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20 In conversation | Robert Hannaford have been built – all for the company’s own use – and the type has been approved by the South African Civil Aviation Authority to fly in controlled airspace with a transponder. Its 2.5-hour endurance is combined with the ability to operate at up to 25 km from the ground control station while maintaining a live video feed, for about one-twentieth of the cost of something roughly comparable, Hannaford said. Airspace challenges Flying in controlled airspace is very challenging for operational as well as technical reasons, he said, the main driver being the safety of commercial air traffic. It is essential to produce a safety case that makes the Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS) comfortable, which means allowing them to see the vehicle on their screens and showing them that you can follow all the airspace rules and comms etiquette, as well as filing flight plans properly. The Bat Hawks have been flying since 2013, and have conformed to the South African CAA’s regulations since their enforcement in 2015. It takes six months to obtain an RPAS operator’s certificate, a process that involved much fieldwork and paperwork. “From a training perspective, all our pilots are instrument rated, although it’s not an official rating from the CAA,” Hannaford said. “They are effectively instrument rated night pilots, for want of better words, because 90% of our operations are at night, some in controlled airspace, some not.” From a technical point of view, it meant conforming to manned aircraft lighting requirements, with strobes and port, starboard and tail illumination. The main challenge though, he said, was finding a small transponder that didn’t need much power to drive and that would work close to an airport well enough to give the ATNS confidence in it. That means reliably reporting positional data including altitude – critical for traffic separation. UDS eventually chose the ping20Si from uAvionix, which worked first time in testing near Cape Town, giving the ATNS what Hannaford called a completely different outlook on UAVs. “A controller sees the same thing as if he were bringing in a BA flight to Cape Town International. He tells us to change altitude, so we do, he tells us to change heading, so we change heading,” he said. BARS safety case Getting to that point, however, required a strong safety case, which in UDS’ case was helped by passing a Basic Aviation Risk Standard (BARS) reference audit, something Hannaford described as even more stringent than a CAA audit. UDS had to go through the audit for it to be accepted for on-site survey work by mining giant Anglo American. The audit goes through the whole operation, from maintenance to pilot training and risk assessment procedures. Hannaford’s ambition now is to grow UDS into an international UAV solution business that can take the lessons learned from almost 18,000 hours of commercial BVLOS flying in South Africa to other parts of the world, while keeping services affordable. August/September 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology Robert Hannaford, 52, is a partner and engineering director of UAV & Drone Solutions (UDS), which is based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Educated at the city’s Blairgowrie High School and then the Vaal Driehoek Technikon, after national service in the South African Army he ran his family’s plastic injection moulding and tool- and die-making business in the early 1990s before attending the Wits Technikon technology college to study data communications, and subsequently microcontroller development in 1994 and Microsoft system engineering in 2000. After a position at South African Post & Telecoms he worked for a fax company repairing printed circuit boards, then managed Canon South Africa’s fax division before starting his first business, Darro Electronics, which carried out high-level PCB repair for the IT industry. He then started what became the biggest cellular repair business in South Africa before moving on to software development, producing natural history apps for Apple and Android devices as well as Google Play and the Windows market, all through Mydigitalearth, a business he still owns. His professional involvement with UAVs began some 18 years ago when he turned a hobby into a business and started building large radio-controlled helicopters, complete with camera gimbals and autopilots, for the movie industry. He co- founded UDS with partners Otto Werdmuller and George Sayegh in 2013. In 2011 he gained a degree from the Unmanned Vehicle University in Phoenix, Arizona. He holds a Remote Pilot’s licence with an instructor’s rating on fixed-wing, multi-rotor and helicopter platforms, and also holds an American Part 107 UAS Operator licence. Robert Hannaford