinced unmanned vehicles can do the job.
