Assiniboine Community College has launched their new Drone Flight Training Program, as one of two recent additions to their Agriculture Extension Programs.

"The Drone Flight Training School is something that industries have been asking us for awhile to get folks trained up to use drones," says Angela Pearen, ACC's Coordinator Agriculture Extension.  "As you know the application to use drones is expanding intro agriculture, but also in other industries as well including land surveying."

Pearen says the biggest push to launch the drone program was from the land surveying sector of industry

"The Drone Program focuses on getting students ready to get the licensing that they need to operate a remotely-piloted aircraft, such as a drone, within flight space that falls under that federal regulation," she explains.

Recreational drones fly at a specific height and are a certain weight.  The ACC drone program trains the commercial application of drones to be used in municipal flight space.

The program starts with 40 hours of online ground school, where students learn about prep work, meteorology - all the things they need to know before actually handling the controls.  After that, the in-person flight training is a two-day tutorial.

"This is where our students will get the chance to fly over different terrain but the first day is really to learn how to fly the drone and the second day is learning how to use them in special circumstances," says Pearen, "using the more expensive drones and in different applications, using different sensors."

"And that's when folks will split off into using Ag applications, and then some will go into the land survey applications," she adds.

The land survey facilitators are now moving more into drone applications where they go over land needing to be surveyed, and get a sense of where the water is, where the stones are, what's the terrain and topography.

"The scenarios they're providing us with were the ones where the drone operator is sitting in the building and the drone goes out and it flies over the space and its doing all the mapping, and the operator isn't on the site during the preliminary study of the project."