FlightWave’s Callie Mortimer is attending the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) Convention 2019. In recent years, the PDAC convention has brought 25,000 attendees from 135 countries together to promote a globally responsible, vibrant and sustainable mining industry. Over 1,000 exhibitors will help introduce attendees to some of the newest innovations in mining. We’re excited to join skymineUAV’s booth #7414N this year, where the FlightWave Edge is on display.
In recent years, UAS have made a significant impact on numerous industries, including the mining and exploration sector. UAS are lowering costs for imaging and generating new use cases every day. They can survey up to 50x faster with 350x higher resolution than some traditional manual methods. Plus, UAS equipped with custom payloads help the mining industry collect data more quickly and effectively than ever before. UAS have applications over the entire mining life cycle, including:
- Topography
- Infrastructure & site planning
- Drill & blast planning/analysis
- Digital terrain modeling
- Environmental monitoring & permitting, including air and water quality sampling
- Incident emergency response
- Spectral geology
The Edge’s unique design helps mitigate issues of both quadcopters and fixed-wing UAS. Iain Allen, former Program Director, Innovation at Barrick Gold and skymineUAV’s Drone Innovation Specialist, says, “In my time with Barrick Gold, the company was a leader in drone use in mining, with both quadcopters and fixed-wing drones in the fleet. Both were useful, and both had limitations. Quadcopters have short flight times, limiting coverage in a single flight, and the “crash” landings of the fixed-wing drones meant they frequently required repair and were not always available when we needed them. The Edge addresses all these concerns and is the logical evolution of drones for mining.”
Stop by booth #7414N at PDAC to check out the Edge for yourself and meet up with Callie Mortimer who is joining skymineUAV’s David Walshe, Unmanned Aerial Service Inc’s Matt MacKinnon, MWH Geo-Surveys’ Marshall MacNabb and Asylon’s Michael Lichko.