ANSWERS FROM ABOVE
The Knysna fires highlighted the potential usefulness of eye-in-the-sky drones. The machines are already proving handy in many fields, though there are airsafety concerns and lawmakers have not caught up
If ever there was a need for drones to provide quick aerial information to firefighters, police and paramedics over a large area in SA, then the raging bushfires across swathes of the Garden Route last week fitted that bill.
There is drone footage of the devastation running up the coast from Sedgefield to Plettenberg Bay. It shows burnt-out houses in Knysna and blackened surrounds stretching for 100 km. But how much quicker could emergency services react if they were guided by drones able to pinpoint the hotspots and places where people were in danger? The disaster that engulfed this broad geographical area could have been made more manageable by the accurate pictures aerial surveillance can give.
The reality in SA is that, for now, the use of drones for civil and commercial activities is limited. That means the drone footage of the blazes sweeping over the coastal bush and forest was more likely a result of chance than any organised activity on the part of local, regional or national government.
One can only wonder at the possibilities there may have been to preempt a disaster that will cost insurance companies more than R4bn in damages claims. The Garden Route catastrophe came at the same time that Cape Town was being battered by a highly irregular storm.
Insurance companies have subsequently warned of rising risk premiums as changing global weather patterns make life more uncertain. Just last week, United Drone Holdings, a local company that consults across the industry, held a three-day drone conference in Midrand, near Johannesburg, to explore the possibilities of these technologies in SA.
What it means: While drones are increasingly being used by private companies and governments, legislation is lagging in most countries
CEO Sean Reitz says the value of commercial drone activities in SA is not easily defined. “A recent economic impact study estimated the SA market potential to be in excess of R2bn, with the capacity to add almost 25,000 jobs.”
The country is having “an extraordinary increase” in the uptake of drone technology in mining, agriculture, safety and security, with the SA Police Service also making use of drones.
“Cost varies from entry level drones from R25,000 to high-end mining units with specialised payloads at R3m,” he says.
Reitz says drones are “fairly strictly” regulated in SA but research from global consulting group PWC in May 2016 indicates the country still does not require a licence for flying beyond a visual line of sight, and insurance is still not required for commercial flights.
As circumstance would have it, Pwc’s capital projects and infrastructure group had, a week before the Cape disasters, been on a roadshow in SA espousing the commercial use of drones.
The global consulting group says drones can help with costs, safety, transparency, operational efficiency, environmental compliance and risk management of capital projects, ranging from mining to construction and agro-processing.
Drones can also be utilised for sports and entertainment events, insurance and telecommunications, providing detailed images of people and machinery that can be used for exploration, mapping, surveying, planning and security purposes.
Perhaps, critically, they can also be used to prevent poachers from killing rhino and elephant, and any other of Africa’s apex animal species.
Unfortunately, drones are already widely used in warfare, in places such as the mountains of Afghanistan.
PWC says “advanced image analytics” are a future asset for heavy industry, saving substantial time and costs. Michal Mazur, PWC partner for drone-powered solutions, says that in 2013 Poland became the only country to provide comprehensive legislation for legalised drone flights. Little wonder, then, that Pwc’s global drone activities are based in Warsaw.
“It’s a new technology and a tool to get a new perspective. There is this buzzword — ‘predictive analytics’. This is predictive analytics,” he says.
Mazur says the global market for drones is estimated to be Us$127bn, including providing data for wind, rain and hail-related insurance claims.
But, as is the case with the new generation of driverless cars, legislation seemingly lags far behind the technology, and computerised drone operations are not yet legal anywhere in the world.
“Data acquisition is a very precise science,” says Adam Wisniewski, PWC director for drone-powered solutions, based in Warsaw.
“You buy data [from PWC] and that’s in the [sales] package.”
He says drones can effectively provide real-time images to an accuracy of 1 cm. Satellites have a much lower resolution than that — maybe 1 m-2 m.
Wisniewski focuses on the practical implementation of drone-enabled services, including for data gathering, cloud computing and asset maintenance.
He also holds a military-grade certificate for drone operators.
“There are very stringent rules on a construction site — such as no smoking,
” he says. “PWC develops the interface to manage data.”
The consultancy has mapped 150,000 km of power lines in Ontario, Canada, for logging companies. And while drones are mainly image-based for now, they can also spray crops and measure agricultural growth rates using sensing technologies.
But Mazur says the technology is still new and legislation has been found wanting. “There is a lot of marketing, but not so much substance,” he says. To this end, PWC focuses mainly on capital projects.
In SA, global agricultural machinery and services provider John Deere has long provided farmers with capabilities such as remotely turning on their irrigation systems using cellphones and satellites — even from a pub in London.
PWC says airspace-governing bodies around the world are facing the challenge of ensuring the safety and privacy of people without suppressing drone innovation and
This may be a barrier to commercial development of drone applications in a given industry, it says.
In many countries, regulations are being implemented which require drone pilots to pass practical and theoretical tests and medical examinations, as well as receive permission to fly in particular areas and beyond a visual line of sight.
Globally, drones equipped with cameras and sensors are providing companies with clearer, more comprehensive views of their businesses. Industries with the best prospects for drone applications globally are infrastructure, estimated to be worth about $45bn; agriculture, worth about $32bn; and transport, worth about $13bn.
“This is another tool in our arsenal. It helps us in processes we are already involved in for our clients,” says Andrew Shaw, director of Pwc’s infrastructure advisory services in SA. “There is real interest among SOES [state-owned enterprises].”
Mazur, meanwhile, says Japan spends huge amounts of money on infrastructure, and that the law now includes drone surveying. While SA’S government has long promised huge infrastructure rollout, major projects have been delayed and burdened by overspending.
Drones could speed up this process.
Airspace-governing bodies around the world are facing the challenge of ensuring the safety and privacy of people without suppressing drone innovation and growth PWC