Northwest Aerospace News February | March 2019 Issue No. 7 | Page 58

Photo credit: BLMOregon on Foter.com / CC BY-SA
A
good example of using industry trade knowledge for
drone data collection would be wind turbine inspection.
Noel said, “A cinematographer can take the drone up and
get the best angles of the landscape for marketing – but the
engineer or inspection technician would know precisely
what to inspect, and what it should look like. The flying
of the drone gets everyone excited, but it’s the data that’s
important.”
Stasney added, “Avista (Spokane-based electric and gas
utility) is teaching their existing employees to fly drones to
inspect dams.”
Both experts feel that their students will have an edge when
looking for jobs because they will have the industry tech-
nical knowledge from their area of study with the bonus of
knowing how to collect data via drone.
One of the challenges Noel sees is in recruiting more in-
structors to teach industry-specific applications —
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for example, an agricultural expert who knows how to col-
lect data by drone, interpret it, and then teach it to others.
“The type of data and how it is collected
and analyzed is different by industry. Most
colleges that we talk to are interested, but
they need to have instructors trained to do
this work,” said Noel.
In summary, these community and technical colleges as
well as several others in Washington are discovering new
ways to train people to use unmanned systems/drones to
collect industry-related, useful data.
Noel sees this trend continuing in other programs across the
state because it’s added value for a graduating student to
have this specialized training.