A Day in Sky-Drones Flight Test Operations

Welcome to a new series from SkyDrones presenting you the test flight operations. As with any day here at SkyDrones testing facility, today we have three aircraft that we're going to test fly and then prepare for passing over to our clients. Today you will see the Skylane 320 and two Skylane 250s. Depending on the weather we'll see what fun stuff we can do at Are they different? Yes, so each aircraft has its own set of everything, props, legs, wings, everything and you have to make sure that they're always the same number. So we just nearly took another elevator from a different aircraft so we just took the correct one and put it in. What's the difference between them? None. Max, what is this? This is the air link, this is the integration unit which includes flight controller, autopilot, mission software, planner, everything. I'm so bad at answering this. Ask Kirill, ask Kirill, ask Kirill, go ask Kirill. This combines three units in one, the flight control system, the AI mission computer with our products A72 processor and LTE 5G connectivity unit. The coolest feature about air link is that it combines three units in one and also there is very tight software integration. So for instance you can power up the drone and then we have SkyDrones Cloud, the product which is a web-based management platform for drones and the drone will be online at the same time and if you power up another drone which we have in the field today we can fly multiple drones at the same time online and that can be done from anywhere in the world. So the coolest feature about the integration of all these products in one and very nice software integration as well. So the whole body of the aircraft is made from purely from carbon fiber all the way from props to the wing to the legs to the main body everything is carbon fiber and this results the aircraft to be just five kilograms with dry weight within dry weight whatever. So now we have assembled the Skylane 250 and I'm going to carry out pre-flight checks so ensuring that all of the airframe has been assembled correctly everything is tight and will be ready to be flown in just a couple of minutes. This drone is the smallest one and usually customers use it for surveillance purposes. If the aircraft is connected via 4G or 5G so you can see the real-time video feed from any camera you connected in SkyDrones Cloud. SkyDrones Cloud is a web application that allows you to check every drone you own and connect to this drone see the video feed from this drone here's a drone mission where this drone is and you can alter the mission as well so if you have a fleet imagine like 20 drones for example you see all the drones in SkyDrones Cloud can connect to each drone can see video feed can see what's happening. Okay before any aircraft goes up in the air we have to follow a rigorous checklist that we've got we've put together and the first part of the checklist is the aircraft assembly then we make sure all the cables are fastened wing v-tails securely locked in place so you can see these have to be properly checked all these bolts have been torqued up to the correct torque go through and check all the blades these are new blades by the way but if they weren't we'd always go and check all the edges and everything make sure the motors are spinning good there's no play in the motor make sure the hatch all down securely go around to the rear of the aircraft again checking all this is all correct again checking the motor condition no play in the motor bearings or anything like this so once we've done the pre-flight checks on the actual aircraft build then we'll go to putting the batteries in again batteries have to be made sure that they're 100 percent and the voltage is correct ampage and stuff so what i'm going to do is open this hatch and then we'll insert some batteries so for bigger drones we're using four batteries instead of two it gives us more flight time more capacity and more payload to take we can use bigger gimbals bigger cameras and that stuff i'm printing out and sticking on the operator id which is the unique identification code that each drone operator must have and display on their aircraft during any part of their flight okay so we've finished all the pre-flight checks on the aircraft the aircraft are ready to fly so this is the team i'm just going to do a quick sort of brief as how the operation is going to work we've got three aircraft so what we're going to do is i'm going to go through a briefing now of how we're going to conduct this operation this flight operation i've just checked the luton taf and wind's picking up to about 14 knots now it's coming in at a southwesterly direction yuri is going to be our vo ga today is fairly light we've got good visibility 10k cloud base is about four and a half thousand let me tell you a bit more about what actually happens behind the scenes at skydreams when we finish assembling the aircraft including the air link any sensor that the client might have because as you all know we create each of the platforms individually for each customer and each use case once the platform has been completed depending on what is the use case of this aircraft and where in what environment is the drone going to be operating we have a number of different testing profiles which we undergo today we have executed testing profile for overland bv loss flight operations that were going to be taking place in the uk the aircraft have been tested for water resistance and for the sensors that they will be having as this specific client is coming from a defense sector i will not be telling much about what systems and the uses however we had to have specific focus on the aircraft's safety system for the safety systems on this aircraft we we can have multiple fixtures we can even install a parachute if the client needs to however those aircraft they have redundant autopilot systems redundant battery supply especially for the skyline 320 it has two battery packs and they can be switched around to start off the flight testing we go into the hover mode so we just simply take off and let the aircraft sit there for approximately three minutes and this is enough of time to understand whether all of the wiring from the microchips to wiring to engines to motors has been done properly if something would happen aircraft would not would not fall out of the sky instead it's just a one meter amplitude meaning that nothing serious will happen to this after this has been done aircraft is landing and we're checking all the connectors and all of the sensors once again after this has been done we're replacing the batteries for a new set that has been flown previously and we're going in for a fixed wing flight once the aircraft is in fixed wing mode it's starting to do a loop around all of our testing flight facility there we're testing the aircraft's speed performance aircraft's handling whether all of the ailerons are set correctly to the exact reference of the client some of our clients focus is for having a very stable and secure flight as they might have very expensive sensors at the bottom of the aircraft ranging from a next vision raptor camera to a camera or any other lidar sensors with gimbals etc some of them they do wildlife tracking some of them are helping to keep our country secured so for those clients we're testing the stability and smoothness of the flight making sure that when the aircraft is flying it's just almost like lying down in the field and enjoying yourself now once we have completed the fixed wing testing profile and we ensure that the aircraft is either capable of responding really rapidly to any actions that the pilot might might give to the aircraft we're starting to test the aircraft's emergency systems and how's the aircraft going to react in case of an emergency we can have a large variety of what can possibly happen in the environment where those drones are operating we can start from going into possible air incursions ground incursions at the landing site loss of the gnss loss of the push-up motor or any of the power motors for each of them we provide a very detailed checklist which tells the operator of how to deal with such a scenario and how to ensure that their aircrafts aircraft will be landing back on the ground very safely once we have tested all of the emergencies aircraft is coming into land now our aircraft they have a different variety of returning to home options we have the most standard option when the aircraft is performing a very long let's say comfortable transition now if the environment in which the drone is operating has some difficulties and has some limited space open to the operators we can also tell the aircraft to do a expedite or a rapid transition into the hover it's very loud and you should see it for yourselves we'll absolutely film this on another day now when the aircraft is doing an emergency transition is stopping almost instantly the transition distance can be less than 10 meters now once this has been tested out all of the features all of the transition modes we're bringing the aircraft back once the aircraft has landed we are ensuring that all of the systems of the aircraft are fully safe and they are still functional and then we are conducting a debrief with the team and we're starting to analyze the logs because analyzing the logs is the most important part of any testing testing profile we check whether all of the electrical components have been functioning correctly we check whether the software the hardware of the aircraft has done its job essentially once this has been done we take the aircraft back to the office where it undergoes final cleaning polishing processes and it's ready to be shipped to one of our customers now those drones like skyline 320 and 250 are ready for handover to our customers and you will see it on linkedin on youtube and stay tuned