UAV Facility approved by Dutch Aviation Authorities

Last week, the Unmanned Aerial Remote Sensing Facility (UARSF) of WUR received the company exemption (Dutch: bedrijfsontheffing) from the Dutch Aviation Authorities for flying with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in the Netherlands.

This means that the Inspections of the Dutch Aviation Authorities (Dutch: ILenT) have approved our training system and our operational procedures as a professional aviation unit. With this we are one of the 20-30 organisations in the Netherlands with such an exemption and definitely one of the first universities/research organisations.

For the Facility this is a very important result which we prepared for almost two years and which will allow us to be more autonomous. However, still flying according to the specified rules and procedures which we formulated ourselves.

We have a team of nine pilots and a fleet with a multicopter and fixed wing system available. For our operations we fly with multi-spectral, hyperspectral and thermal camera’s.

After this formal process, we can now put increasing effort to the scientific harvesting and show the added value of UAV-based remote sensing systems both for science and applications.

In fact we are already doing this, so keep an eye to our website: www.wur.nl/uarsf