The Auburn Aviation Center will start offering classes and certification in an FAA-approved UAS flight school starting in early July 2015.
Auburn University's unmanned aircraft system (UAS) flight school is getting up and running following approval by the Federal Aviation Authority in April 2015. Auburn's Aviation Center has been teaching flight training for more than 75 years, and the school has embraced this next generation of commercial interest.
Classes to the public will begin in early July 2015, covering such topics as flight planning, telemetry, safety and other aligned operational topics. The classwork will be paired with flight training outdoors and untethered, with certificates requiring a written exam and flight test.
Auburn is an affiliate member of the Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE), a consortium of research universities and government industry partners. As part of the ASSURE initiative, Auburn's team is collaborating with Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal on military technology.
The state of Alabama sees this initiative as an important extension to the state's history of aerospace and aviation development. UAS companies such as Camber, Dynetics, Griffon Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and Sierra Nevada Corp. all have UAS projects in Alabama.
