Another beautiful Irish summer day on Bray's pebble beach. With tens-of-thousands onlookers on the promenade with their eyes to the skies as all the various aircraft zoom past and leave a smile on each of the faces.
Usually manned and unmanned aircraft do not operate in the same vicinity as each other.
Let alone with thousands of members of public being in close range.
Not to fear when FlyRyte is near! Our team consists of highly skilled drone operators, and active military personnel from the Irish Aer Corps.
You might wonder, how did these guys pull it off? The planes were flying so close and low, and yet you'd see the drone whizzing across the sky. The key here is permissions, communications, and planning.
Before we would even think about putting our propellers on, we will have a full site and risk assessment done for the day. Here we look closely where the danger zones are when operating our drones, and plan our flight paths accordingly.
One should always prepare for the worst case scenario, by doing so you can plan your operation out as to mitigate the risk and avoid any incidents.
By having the Air Traffic Control on site and a direct line of communication to them and organisers, we could ensure that we are in the loop on all activity surrounding the airspace around us. When choosing a take-off and landing zone, we scout the area for the best possible visibility on the surrounding airspace, crowds, and to maintain a good line of sight with our drones. With Bray hill in the background it would be so easy to lose sight of the drone due to background camouflage.
Additionally to having a communication link to ATC, we have radio communications with all the drone team on the ground as well. This ensures that everyone is in the loop around operations, and in the event that an unplanned event would appear we could plan accordingly and make instant corrections to our flight plan to stay clear from risks.
On the day we made another successful drone delivery by dropping a medkit on the beach with the flight path coming from the sea. Drones can be life saving to provide reconnaissance for ground teams, or delivering packages in minutes where it would take a ground team hours to reach. Imagine walkers injured on a mountain, with a drone it would be possible to do a rapid deployment to the injured persons, and provide them with any items needed to assist them until the ground team arrives. Not only is the delivery method rapid, it is exponentially cheaper to operate than helicopters whilst reducing the human risk factor at the same time.
Not only did we have a ground team on the day operating multiple drones simultaneously, we also had Captain Oisin McGrath showing off his skills in the Aer Corps EC135 helicopter.
Oisin was hard at work previous weeks battling the gorse fires across the country with his helicopter.
We are always available for any questions you have regarding drone operations in Ireland. Don't be shy to come say hello if you see us at the next event, or even drop us a message on Facebook or the website at any time.