At the final conference, all achieved goals and results of the project, which enables training and certification for drone operators, were presented.
The final conference of the Erasmus+ project FlyVETUp! was held on October 24th and 25th, 2022 in Zagreb, Croatia. In past two years, the project has developed educational materials for drone operators in the postal sector, which are launched at the web platform and available to the public.
Certification ceremony
On the first day of the closure conference, participants of the drone operator course, students of the Rudolf Perešin Aviation Technical School from Velika Gorica and guests gathered with the entire project team at the multiplier event in the premises of the Croatian Post. Ivana Filipović, manager of the project FlyVETUp! in the Croatian post and one of the key speaker presented the entire course as the results of the project and what has been done so far. “Nowdays, many global postal operators are testing drone delivery because it is issue that will surely be applicable in some form. This is necessity we are face with and precisely why it was important to design and implement an education regarding drons facilities that improves the skills and knowledge of all those who would like to operate with drones”, concluded I.Filipović. Vedran Šarac, principal of the Aviation Technical School, emphasized the importance of such projects due to the harmonization of the educational programs with the needs of the economy. Additional value of the project is establishement of the extracurricular activity “AeroDrone” for the students at Aviation Technical School. Dinko Mihaljević from the Agency for Mobility and Programs of the European Union praised the project as an example of good cooperation between educational and economic entities financed by Erasmus+ program, which also achieved the horizontal goals of the green and digital transition.
At the conference, after sucesfully completing the training, 33 participants form Croatia Post gained the certificates, acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to operate drones. A short film of test deliveries by drone, that took place in Greece and Cyprus, as part of the project, was also presented.
Achieving goals
On the second day, the project partners from the Croatian Post, the Hellenic Post, the Cyprus Post, the Rudolf Perešin Aviation Technical School, Dronint from Cyprus, AKMI from Greece and the German company BK Consult held the final working meeting where they shared their impressions and experiences gained from working on the realization of project results.
Through the project activities, 3 project results were achieved as an intellectual outputs: Preparation of the course, Development of the training program for drone operators and Application of the training program to the staff of postal operators. In conclusion, the goals of the project have been achieved. The training program enables participants to achieve the maximum level of assimilation of the concepts, terminology and regulatory framework of models for UAS operations and applications by going through Module 1 – Core Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) and Module 2 – Intro to the Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM). A total of 126 online training participants out of 174 enrolled successfully completed the course and received certificates.
As a reminder, the project FlyVETUp! is financed by EU funds from the Erasmus+ program in the amount of EUR 214,382.00 in grants. The lead partner of the project FlyVETUp! was Croatian Post with partners Rudolf Perešin Aviation Technical School, Hellenic Post and Cyprus Post and three partner companies: Dronint, AKME and BK Consult.
Free training materials are available to all those interested to become trained and certified drone operators at the link https://flyvetup.com/training/ . After completion, all participants receive a certificate that allows them to operate drones.