DRONES
Air Transport Association (IATA) began exploring drone technology as a threat to aviation but recognised its applications for delivering cargo in the future. Céline Hourcade, head of cargo transformation at IATA, explains the aviation industry does everything in a standardised way, such as tagging baggage with its origin and destination, but such standards don’t yet exist for drones. “IATA foresees a need to put standards in place for the use of drones to integrate and facilitate the new branch of aviation,” she says. Hourcade believes it will be drones with payloads of up to 10kg and up to 200kg that will be of most interest to the business continuity community. “They can open up routes that cannot be served by traditional aircraft because the aircraft is too big or the infrastructure needed for a traditional aircraft is too costly,” she says.
Restoring connections While getting supplies quickly is vital, with the vast majority of business functions relying on the internet the drone’s ability to restore connectivity is likely to be one of its unique selling points to the business continuity community in the long run. Currently, tech and telecoms companies are exploring a number of options to enable this, including the use of the high-speed wireless standard LTE
“An incident will impact more badly if business continuity planning updates for these assets have not been frequent or effective” (long-term evolution). AT&T used a drone equipped with LTE technology to reconnect residents in Puerto Rico across an area of 40sq miles after Hurricane Maria last year. This is only a temporary fix since connectivity is determined by how long the drone can stay in the air. A number of big names such as Facebook and Google’s parent company Alphabet with its Project Loon are trying to find ways of providing connectivity in hard-to-reach places for longer lengths of time; similar technologies could one day be applied in disaster recovery. Facebook completed the first full-scale test flight of its high-altitude and solar-powered unmanned craft, Aquila, last year. Aquila can beam connectivity down from an altitude of more than 60,000ft using laser communications and millimetre wave systems. Facebook’s Connectivity Lab claims it can fly for up to three months at a time. Meanwhile, last year mobile operator EE showcased drone
Drones can be used to remotely monitor hard-to access assets across a number of industries
and balloon air masts that would aim to keep UK communities online in the wake of disasters such as major flooding.
High-rise feedback The ability to feedback high-quality imagery and data from the site of an incident also makes drones an extremely empowering technology for business continuity, especially when it comes to pinpointing and mapping problem areas. A number of cloud-based applications are available to enable data transfer in real-time but some of the heavyweight solutions designed primarily for first responders and emergency agencies may also cascade their way down in the future. For example, at the United Arab Emirates Drones for Good event last year, Nokia demonstrated its rapidly deployable 4G Ultra Compact Network, which provides a standalone LTE network to quickly re-establish connectivity to mission-critical applications after a disaster, including video-equipped drones. The drones can stream video and other sensor data in real-time from the disaster site to a control centre, providing inputs such as exact locations and the nature of difficulty of reaching that location. Increasingly, drones are also likely to be used to remotely monitor assets across a number of industries, such as oil & gas. Last year IBM entered into an agreement to bring its Watson Internet of Things (IoT) technology to Dutch company Aerialtronics’ unmanned
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