Newsfeed_Spring 2017

The flight team preparing to take off.
“When you work in a place like Ethiopia, the government
is very protective,” says Dan. “In Ethiopia, there
are no private planes, not just anyone can go out
and get their license.” Because of this, Derek – who
navigated the plane – and Steve had to wear an official
airman’s shirt with the appropriate number of stripes on
the epaulettes. “They don’t care who you are, you have
to look the part,” laughs Dan. “So we made sure they
looked official.”
Once they had donned their official garb each morning,
they’d walk across the tarmac to where their plane
was kept. “This was almost a 30-minute walk away,
but we’d walk by a bunch of huge planes so this part
was actually really interesting,” says Derek, who did the
navigating for the pilot of the plane and the data acquisition
for this project. “Once we arrived at the plane –
which was an Aero Turbo Commander, a pressurized
aircraft with a jet turbine engine versus the piston engine
planes we use here – we would take off and be in the
plane all day, usually for 5 to 6 hours, before I’d return
and Steve would download the data.”
Collecting the data
Derek spent each day flying the flight path he and Steve
had planned. Not only was the project about data
acquisition and interpretation, but there was a knowledge
transfer component that both Steve and Derek
participated in and enjoyed. “There were usually a few
government staff in the plane with me while we flew,”
says Derek. “I’d be training them on how to operate
the LiDAR system. They would operate it and I’d walk
them through the steps and oversee their work. It felt
like we were pioneering the industry of LiDAR in Ethiopia
because LiDAR data acquisition was new for them. But
they were all super smart people, really willing to learn,
and I really enjoyed this aspect of the project.”
Once Derek had flown the entire flight plan for the day,
he would return to base where Steve would begin the
data processing. “Once I received the data, I’d ensure it
was entered into the georeferenced, unclassified point
cloud,” says Steve. “For security reasons, we had to
do all data processing in the government offices. We
trained several of their staff to work through the data
from GNSS and Inertial processing to computing the
point cloud.”
MCSL Quarterly Newsletter Fall Issue 2017
Page 3