As an SME have you ever asked yourself “what if I had no customers for 4 months of summer?”. For most of us, our worst case scenarios never even go that far, but now all our planned jobs since March have been cancelled, from planned French TV and film crew drone support to local real estate videography and survey & inspections of infrastructure, all on hold for the foreseeable future.
As a small business, there is a clear need to use this time wisely and not just sit back and wait it out. Time to diversify and think out of the box! For me and Skygate that means expanding our drone training services to support future demand for skilled pilots, for others it means making plans to cope with the changing dynamic of all the business sectors.
PANDEMIC DRONES
One thing is for sure, COVID-19 will accelerate the development of drones used in industry, whether it’s for construction-site surveillance and mapping, parcel deliveries, environmental research, area disinfection or aerial support for first responders. Even Amazon parcels, Supermarket produce and medical supplies will all be delivered by drones in just a few years from now, and COVID-19 is going to make this happen sooner than later!
The Canadian drone company Draganfly is developing a drone to help health officials immediately identify an outbreak. The proposed “pandemic” drone would be able to fly over people and identify their temperature and respiratory conditions, helping to limit infections. The need for rapid identification of people infected with the disease so that they can quarantine and limit further infection has become abundantly clear in the Novel Coronavirus disaster, as current testing tools can be slow and have limited availability. A drone that could immediately survey community groups could be a game changer for healthcare officials. This picture shows the data that the drone could capture:
While Skygate’s thermal imaging inspection drones can do this manually (just for body temperature), we could have this equipment on hand once this technology becomes available. It’s just not quite there yet.
So for now, business plans, accounting, budgeting, marketing, SEO, R&D, (and all those boring things that need ‘self isolation’ in front of a computer), should keep us off the streets, for a while at least 🙂