Unmanned Aircraft (drones) offer a radical new model of cost-effective, attainable, efficient, and futuristic transportation that can provide remote rural villages with access to modern services, benefiting industries and enabling humanitarian operations. The Lake Victoria Challenge in Tanzania in 2018 and the African Drone Forum – Lake Kivu Challenge in Rwanda in 2020 demonstrated the safe implementation of electric drone cargo transport and data collection in environments of low-to-no connectivity, surveillance and data quality. Ten drone teams from around the world competed in three flying competitions, supported by UK DFID in collaboration with the World Bank Group and the Government of Rwanda. As safety lead and operations manager, David Guerin and the ADF-LKC team facilitated nearly 1500 kms of BVLOS automated drone flights across Lake Kivu, testing safety and airspace integration concepts while demonstrating real use cases. Ground risk, air risk and mitigations including unmanned traffic management will be discussed.

Speaker details: Mr. David Roy Guerin, Safety and Airspace Integration Adviser, African Drone Forum – Lake Kivu Challenge Chair: Andrew Chadwick MRAeS, Chair of the UAS Specialist Group, Royal Aeronautical Society