On a sunny July day at Nenana’s small airport, trainee pilot Brian Lu is prepping the SeaHunter, a 300-pound, twin engine, 16 foot wingspan drone.
“We’re here to do a practice run between Fairbanks and Nenana,” Lu said.
Lu is one of the newest pilots in the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ drone research program. Officially called the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft System Integration, or ACUASI for short, it’s designated as an FAA “Center of Excellence” to help develop the technology.
Andrew Wentworth, the pilot in command for the tests, sits inside a white trailer set up as a flight control station.
“We’re working on our handoff from one control station to another control station in preparation to fly what we call a ferry flight from Fairbanks to Nenana,” Wentworth said.
Wentworth remotely starts the SeaHunter engine and it taxis down the runway.
Lu says the test flights comply with FAA regulations that require unmanned aircraft to remain in sight of the pilot.
“Everything that we're doing right now for this practice run is visual line of sight. We will have all eyes, you know, when we're flying it on it,” Lu said.
The pilots watch it turn around at the end of the runway, and tell it to take off.
Trainer Matt Westhoff watches the flight from the ground as the handoff occurs by computer from one control station to the other, in a blue trailer, about 100 feet away.
“That’s the first time we've landed off of our portable station. We've done transfers and stuff before on the ground, but now this is the first time we've actually took control of it in the air and landed from that,” Westhoff said.
“So, what you saw today with Matt for the landing -- incredibly uneventful," Robinson said.
And that’s by design according to John Robinson, ACUASI’s new director of operations. Robinson says every ACUASI test flight has several safety layers, with human pilots standing by to take control of the aircraft.
"A boring, a boring day with a UAV as an exciting thing. And honestly, we hope for a lot more boring days to come,” he said.
And they did it again. The successful handoff flights in July were followed by a 40-mile test flight between Fairbanks and Nenana last week,
“There's a lot of things we're setting out to prove here with these flights,” he said.
Brian Lu says ACUASI’s impact on Interior Alaska is expanding.
“And you know, we want that to be the drone capital. And so we're gonna start these corridors that need to be set up and we need to establish this,” Lu said.
“Yeah, I think the link is strong, and I would love to become the Silicon Valley of drones,” Robinson said.
This week’s conference will focus on the potential for drone research and economic impacts. Topics include emergency management, artificial intelligence, law enforcement, rural community needs, and infrastructure.
