The EMSA drone will fly over the Strait of Pas-de-Calais for three months.

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Nordic Unmanned

A drone that smells of sulfur.

Since this Wednesday, a strange unmanned vehicle has been flying over the Strait of Pas-de-Calais.

He is neither there to set a new Channel crossing record, nor to try to prevent migrants from sailing towards Great Britain.

Well not in the first place.

The main function of this drone is to flush out ships that pollute the atmosphere with the sulfur contained in the fumes from their engines.

The Strait of Pas-de-Calais is one of the areas in the world in which maritime traffic is the most dense.

This represents a flow of more than 130,000 ships each year, goods and passengers combined.

Suddenly, according to the Ministry of the Sea, “this region benefits from a reinforced protection regime in the fight against air pollution.

»While, in the world, the sulfur content of ship fuels is set at a maximum of 0.5%, this rate must not exceed 0.1% for ships navigating in the Strait of Pas-de-Calais .

A three-month mission over the strait

A restrictive regulation complicated to enforce given the importance of the traffic and the surface to be monitored.

Until then, the authorities had resources such as "satellite imagery, information on the positioning of ships and surveillance by aircraft and maritime patrol vessels," the ministry said.

However, to materialize an offense, fuel samples are systematically taken at the quayside on suspected vessels by safety inspectors.

The sniffer drone completes this arsenal.

The EMSA drone will fly over the Strait of Pas-de-Calais for three months.

- Nordic Unmanned

The machine is made available to France free of charge for a period of three months by the European Union in partnership with the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA).

It has been implemented since Wednesday by the regional operational surveillance and rescue center (CROSS) of Cape Gris-Nez.

Detect pollution and potentially much more

The drone, a beautiful 150 kg beast, will fly over the upstream path of the Pas-de-Calais traffic separation device (DST) and will allow "to measure the sulfur level in the emission plume" d 'a ship thanks to a battery of electrochemical sensors.

The data collected is sent during the flight to EMSA.

In the event of an anomaly revealed by the analysis of the data, a check may be triggered at the ship's next stopover or in its port of destination.

The drone's missions can go beyond tracking down polluting ships.

The aircraft in question is a kind of Swiss army knife that can be equipped to perform, for example, "the detection of illegal fishing, the fight against drug trafficking and illegal immigration", details EMSA .

The Ministry of the Sea did not specify whether these possibilities were going to be exploited, while adding that the machine “could also contribute to search and rescue operations at sea coordinated by the CROSS.

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