If you look at what's happening with the elephant population, and if you look at what's happening
with rhino, if we don't do something these things will are going to be gone within the next
10 years. That's a fact of life.
When I realized that drones could possibly work and they could do something for poaching,
we had to do it.
It's become an obsession for me now.
Just seems like a natural fit to try and use technology to try to curb this in any which
way you can.
And as technology evolves and we start to leverage AI and we start to leverage smaller,
more sophisticated technology, better battery life, it's only going to get better.
The obvious thing is the ability to fly at night, the ability to fly stealthily and quiet,
the ability to cover a fairly large demarcated area in a stealthy way.
Anti-poaching teams walking around in the bush are not that effective.
You're in the African bush at night.
There are things out there that want to eat you.
If you've ever been out in a National Park like the Kruger National Park, there are a
lot of lions, there are a lot of leopards.
Even although these are highly experienced trackers,
it's still a daunting
task for anybody.
So typically what happens is we would integrate a drone unit with an anti-poaching unit.
If an incursion is detected, the first thing that happens is that the drone is placed into
a holding pattern, or a loiter pattern, and we would simply loiter in the radius at an
altitude that keeps us working in a stealthy manner.
We would have no navigation lights turned on during this process.
And we would be watching the activity of the poacher on the ground.
And at the same time, the drone team, that consists of a sensor operator and a pilot,
would radio in and start giving coordinates to the anti-poaching unit.
Sometimes, there can be a firefight and the poachers will return fire and there can be
a gunfight and there can be fatalities.
I mean, that happens.
Probably 30% of the time, that's real.
The best result is that the poachers are apprehended and are arrested and end up in the court case.
And with a bit of luck, they're prosecuted for doing this.
There's very few poaching incidents that take place during the day.
The drone that we use the most, the one called the Bat Hawk, which is a two-and-a-half meter
fixed-wing aircraft is launched using a bungee cord.
And from that point on it's on autonomous flight.
We chose to use thermal cameras at night purely because it gives us the opportunity to spot
both humans and animals and it makes it incredibly easy for us to find those thermal signatures.
A thermal signature is really the heat that is coming off an object.
And it's the easiest way to find things in the bush at night.
Kruger National Park has a huge issue with rhino poaching and although we don't physically
catch poachers that often.
We disrupt the whole activity altogether.
So if we move into an area and we start flying that area, we find that the poaching in that
area literally subsides within two to three days.
We'll get the park ranger for that particular area and we'll invite him in, we'll show him
how the technology works.
And what happens is that guy goes back and
that information goes into that local community and suddenly there's no poaching.
It just dies down.
I love technology, so for me it's always about trying to find better ways of increasing battery
life, more efficient speed controllers, better camera technology.
Anything to do with a technical aspect of the drone from my side really excites me.
So the wings and the tail section
are all made out of foam.
And the reason we did that was so that it would be very easy to repair if you crash
in the bush.
We use lithium polymer batteries or lithium ion batteries depending on the nature of the
operation and typically operating a six cell configuration at 22.2 volts.
So the big thing for us is to have moved away from a bungee-assisted launched aircraft and
to start looking at VTOL type aircraft, which means a standard fixed-wing airplane
that takes off in a vertical orientation, transitions to forward flight, comes back
and lands on the same spot.
The one challenge that you've always got when you're landing in the Kruger Park or any of
these parks is that the pilot has got to get out of the ground control vehicle and go land
this aircraft and you've got all sorts of animals running around there.
So it's quite daunting when you walk 100 meters away from your ground control vehicle and
you've got to now land on a road in the middle of the bush.
You don't know whether these lions are now sitting on the side of your runway in the
middle of the bush waiting to come and grab you.
There are many facets to this conservation thing and the poaching element.
The one is obviously to conserve what little wildlife is left in Africa.
Once rhino go, the elephant population is under even more threat.
And eventually, when all of that is gone from Africa, you're going to find there's no real
reason for people to go and tour countries like Kenya, Tanzania.
If you look at the amount of foreign revenue that comes into those countries, it has huge
implications for those countries.
The other side of it is that a lot of the problems that are happening in South Africa
right now, or the poaching that's taking place comes out of Mozambique.
And that money is directly translating into funding terrorist organizations, so if you
can stop it, you're cutting up an income source for terrorists and you're, at the same time,
ensuring that wildlife tourism will remain for the foreseeable future.