The First Ever Course on Humanitarian Drones

(Source: irevolution.net‘s Patrick Meier)

The Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) promotes the safe, coordinated and effective use of UAVs in a wide range of humanitarian settings. To this end, the Network’s mission includes training the first generation of Humanitarian UAV experts. This explains why I teamed up with VIVES Aeronautics College last year to create and launch the first ever UAV training specifically geared towards established humanitarian organizations. The 3-day, intensive and hands-on training took place this month in Belgium and went superbly well, which is why we’ll be offering it again next year and possibly a second time this year as well.

Participants included representatives from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), World Food Program (WFP), International Organization for Migration (IOM), European Union Humanitarian Aid Organization (ECHO), Medair, Direct Relief, and Germany’s Development Organization GIZ. We powered through the most important subjects, ranging from airspace regulations to the physics of flight, the in’s and out’s of civil aviation, aeronautics, weather forecasts, programming flight routes, operational safety, standard operating procedures, best practices, etc. I gave trainings on both Humanitarian UAV Applications and Humanitarian UAV Operations, which totaled well over 4 hours of instruction and discussion. The Ops training included a detailed review of best practices—summary available here. Knowing how to operate this new technology is definitely the easy part; knowing how to use UAVs effectively and responsibly in real-world humanitarian contexts is a far bigger challenge; hence the need for this training.

The purpose of the course was to provide the kind of training that humanitarian professionals need in order to 1) Fully understand the opportunities and limitations of this new technology; 2) Partner effectively with professional UAV teams during disasters; and 3) Operate safely, legally, responsibly and ethically. The accelerated training ended with a 2-hour simulation exercise in which participants were tasked with carrying out a UAV mission in Nepal for which they had to use all the standard operating procedures and best practices they had learned over the course of the training. Each team then had to present in detail how they would carry out the required mission.

Below are pictures from the 3-day event. Each day included some 12 hours of instructions and discussions—so these pictures certainly don’t cover all of the flights, materials and seminars. For more on this unique UAV training course, check out this excellent blog post by Andrew Schroeder from Direct Relief. In the meantime, please feel free to get in touch with me if you’re interested taking this course in the future or would like a customized one for your organization.

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