International meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden

There is currently a revision process in place looking at the certification standard ISO 9712 and I have represented BINDT at some of the meetings, the most recent one being in Gothenburg, Sweden. This was the international meeting, so the whole world could have representation there, with participants from the USA, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Russia and many European countries. 

The Canadian Chair opened the meeting with a very good statement, explaining that we were there to implement evolution, not revolution, with respect to ISO 9712 and that there were over 400 comments to be dealt with. This was a follow-on meeting from the one held in Singapore, where the comments were grouped into categories and dedicated working groups were agreed to look at the grouped comments. In Sweden, we were split into groups on the first day at the briefing session. By the third day, the groups were able to report back on their progress and this impacted on how the other groups progressed. The meeting closed with an acknowledgement that there needed to be an additional meeting, plus work in the meantime, to continue the progress on the revision. There are some very good revisions being proposed and many of the certification bodies have historically faced the same issues in implementing the current version of ISO 9712. The revised version of the standard will be issued in due course.

Another event that I was privileged to attend was a BINDT workshop on multicopters, held in Manchester in July 2018. The number of different names these flying platforms can have, from drones to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is difficult enough to start with. Then there are the many rules relating to where commercial UAV flights can be made and by whom and what payload can be carried. Commercial operators who offer survey services should be able to show the clients their licences, insurance, risk assessments, flight logs and operating manuals, as a minimum. One area of shortfall is in the standards for the visual and infrared data collection and subsequent processing, as this technology is still relatively new when attached to a flying platform. The potential is great, subject to weather conditions, and multicopters can also be used in a cage structure for internal inspections in hostile confined spaces. These flying platforms have very little in common with the toy/hobby drones that are readily available and can be bought 
cheaply.

The event was very well attended, with technical questions and potential uses being explored. As a side note, the operators have been seeing ‘lost’ Second World War airfields when surveying due to the current drought 
conditions.

john.moody@bindt.org

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