Employee Profile - Eric Jorgensen
Textron Systems Support Solutions employee Eric Jorgensen is applying a lifelong love of aviation to his work with customers in the agriculture industry.
Q: How did you get your start in aviation?
A: I’ve been around aircraft my entire life. The first time I actually flew an airplane, I was eight years old. I didn’t solo it, but I had the controls. My brother was a flight instructor and he was in the airplane with me.
Q: What experience do you bring to your civil and commercial customers?
A: I am a certified flight instructor. I have my commercial pilot certificate, instrument rating, multiengine – so I’m familiar with how airplanes work. I also have background in aircraft maintenance. With my role at Support Solutions, I am a trainer developer. I write lesson plans and develop training materials for our customers. My aviation, maintenance, and training background enables me to bring a lot to the table.
Q: What goes into planning a successful agriculture data collection day?
A: My priority is to ensure the success of the mission. I make sure all of our equipment is ready to go and up to operational capability before we even take off. I do all the prep work the day before. I arrive before anybody else, clean the camera lens inside and out, and make sure everything is still tight and secure. I get the aircraft prepped and ready. I also contact our data provider – they work with us to use their fiber Internet to upload all of our imagery for processing. Some of my work in the background ensures smooth operation so we can get information straight from the airport to the data provider, and upload that data as soon as possible without any kind of delay. Ahead of the flight, we determine when we need to take off based on the sun angles for the specific times throughout the day. For our data collection flights, we would arrive early to prep the aircraft for flight, discuss our game plan, and take off an hour before we needed to start data collection.
Q: What happens during the flight?
A: The pilot and I share responsibilities with flying the aircraft, helping to ensure a safe flight. You have to be at the right altitude and the right pitch angle, the right bank angle, and the right speed. There are two different displays in the aircraft – the pilot console and the operator console. They provide guidance to each line that we’re supposed to fly, and tells us how fast we’re going, how high we are, and our bank and pitch angles. As the operator, part of my role is to select which lines to fly, when to fly them, and what kind of entry we want to use to get situated and fly that line.
Q: What potential issues do you face?
A: Contending with the weather is one of the biggest issues we usually face. Spotty clouds and high-winds play a big factor in how our data is collected, and how it comes out in the end.
Q: How much data can be collected?
A: This system has the potential to take high-resolution pictures at up to around one frame per second. So it’s a shot and another shot and another shot. During a recent mission for a large agricultural co-op in South Dakota, we collected almost a terabyte worth of data in two days of flying – thousands of photos easily.