AUGUST 2017 _ http://www.popularmechanics.co.za 33
“MY NAME IS GEOFFREY NYAGA KINYUA
and I’m 25 years old. I was born in a village
on the slopes of Mount Kenya, about 400
kilometres outside of Nairobi,” says a tall,
slender, unassuming-looking man. The
auditorium seems unmoved by his story.
Understandably, because it’s day two of
the conference and it’s right before the
lunch break. The professional drone indus-
try in South Africa is also dominated by
the kind of men who went all-in on the
idea of South African engineering excel-
lence leading the continent.
The speaker tries again.
“From a young age, I was always fasci-
nated by technology, particularly aircraft.”
It’s a fascination that turned into practical
experience, he explains. He recalls how he
was the first person in his country to suc-
cessfully design, build and fly a fixed-wing
drone.
It doesn’t matter. He’s losing the crowd.
Everyone in the room at least knows of
someone who built their own multi-rotor
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).
“In January, I started my employment at
Astral Aerial, a subsidiary of Astral Aviation,
and along with my two colleagues we’re
interested in solutions to last-mile delivery
problems in Africa. We are addressing this
with an innovation called the FlyOx. This
drone has a payload capability of 2 050 kg
and an incredible range of 1 240 km. It is
also capable of water landings.”
The room has suddenly gone quiet,
awfully quiet.
Nyaga ploughs on. His video presentation
shows a cargo plane taking off and landing
in a very shallow puddle. There’s no pilot
inside.
The silence has deepened. But the audi-
ence is wide awake now.
“The drone can stay up in the air for
twenty-six hours in surveillance mode,
but we’ll mainly use it for cargo in the
humanitarian space and crop surveying.
At Astral we also have a surveillance
drone called Guardian Eye that has a pay-
load of 7,5 kg and now an extended flight
time of eight hours after we added solar
panels on the craft.”
To put it in perspective: Denel’s Bateleur
drone is the local endurance champion,
with flight times between 18 and 24 hours.
It is, however, a military drone and builds
on Denel’s impressive-for-the-90s Seeker.
To achieve a third of that flight time with-
out military funding is crazy.
But projects like FlyOx and Guardian
Eye aren’t the stars of Astral Aerial’s
show. Instead it’s the company’s award-
winning concept for unmanned air traffic- Guardian Eye is Astral Aerial’s
surveillance and inspection drone. - FlyOx can land on water and
unpaved runways. 3. The Flyox
ground station can fit inside of a
stripped-out Vito. 4. Kinyua stunned
Drone Con with the FlyOx.
Geoffrey Nyaga Kinyua holds a
B Eng degree in aeronautical
engineering from the Technical
University of Kenya, the poster
child for African millennial
disruption.management that intends to revolution-
ise the continent’s drone policies. The
plan is to separate the sky into highways,
almost. In a similar move, Amazon is
developing air traffic control software for
its unmanned delivery drones to integrate
seemlessly into existing air traffic. “It will
enable safe low-altitude drone operations,
providing airspace access and geofencing,
real-time identification and separation of
airborne traffic, and flight planning includ-
ing contingency management and severe
weather avoidance,” said the company in
a May 2017 statement, ahead of rolling
out developments in France.IN A DISCUSSION AFTER HIS PRESENTATION,
Nyaga revealed to Popular Mechanics
that FlyOx is undergoing testing for an
Alibaba subsidiary. Kenya seems to be the
perfect staging ground for this innovation
for two reasons:
l Amazon doesn’t have a large presence
l There are no real street addresses out-
side of the city centres, which creates a
larger margin for error. FlyOx would then
be used, for instance, to courier packages
from Nairobi to Nyaga’s home village.
“As you know, Africa is very vast. Sixty-
two per cent of Africans, me included, live
in rural areas. What is more exciting is
that 60 per cent of the population (conti-
nental) comprises the youth, who have
adopted technology. Drones have spread
from South Africa throughout the rest of
the continent,” explains Nyaga.“My colleagues and I are
interested in solutions to
last-mile delivery problems
in Africa”
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