Here we’re going to fly in the area
where you should have the cooling pumps of the facility,
so what is supposed to cool down the reactor.
It was 1:23 am on April 26th, 1986.
The worst nuclear accident in history.
A routine test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant went horribly wrong.
The first question that we ask ourselves is,
is the area radioactive
and is it dangerous for the pilot and for the team?
The disaster threw radioactive fallout
across a huge area.
They needed an image to prove that
those areas were clean of any radioactive material.
The area around Chernobyl is still an exclusion zone.
It’s really amazing to be able to walk in a city
that has been completely abandoned in a matter of days.
The atmosphere was really weird.
It really feels like a haunted town.
[Exploring A Disaster Zone]
I’m Charles Rey, and I was a pilot that flew the drone in Chernobyl.
The melting of Reactor Four happened in 1986,
so 35 years ago.
We were supposed to do a demonstration
in just one of the buildings outside of Chernobyl
to be able to show the technology
And actually, it's when we got on site that people ask us,
“Can you help us out and do actually a real inspection for us
in the reactor number five to be able to prove and capture data
that would show that there is no nuclear waste
stored in those areas?”
One of the engineers on site said, “They are OK to fly inside Chernobyl,
so as long as it's safe for them and for the drone,
let’s give it a try.”
I was the only pilot for this mission in Chernobyl.
I had a co-pilot to help me for the direction,
and we have the engineers and the security guys
that were following us during the full day.
The first question that we ask ourselves is,
is the area radioactive and is it dangerous for the pilot
and for the team that went there?
But the first thing that people from the sites gave us
was a sensor on each of us,
and we had to make sure that
we were not flying in highly radioactive places inside the sites.
We usually start with a reconnaissance flight,
in which we just want to have a general feeling of the environment
to see the stability would work well,
to see how far can we go without losing the signal,
how much time it takes to get to the inspection point and back.
So here we are flying through one of the cranes
that should have been dismantled
after they finished to build the facility,
but they never finished to build it.
They never removed it.
In here you can see that it was really not finished,
and they really stopped working on that overnight.
So the three holes here on the ground
is where you should have the pulling water pump.
So here, we are in another flight.
You can see the lead sheet here on the floor
is where would have been the entry of the reactor.
Here you would have had some liquid where we are right now.
Here you can see the ceiling.
And that should be the ground zero of the facility.
And the square here,
you can see what was supposed to be the cooling pool
in which they would put the radioactive material.
After they have been used,
they are stored here for a couple of weeks or months
to be able to cool down
before you can store them safely outside of the facility.
When we are looking straight down,
you will see the cage of the drone
is what you can see at the bottom of the screen.
And here I’m trying to collect data
without having the cage in the field of vision.
Then I move the camera straight down,
and this is the cooling pool in which I will fly down
so we could prove that those pools were completely empty
and that there was no radioactive material
that had been stored in those cooling pools.
The main difficulty in this flight
was that we were flying relatively far away
and that there was a lot of concrete between us
and the pool that we wanted to inspect.
So we had to see if the signal would go through,
and luckily, the roof of Chernobyl, of the facility, wasn’t steel,
so actually the signal of the remote control
would bounce on the ceiling,
and this allows us to fly from the bottom part of a reactor
all the way up to a pool that was even under us.
On the tablet, you have a sensor that we tell you the signal strength
between the drone and the remote control.
Every time you have to do an inspection or flight
in an area in which you knew that if you lose the signal with the drone
or if you run out of battery, you cannot recover the drone,
it’s always a bit more stressful.
And you have to do that
with a couple of inspectors looking over your shoulder,
so it really doesn’t help for the stress.
I collect the data with the instruction of the inspector
on where to fly and what kind of data we need to capture.
There were no alternatives than using the drone
to be able to capture those data.
The piloting team of Flyability
have the opportunity to travel all around the world
to be able to do this demonstration and this inspection.
In the past few years,
we had the opportunity to participate in an adventure mission in Greenland
in which we were exploring glaciers
and trying to get data about global warming.
The Greenland ice sheet
is the second biggest ice sheet in the world after Antarctica,
and that mission took us in some of the deepest ice caves in the world.
The purpose was to be able to go fly inside a glacier
and see how the area had melted
and what was the impact of the global warming.
So they wanted to see if there was any life,
so any bacteria or anything like that.
Due to the global warming,
it wasn’t really safe to send people at this time of the year,
so we actually sent the drone and flew it about 140 meters down
in those chutes to be able to collect data,
and we actually found a frozen lake at the bottom.
Indoor drones can really allow you to go and fly the drone
in confined spaces more or less everywhere.
It is already used to fly in mines.
We can fly in caves.
There is actually no real limit.
It is an adventure to be able to explore those places
that haven’t been seen in years.