AV News: Northland's New Drone Repair Program

With more and more drones taking to the skies, there leaves an inevitable need for people to repair those drones once they crash. One college in Minnesota is training students on how to do exactly that.

For the past six years, Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, has been teaching students how to repair drones. But until recently, the drones that were being repaired were large-scale military aircraft. In the fall of 2016, Northland introduced a small Unmanned Aircraft Systems repair course. The program is 30 credits and prepares students to fill a need in a booming drone industry.

“With the addition of Part 107 and the knowledge that the first thing that’s going to be out in the airspace working commercially is your small UAS, it just seemed like we were missing a part of the market that we could easily address with our experience.”

Nicklin has a background in military drones and has been teaching at Northland for the past five years. The school says it was the first in the country to offer a UAS maintenance training program. To implement the small UAS repair program, Northland only had two introduce a few new courses to accompany the repair program already in place. That included a small UAS ground school and a small UAS lab.

“As far as for an accredited institution of higher learning, I wouldn’t say we’re unique when it comes to small UAS. When it comes to large UAS repair, we certainly are. We’re the only ones in the country doing it.”

The ground school prepares students to take the FAA’s Part 107 test. Nicklin says knowing how to operate the small UAS is an important part of knowing how to repair them. Northland also offers a UAS summer camp for high school students, with the hope of promoting STEM learning. As drones become more prevalent in society, schools like Northland continue to find ways to incorporate the technology into coursework. For Northland, that means teaching students how to fix the small drones that many commercial pilots will be flying.

“With our certificate program, we’re looking at the field service repair. So they actually go out and their purpose is to go out and conduct missions, whatever that may be, and be able to sustain their aircraft in the field. I see that growing more and more.”

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