How Aerologix Matches Drone Pilots To Clients

Chief pilot Finley Lewis was one of Australia’s original drone pioneers. But years on, he’s not stopping there.

HE’S FAR too modest to put it like this, but Finley Lewis, now22, was something of a prodigy in Australia’s burgeoning RPAS industry. As a child, he’d build remote control airplanes at home before transferring that passion to drones. One day, while he was down the park flying one for fun, he bumped into someone who introduced him to Tom Caska, a man similarly making a name for himself in the then-green sector. Caska recognised his giddy passion straight away, the pair struck up a firm friendship, and before long they were working together on small projects. Next comes the wildly ambitious bit: Lewis, egged on by his new mentor, decided to build a medical delivery drone for his year 12 HSC design and technology project. Back then, such things didn’t really exist.

“I was driving along through the city, and I remember seeing these plasma transport cars sitting in traffic,” Lewis says today. “I just thought, ‘Surely there’s a better way to do that?’” He designed and manufactured the device from scratch, tested it and – “after a couple of incidents” – rebuilt it again and again and again until it worked perfectly. The end prototype was quick enough to zoom from, say, the Prince of Wales Hospital to Royal Randwick, carrying supplies. Soon enough, 9 News was in touch.