Grad partners with Mohawk professor for restricted airspace drone work

By Meaghan Drury ‘12

In the summer of 2020, Kary MacMillan ’18 was presented with a problem and an opportunity. Working as a proposal coordinator at Construction Demathieu & Bard (CDB) Inc. Kary wanted to use a drone to film the work her company was completing on the Rainbow Bridge. Although filming a bridge may not sound like a huge deal, this one in particular would require the drone or Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) as known in the industry, to fly in restricted airspace over an international border crossing.  

Not being fully licensed to fly RPAS in restricted airspace and working with an extremely tight timeline, Kary reached out to one of her architectural technology professors, Richard Borger ’05 for help. “With Kary’s guidance and leadership, we were not only able to capture the footage CDB wanted, we were able to collect footage for the security team at the Bridge Commission, and even perform a structural inspection on the underside of the bridge deck over 250 feet from shore at a height of 200 feet above the Niagara River,” says Richard.  

With the help of her professor, Kary was able to show her company’s leadership that RPAS can have a great benefit to their operations. Not only do they provide an efficient way to examine large and difficult to access structures, they also provide a safety benefit as well. As Kary says “Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems should definitely be considered as a tool for construction projects, especially for structural inspections in dangerous or limited-access locations. Why choose to suspend a worker over the edge of a bridge at 200 feet above a river if you could stand safely on the shoreline and get the same footage with a drone?”  

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of the InTouch magazine.