Joan Brown
– Newport News Times – Aug 15, 2018
LINCOLN
CITY – Career Tech Charter High School’s Coastal Drone Academy pilots spent
three days in the field this summer remotely flying while taking more than
25,000 photographs in a mission commissioned by Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife to map sea grasses and shellfish of Netarts Bay.
“We
can fly huge areas and produce really accurate data,” said Chuck Getter, drone
professor at Career Tech.
In
performing missions, pilots program their drones to fly in an up-and-back
pattern in a block area while taking photos. “In aviation terms, you call it a sortie,”
Getter said. “Your block is the area
you’re going to take the pictures in, and that’s limited by the length of the
batteries in the drones. These drones
can fly for about an hour, so they can fly about 25 miles.”
A
block, or sortie, equals about a quarter square mile, Getter said. In the Netarts mission, they tried to map two
or three blocks a day. Information they
gathered is survey grade. “They are a
crew, and they get paid as a natural resource crew doing drone work,” he said. “They get an incentive pay for the day.” They also get high school and college credits.
Getter
started talking about a drone program with Career Tech’s charter owner,
Community Services Consortium, in 2015. Gaining support from them, as well as from
Lincoln County School District, Federal Aviation Administration, American Model
Aeronautics, State of Oregon ODFW, and other collaborators and clients, Coastal
Drone Academy gained a grant from Oregon Department of Education to get going,
including the purchase of drones. September
2018 commences the academy’s second full year of flying.
The
academy offers three courses, AV 101, 102, and 103. From the first week of the first class,
students fly trainer drones.
In
AV101, when it rains, students fly their drones inside the Oregon National
Guard Building. “They do racing, they
have a lot of fun,” Getter said. The
first year is spent learning to be a pilot – aerodynamics, the rules of flying,
visiting an airport and a flight museum, and learning how to repair their
drones.
“Right
now what we’re trying to do is marine studies. To do that using a drone, you have to enter
U.S. air space,” he said, and that requires a FAA drone pilot, or 107 license,
which all students are strongly encouraged to obtain.
The
107 test has 125 concepts, Getter said. “We actually spend a year inside the 107
licensing booklets trying to understand the concepts that FAA gives us, instead
of just memorizing them.”
AV
102, the operations course, focuses on doing useful work for the academy’s
collaborators. AV 103 focuses on
performing missions.
“Students
also learn how to work as a team, how to produce a product of data for a client
or collaborator, or maybe they look back and reflect on their high school
experience with some more satisfaction in themselves and their
accomplishments,” Getter said.
Coastal
Drone Academy is being watched by two sets of evaluators – the Oregon
Department of Education visits them every three months to talk to the students
and instructors and to see what they can do, and the academy has also invited
Oregon State University to evaluate its program.
A
focus is to follow students once they graduate and to ask them what things
worked and didn’t and what they would add. “We’re also trying to ask, ‘What did
you become when you grew up, did it help you?’” Getter said.
Career
Tech 2018 graduate student Jason Miranda will work next school year as a tutor
in the drone program. He will also be
attending community college and has been accepted for a marine studies cruise
scholarship to Oregon State University, Getter said. “They have an offshore research program, and
he’ll be off chasing whales with drones sometime in September.”
Getter
has more than 30 years' experience as a drone and airplane pilot. He worked on a team developing a concept for
making maps of shorelines, subsequently mapping the entire United States
shoreline then being invited by countries to map their shorelines, resulting in
his team mapping over 25,000 miles.
Nationwide,
there’s a shortage of drone pilots, he said, adding that collaborators and
clients are great places for academy graduates to gain internships, employment,
and other opportunities.
