Virginia educators have received a $900,000 federal grant to help teachers start drone-flying classes at community colleges.
The domestic uses of such “unmanned aircraft systems” range from checking crop health to land surveying, environmental monitoring and more, Aukland said.
And unlike with more traditional imagery, where analysts need an available aircraft and pilot or have to wait eight days for a satellite to make its way through earth orbit, drones provide “just in time imagery,” cheaply, quickly and efficiently, she said.
In one recent project, students used a $1,000 drone to scour more than 100 acres at NASA’s Wallops Island facility along Virginia’s eastern shore, examining invasive grasses and the contours of the shoreline. The same work might have been done with a human-piloted plane at a much higher cost.
It took the students eight minutes, Aukland said.
Virginia can use the $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to “set itself apart from its competition by creating a workforce pipeline of well-trained operators and researchers,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement. The classes will teach instructors how to maintain, fly and gather data with drones, and help them start new courses and programs. Also involved in the effort are the Old Dominion University Foundation, southwest Virginia’s Mountain Empire Community College, Virginia Tech, and the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.
The courses for community college teachers will begin next summer.
