Medicine Hat company aims to solve weather balloon waste with reusable drones

Spencer Fraser, founder and CEO of Landing Zones Canada, said they have designed and manufactured reusable special mission drones to solve the problem.

“We’ve developed a drone that goes up on the balloon, and when the balloon pops, the drone flies back to where you launched it, and it’s measuring the weather the whole time,” Fraser said.

“That’s the innovation, and we’re quite proud of the trials we just completed. System works well, better than we expected, so we’re really happy.”

Fraser said the company has operated out of Medicine Hat for two years now working on the project quietly, as they are in an international race to come up with the solution.

The group was onsite at the airport in Foremost, Alberta, over the past two weeks to complete trials.

With 21 people part of the testing, which included four trial runs this week, with the final two on Thursday.

Fraser claims the airport in Foremost is probably the best drone test range in the world, based on the large area specially designated by Transport Canada to do drone tests and the topography of the area.

“”Here, we’re restricted to about 18,000 feet, and so we launch, we release the balloon just shy of that, and then we fly around and recover,” Fraser said.

“One of the things we’ve been doing is just verifying systems, optimizing some of the sub-components that we have on board.”

Fraser said the environmental savings and cost saving will be huge, as 600,000 single-use weather instruments are used each year worldwide.

The company released a video to explain the project in detail.

Additional testing will take place at Suffield in October.

by Jesse Gill

Medicine Hat company aims to solve weather balloon waste with reusable drones

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