NIAGARA COUNTY, N.Y. – Niagara County Community College is offering a new course on drones.
It starts this fall and costs $1499. That gets you 18 hours in the classroom, a small quad copter with a camera, and a computer flight simulator.
New FAA regulations for drones go into effect at the end of this month. They require anyone who wants to profit from the use of drones to take a test and get certified. This course prepares people for the test.
Brian Pitre is the Co-Founder of SkyOp. He teaches the course and taught himself how to fly drones four years ago. He quickly realized they could launch new careers and businesses.
"There's thousands of applications for these particular devices. They're transformative. They're like computers or like the internet. People have yet to truly understand that. What we see is people come to our classes because they'd like to start a new business,or alternately they are in an organization, say an engineering company, who knows it's going to affect their business, but they're not quite sure how and they come to our classes so that they understand better how this is going to affect what they do," says Pitre.
There is a free one-hour demonstration on September 21st at NCCC at 6 p.m. for those interested in the class.