Who said kiwis were flightless birds?

By Les Watkins

About 65-square-kilometres of sky a little way over a hill from Rene Redmond’s home at Palmerston North – up to a height of 25,000 feet – have been specially designated as air space for use by him and his workmates.

Pilots of other planes can fly through that area most of the time but the Civil Aviation Authority requires them to stay away when it is needed by Mr Redmond’s team.
"We’re so lucky because this situation is unique," he says.
But then, of course, his flying machines are also unique.
They are a versatile New Zealand product developed mainly by himself, a former air force engineer, and one-time topdressing pilot Lew Woods. They are Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, pilotless planes commonly known as UAVs, which can obey orders from as far away as 40km.
This country’s Defence Technology Agency (DTA) was among the earliest customers to recognise the immense reconnaissance and surveillance potential of UAVs which can transmit pictures from on-board cameras – either of pre-chosen selected subjects or of new ones as commanded from the ground.
That potential is also attracting a great deal of off-shore attention and a recent customer is the University of Queensland which has used it for an environmental survey of Australia’s Blue Mountains.
"Yes, we are expanding into the international market and are having expressions of interest from countries such as Brazil and Thailand," says Mr Redmond.
He and Mr Woods, co-founders of the Skycam UAV NZ company, initially used a remote-controlled helicopter fitted with a video transmitting system to work for real estate firms as well as the film and TV industry. But the company would never have been started had it not been for what happened on February 5, 1982 – Mr Redmond’s Black Wednesday.
Planes had been his passion since he built his first model at the age of eight and he loved being an aircraft engine fitter. Doing anything else was unthinkable. But his career juddered to a horrendous halt that warm day when he decided to cool off by swimming in a river. "I must have dived in a bit sharply and hit the bottom," he says. "My neck was snapped".
Suddenly, three days before his 25th birthday, he was a tetraplegic and, with his medical rating at zero, he was discharged from the air force. After eight months at the Otara Spinal Unit and a further 18 months at home he took an office job.
"But within a couple of years I wanted to be self-employed," he says.
“Lew and I decided to specialise in UAVs – and we did produce one for consideration by the defence force – but the time wasn’t right for them in New Zealand.”
So the pair “morphed”, as he puts it, into the model aircraft business. Under the name Galtech Models they started selling small home-made planes by mail order and from a retail outlet in his garage.
By 1991 attitudes had changed and they started Skycam , running it in tandem with the Galtech enterprise. Soon the defence force was using their UAVs.
By then UAV manufacturing was flourishing overseas and giants such as NASA and Boeing, respecting and utilising the Kiwi ingenuity, have since continued to invest heavily in the aircraft.
Skycam’s business is booming so well that Mr Redmond is preparing to expand the staff which is now only three full-timers and two part-timers. The company had concentrated on a mini-UAV, the Kahu weighing four kilos and with a 2.3-metre wingspan, which is popular with the New Zealand military.
It has also developed Skyclops, weighing seven kilos and with a three-metre wingspan, with a fully gimballed nose camera which can be rotated 360 degrees.
“Skyclops provides for more in-depth surveillance,” says Mr Redmond. “For instance, the auto pilot can be programmed to orbit round and round an area while the camera remains locked on the chosen target.”
Skyclops is ideal, for instance, for police maintaining close observation of a location or soldiers monitoring enemy activity.
The Americans have armed some UAVs with AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles – renaming them unmanned combat air vehicle or UCAVs – to avoid risking aircrews.
The Australians are using a Skycam UAV to monitor the aftermath of mining in the Blue Mountains – checking that the mining company has met its obligation to restore the land to its natural state, that vegetation and animal life is again normal. Another of the many values of the UAVs is their use during search and rescue missions.
One of the quirkiest recalled by Mr Redmond involved him making a TV video about insects for a narrator to talk over. “We were emulating the flight of a bee going round and round a garden in Wellington,” he says. “Our camera was showing viewers the world exactly as it looks to a busy bee.”