Company Name: Airscope Industries puts drones in inspection frontline
Announcement Date: 10/02/2016
Announcement Category: Product launch/update
Announcement Content:
When a tiny hobbyist drone revealed the damage inside Christchurch Cathedral just after the 2011 earthquake, little was known about how drones could emerge as a major commercial infrastructure inspection tool.
That potential is being tapped into by a fledgling Western Australian firm. Its founder, Chris Leslie began flying at age 15. He was too young to drive so his family drove him to the local airfield. At 24 he was one of the youngest commercial airline captains around, flying for Qantas subsidiary Network Aviation across WA.
By 25, he had enough and wanted out. “I got there (piloting) at such a young age through hard work and a bit of luck, but I realised I need to be challenged, I can’t be doing this for the next 40 years of my life. So I was looking around for opportunities, and I stumbled across the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) industry.”
He said that over five months he compiled a profile of how industry might best use commercial drones. So in March last year he founded Airscope Industries which aimed to build a “drone airline” specialising in infrastructure inspections for industry.
Mr Leslie said he wanted to imbue Airscope with a traditional airline culture. “We’ve created a full airline model. We internally train our pilots, our inspectors and our staff, and put them through our safety management systems.”
“We’ve got 27 staff,” he said. They ranged from full time to casual. “A lot of those staff are either ex-military pilots, ex-commercial airline pilots, operational staff, safety managers from the mines - we have an array of people working together,” he said.
“And it’s not just about the technology. We run our interview process exactly as you would if you were going into Qantas or Jetstar.”
He said 9 were former or current commercial or private airline pilots. Others had worked remotely piloting underwater equipment from oil rigs. He said a lack of jobs was seeing commercial pilots drift into the UAV industry. Airscope aimed to have 15 pilots aboard by June with a goal of 100 pilots in Australia and New Zealand in three years.
He said inspecting power poles loomed as big business and Airscope was in a pilot program to inspect 100 poles. “There’s 9.5 million power poles in Australia and we want to inspect every one of them,” he said.
Conducting drone inspections of wind turbines, oil rigs, conveyer belts, sewage plants, water infrastructure, warehouses, shopping centre air conditioning systems, and heritage listed buildings were on the agenda.
He said Airscope Industries so far had six contracts at various stages of implementation. One potentially involved monitoring for sharks.
He said industry specialists could watch as the drones flew. “We want to position an inspector or a highly educated technician and give them an ability to position the camera 2 or 3 metres away from an asset, and use the camera to make informed decisions.
“We work out the flight angles and what data can be captured with various sensors on the aircraft in order to collate proper data. It’s very much in test phase”
Investor and soon-to-be company director Julio De Laffitte said the Perth-based company planned to expand to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast next year.
He predicted that people would come to Airscope to learn to fly drones commercially. “We’ll also have to develop technology so that drones don’t bump into each other,” he said.
Announcement URL: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/airscope-industries-puts-drones-in-inspection-frontline/news-story/5e91beb0754c235ed385b5c7ee39d250
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