A Sky-Futures unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment team member releases an aircraft off the helipad of an offshore platform. Photo: Sky-Futures
Written for Vertical Magazine – November/December 2016
As the helicopter industry continues to adapt to the challenges faced in the oil-and-gas sector, two long-established operators have added unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) services to their portfolios. And rather than starting from the ground up, both operators have partnered with experienced unmanned aircraft system (UAS) companies.
Bristow Group entered the UAS sector earlier this year, with a $4.2 million investment in U.K.-based Sky-Futures. Operating in over 21 countries, Sky-Futures has provided UAS services for the oil-and-gas sector since 2011. “The oil-and-gas market is global and significant,” said James Harrison, Sky-Futures co-founder and CEO. “Everywhere there is oil-and-gas infrastructure, there is a requirement for UAVs.”
Michael Shaffer, director of corporate development and strategy at Bristow, said the Houston-based company’s investment in Sky-Futures gave it immediate entry to the fast-growing UAV commercial space. “The two companies are working together to leverage each other’s strengths to offer cost-efficient solutions to mutual customers,” he said. “Bristow has been taking proactive steps to differentiate its existing aviation offering and capitalize on opportunities to provide complementary services that are a natural extension of our aviation expertise. We see unmanned aerial vehicles playing a substantial role in the future of aviation.”
Era Helicopters has been in operation for almost 70 years, and sees UAVs as a natural extension of its aviation services. “We have monitored the introduction and development of unmanned aerial vehicles and their commercial applications for some time,” explained Paul White, Era’s senior vice president of commercial. “UAVs have been utilized by our clients across a variety of industries for a few years now. Era verified the potential efficiencies and safety enhancements offered through the experienced use of UAVs, permitting us to further extend our mission to enhance [the] safety, efficiency and reliability of our customer offering.”
In August, Era entered into an exclusive agreement with Total Safety, a worldwide provider of safety and compliance services. “Era will be managing the UAV flight operations while Total Safety will provide the sensory subject matter expertise and inspectors,” said White. “The collaboration represents the opportunity to build off of each other’s existing relationships and provide an unparalleled service offering.”
Finding a UAV Niche
In terms of operational utility in the oil-and-gas segment, UAVs are used to perform inspections of offshore rigs and platforms, providing HD video, stills, and thermal imagery for analysis. A UAV team can be tasked with underdeck inspections, topside work, decommissioning, and splash zone and emergency inspections. But the UAV really comes into its own for active flare inspections, a process that used to be difficult, risky, and expensive.
With discharge temperatures above 1,000 C (1,800 F), flare stacks could previously only be safely inspected from adjoining structures or from a helicopter, or by taking the expensive operational option of bypassing the system. Now, instead of taking a flare stack offline, a UAV can inspect a live stack to determine whether the flare is operating properly, and to evaluate whether maintenance or replacement is required.
“We inspect hard to access areas such as flare stacks, heat shields, and other areas that cannot typically be inspected during production,” said Sky-Futures’ Harrison. “This means that we can bring significant operational savings of around $7 million per day by avoiding shutdowns offshore. The biggest advantage is the cost alone — it’s around 85 percent more cost effective to use UAVs for multiple scopes of work offshore than rope access technicians.”
“We did a case study in the U.K. North Sea, and our team completed five days of work that a rope access team would have scheduled eight weeks to complete. We also inspect confined spaces using a UAV without having a human enter the space itself — a huge safety improvement. In fact, B&W Offshore [a global provider of floating production, storage, and offloading vessels] called this increased safety ‘invaluable’,” he said.
There isn’t one single UAS solution that will work for all clients, according to Era’s White. “Each job is different, potentially requiring multiple planning and data collection days, a variety of sensors, and potentially multiple rotor-wing and fixed-wing UAS. There really is no ‘stock’ job given the wide variety of applications and varying client requests,” he said. “Era utilizes UAVs that have outstanding endurance, payload capabilities and triple redundant autopilots, and operate very well in GPS-denied environments.”
White also believes that it’s important to recognize that UAVs aren’t a stand-alone solution, but another resource to be deployed for the right projects. “UAVs do not replace the need for human inspection; they are merely a complementary tool for surveyors and inspectors to utilize. The UAVs are the delivery systems for the sensor technology, and the value to the client is in the efficient collection and delivery of data, which leads to better decisions and outcomes.”
Bristow’s Shaffer shares this opinion. “Although UAVs do not completely replace traditional methods of inspection, they can enhance or provide a better alternative solution that is safer, faster and more cost-effective for the client. UAV inspections on industrial infrastructure enhance planning, may be completed without disrupting production and can eliminate the need for costly and potentially unnecessary shutdowns,” he said.
In the energy sector, UAVs are particularly well suited to performing flare stack inspections. Photo: Total Safety/Era
What’s in a UAV Deployment?
When performing a rig inspection, Sky-Futures deploys a UAS kit with a small and easily-fielded team made up of a remote pilot and a certified inspector/sensor operator. “We use a variety of UAVs for different work, but our current offshore UAV is the [AscTec] Falcon 8,” said Sky-Futures’ Harrison. “We fly in sorties of approximately 10 minutes and the length of time depends on the scope of the job required. A flare stack can be inspected in half a day, and our average job is five days long.”
For Era’s UAVs and related equipment, White explained that the kit is packed into hardback cases and is transported in the company’s mobile command vehicle, or if necessary, by air or ship.
“The batteries are sized to meet commercial flight requirements and are maintained through a robust battery management program that meets all rules and regulations,” said White. “In general, I would say jobs require between two to four pilots, sensor techs, and support personnel depending on applicable local laws and customer-driven rules and regulation. This does not include the back end data management and client deliverables.”
But it’s still early days for the use of UAVs in this sector, explained Sky-Futures’ Harrison. “New sensors will enable a huge new market to open up within oil-and-gas,” he said. “We are already able to measure the size of defects to plus or minus one millimeter using proprietary laser measurement technology, and the data can be further analyzed. Our view is that the market for UAVs will be driven by strong business cases; one of which is the ability for more end users to be able to view the latest data from offshore or from a confined space without physically looking at a report.”
Sky-Futures’ “Hangar” software fuses real-time UAV data and associated captured metadata into 3D models and reports that are accessible via a secure cloud-based online portal. “We believe this software will help to drive the market for UAV data, as more and more end users can derive information that could not previously be captured, such as tracking defect size over time and using the derived imperial data from Hangar to do predictive analysis,” said Harrison.
“There really is a tremendous opportunity in this space,” said Era’s White. “As you know, we have served the oil-and-gas sector for decades, so we are pretty well read into their needs from an aviation perspective. Our clients are coming to us with potential use cases all the time. In many cases, multiple business units inside the same organization are utilizing UAVs to collect and interpret data related to infrastructure, supply chains, regulatory compliance, general security and other very exciting areas. Again, the technology is moving so quickly that it seems every day UAVs become a more important data collection tool. It’s a very exciting time to be in this business.”
However, UAVs won’t be replacing helicopters, stressed White, citing the evolution in aerial electronic news gathering (ENG). “You can now dispatch a helicopter to get the initial shots in real time, and then take the follow up shots from a UAS. This delivers substantial cost savings to the client and can also be much safer in poor weather or high density areas,” he said. “We don’t see UAVs as a threat to rotary services, but as a complementary tool.”