Mechanical sand excavation has been a long history of business activities along the Yangtze River over the past 50 years, from 70’s of last century. With both the rapid development of economy forming and shaping in Changjiang area, and huge demands for sand and gravel, numerously increased sand excavating boats have been gathering around on the surface, doing illegal and disordered sand excavation activities for the profitable sand price.
Dating early back to November of 1996, Jiangsu province firstly managed to govern these situations by announcing all sand excavation related work should be forbidden for the river segment across Jiangsu province area. Nowadays, except for those that are affirmed to be legal sand excavation sections of the river, the rest over 1800km of river segments are listed as sand excavation forbidden areas.
Yet being driven by huge profit gaining from sand excavation work, there are often illegal activities still can be caught on site by manual patrolling. However, these traditional patrolling methods, including manual patrolling along the offshore and on the boats cannot meet increasing demands for large scale surveillance. To solve these pain spots in manual patrolling, an organization in Jiangsu province used MMC UAV Griflion M9, a VTOL fixed-wing drone for their patrolling looking for illegal sand excavation activities, this achieving great outcome with the Sky Eye hovering over the river.
Griflion M9, a new generation VTOL fixed-wing drone enhanced by all sides, features lots of great advantages, such as larger district flight distance, longer flight duration, and immediately vertical flight capability without any run-up restrictions, which is essential for sole fixed-wing drone. During the last surveillance work, MMC UAV Griflion M9 flied totally 60km for up to 2.5h over the tested water surface by a round journey, photographing and recording a few sand excavation activities suspicious for being illegal, which helped them to locate these activities and collect evidence, and incredibly improve river segment surveillance efficiency by 10 times than manual patrolling.
