The 6th Portugal Air Summit took place at Ponte de Sor Aerodrome from the 12th to 15th October. Throughtout the exhibition, conferences and shows, the progress in unmanned aviation was apparent in multiple areas. It is most noteworthy that expectations about Urban Air Mobility are no longer about the “If…?” but about the “When…?”.
Other areas where importante advances are expected inclued “drop” missions, ranging from the proverbial food and medicine last mile deliveries to the spraying of crops in farming or delivery of emergency kits over the water and on the mountain, and the cooperation between multiple aircraft and systems.
Albatroz Engenharia was present indirectly as a member of APANT – Associação Portuguesa de Aeronaves Não Tripuladas, the Portuguese UAS association. The team learned from visitors about their interest on forest management and firefighting prevention and exchanged the recent developments in the area of remote detection and forestry dendrometrics as well as on autonomous operations.
It is also noteworthy the interest of young students (and their families) about job opportunities in the different fields related to aeronautics and aviation in the decade up to 2030, which matches the scope of Skill-Up, an European Project which APANT is a partner and to which Albatroz has already contributed with use cases and learning
experiences.
If the contribution of technology is decisive to the progress of unmanned aviation, people and competences are as equally important in all stages of the business, including but not limited to:
- Before operations, humans are essential for specification, system design and concept of operation design;
- During operations, humans are essential for risk analysis, situation awareness, ambiguity resolution and emergency handling
- After operations, humans are essential to make sense of data collected. Data withou intelegence are ever more abundant but they are worthless if one cannot figure out their meaning. That’s information and intelligence.
All these fields, among others, will call for increasing number of competent professionals in the coming years, likely beyond 2030.
