Rescue helicopter hangar inspection at Waterford Airport

A 20-year-old hangar awaiting maintenance

The job came through a client Engineers With Drones has worked with for a long time. They asked the team to take a really good look at the search and rescue helicopter hangar at Waterford Airport, a building that is unusual to inspect both from a drone point of view and from an aviation point of view.

The hangar is 20 years old, and a new company was taking it over. It had leaks and other defects that needed attention, so the inspection had to be thorough.

The timing suited the job. Waterford Airport was shut to all flights apart from the search and rescue helicopter while a runway improvement programme was under way. Normally it is a relatively busy airport, with a lot of flight school traffic coming and going, but on this occasion it was quiet, so the client said to get it done.

The UF101 form, and why not every drone operator can submit one

Even with Waterford Airport closed for all intents and purposes, it was still an active airfield with active aircraft operating out of it. In this case, helicopters. Flying there meant going through the full process of gaining an approval to fly at that location.

That process starts with a specific form, the UF101, submitted to the airport. Only a very limited number of drone companies are in a position to do this. Engineers With Drones is one of them, because the company holds the high-level EASA and IAA Specific Category approval, a SORA-based operational authorisation.

The airport checks the operator's credentials, and then checks what is going to be flown, when it is going to be flown and how. Approval to fly is granted at the airport's discretion. Once that approval came through, the team mobilised with the client.

Air traffic control, a two-hour slot, and the capture protocol

On the day, the team made contact directly with Waterford Airport's air traffic control and asked for a slot, giving the time they wanted to fly and a duration of around two hours.

ATC confirmed that the search and rescue helicopter had just departed and would not be back for two hours. That opened up a two-hour window with no traffic in the area and no danger to other aircraft. From that point the drone was handled just like any other airliner or helicopter: cleared to take off, work away, and report back when the job was done.

The building itself is not a complicated one. It is a standard square hangar with two large doors at the front. The capture followed the usual pattern: the roof and any defects on it, then the walls, then close attention to the gutters.

On an older steel-clad building like this, the list of things to look for is well known: cut edge corrosion, tek screws that have gone missing, loose elements of flashing and cap flashing. Steel gutters bring their own problems, because corrosion sets in where there is a lot of sitting water, or a lot of growth and vegetation collecting inside. There was vegetation in the gutters on this building.

A report identifying the location and extent of the defect

The report sets out what defects are present on the building, the severity of each one, its classification and a description. Every defect is illustrated with a high-resolution image, so anyone reading the report can see where that defect sits on the building and how bad it is. From there, a reader who knows the building trade can work out what it would take to put it right.

A swift, 90-minute field operation

The capture was finished in about an hour and a half, well inside the two-hour slot ATC had given and with plenty of time before any other air traffic came back into the area.

The team landed, informed ATC that the work for the day was concluded, and departed without any disruption to operations on the field itself.

The job carried a personal angle for Bob Foley. He did all of his own training at Waterford Airport and worked there for about four years, and he was on site when this hangar was being built around 20 years ago, so he knew the building well from back then. He described it as a nice project, and interesting to be back after so many years, with the chance to interact with manned aviation that close to the airport.