But more importantly, you also want to make sure that you are creating a network that gives your customers or passengers many options. You need to create economies of scale, so that your unit costs, drop. And we want to make sure that this space is safe and we have been involved in a lot of safety enforcement when it comes to manned aircrafts and we can translate that to unmanned aircrafts.īecause aviation is a very expensive venture, with very low margins. Because there can be a lot of rogue operators – that’s one of the things that people need to be aware of. Of course many people are doing this, but the difference that we bring to the table is our experience and our ability to monitor safety. So that’s the kind of thing that we want to roll out, helping those kinds of initiatives, so have discussions for example with the forestry department or can we help do the census for afforestation in Kenya? Talk to state co-operations that have a lot of utilities-Kengen, Kenya Power and Lighting, Kenya Railways, Kenya pipeline-to help them do their inspections and surveillance on their installations, instead of using very expensive helicopters. Just to give you a typical example, so we were partly involved in the wildlife census that took place, that KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) was doing a few months ago, and we were given a section of it. In the past, when you see a problem, people used to send helicopters – in fact they still do even now. Right now we’re in discussions with some organizations to see how we can help farmers to do that.Īs an example, we can provide local solutions to the locust menace. For example, there’s a lot of need for aerial inspection, surveillance. We want to provide efficient and cheaper solutions to some of the problems that we see in the country. We used that manned aircraft experience and translated it into an unmanned aircraft experience. We are one of the most experienced aviators in this country and in this continent. We have become a more agile organization, over the last one and a half years, and so, we have to be at the front and center of every new emerging technology and we want to be in the conversation of how we introduce that UAS technology in this country. This is why we set up Fahari and we have a lot of experience in aviation. So we are not too far from pilotless aircrafts. The aircraft can virtually take off, fly and land on autopilot. Right now technology is so good that pilots, when they use autopilot, can just sit and watch and make sure that their aircraft is going in the right direction. Because very soon we’ll have pilotless aircrafts flying, just as there are driverless cars. First what’s a cutting-edge technology in aviation? It will have to be UAS technology – that would have to be what it is.