[00:00:10] Speaker A: Hi, Mark here and welcome to this episode of the Sky Careers podcast. Today I interview Jennifer Williams, the Chief operating officer of SkySight and strata ship. Jennifer shares her unique journey into the aviation industry, including her early education and how COVID 19 sent her career path in an unexpected direction in ending. In her current role in developing innovative stratoship drones operating 60,000ft above Australia, Jen gave me a whistle stop education about the amazing world of Stratoships and the potential to help a broad range of customers and industries from emergency services to agriculture and conservation. This is pioneer territory and Jen is helping to lead the charge responsible for everything from sales and HR to, to inflating and launching the 25 meter Stratoship prototype. I'm sure you'll enjoy meeting Jennifer and learning all about this brave new world as much as I did. This is my conversation with Jennifer Williams.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Welcome to the Sky Careers podcast.
[00:01:14] Speaker C: Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. It's good to see you.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: We'll start with a question. We always start with where did you go to school and what were your favorite subjects?
[00:01:23] Speaker C: I'm going to say a school name that probably sounds like a foreign country to most people. I grew up in a town called Bungondore and I went to Bungondore Public School. Yeah, I told you it wouldn't sound real. So it's, yeah, probably about 40 or 50 minutes outside of Canberra in this cute little town.
Probably grown quite a bit since I left from there, but it's just, you know, another public school, another state school is. Some people say I went from there to a high school, another public school in Canberra as well, where I had a little bit more freedom of choice of subjects. Obviously primary school, you don't have a lot of options. And in high school I was lucky enough to do a lot around mathematics and science. I got to pick some of my subjects as well, which I know not all schools let you do, but I got to pick robotics. I got to pick basically doing aviation as part of that as well. So I was working with a drone on like a drone on a drone project during high school I got to do games programming as well, which helped a lot. Doing programming of, you know, other bits of robotics as well.
And yeah, I also did music. I loved physics, I hated chemistry, couldn't stand English at all whatsoever. And I actually didn't do English all the way through to year 12. And yeah, so I did a whole mix of subjects and I just chased whatever I wanted to do rather than the traditional sort of, you know, English, science, Maths.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Love it. So it would sound that you had the perfect plan to enter aviation when you're at school.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Well, no, not at all.
No, not at all. So I actually just wanted to be an engineer. And I recognize as, I recognize that I love technology. I recognized that I loved basically cool, cool toys, as I like to say, fun toys. And I recognized that I really wanted to help people. If I could change lives or save lives, I thought that would be really, really great way to just start my career.
I finished high school not really knowing if aviation was going to be a pathway for me. I'd start off in electrical engineering and studied that for two years through university.
I didn't make it all the way through. I struggled, really. It was hard. It was really hard. Engineering is difficult. But I realized I like being really hands on with stuff as well. I don't just like writing equations in books.
So I left that. I pursued work for a couple of years, working across the video games industry and doing events as well, which was just something totally different. And it was, it was only a few years later where I had handed my resignation at my job. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I just knew that I didn't want to work there anymore. And a odd ad popped up on Facebook to go join the Qantas Group Pilot Academy. And I went, you know what, let's go, let's just go try that. Let's just go see what happens.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Love the randomness of that. So what was that presumably led to your first job in aviation?
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Yes. So I did have to go the long way around. So I did go off and get my commercial pilot's license, which is not a step in the drones industry. You don't have to do that. But thank you.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: That's good.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
But it was a really, really fun experience and I loved flying. I love just the freedom of what you can do with it. But I came out, I graduated in the height of COVID which was the best time to be a pilot. Really wasn't. There was no jobs available. There was. The industry was absolutely decimated by the whole pandemic. So I looked around and I saw the drones were there and growing quite rapidly. It's something I had a little bit of history with and funnily enough, with all my pilot skills, I could easily transfer a lot of them across into unmanned aviation.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Wow, that's really interesting. Looking back now, was Covid like an opportunity for you? And if we hadn't had the, the coder and my brother's A. He's a captain with Virgin Atlantic and I know he. He was half of his. Half of his colleagues was. Were actually, well, I think potentially made redundant. He was lucky not to be. But I remember how touch and go it was for so many people in the industry. But so did Covid actually sort of give you a nudge in the. In looking back, did you nudge in the right direction?
[00:05:53] Speaker C: I think so. I think if. If Covid wasn't there, I probably definitely would have pursued a different path.
I think I might have ended up eventually on the same path, though, just knowing how much I enjoy it now and understanding a bit more about myself and what I enjoy generally. I found that right at the end of my training, I did training. It was kind of similar to airline training and I just didn't enjoy it. It wasn't my cup of tea. And I was silently dreading a little bit inside. I was like, man, I'm going to get into an airline, it's going to be like this.
And it wasn't because it was bad. All of my other fellow students loved it. They had a really great time. But I just didn't gel with it in the same way. So I think I preferred the freeing flying availability that I got through my commercial license, but not so much towards sort of that jet pilot formal training, if you like. Yeah.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: So tell us. So you're now the chief operating officer at Sky Site and Stratoship, which is a very big name badge if you go to the conference, I'm guessing.
How. How did you get there and what do you do there?
[00:07:05] Speaker C: So how I got there is again, a little bit roundabout. So I did go into unmanned aviation. The first job I actually had in drones was doing technical writing for a really big military drone.
And that I didn't need to be a pilot, I didn't need to have any technical skills. It helped that I understood a lot of the systems and I understood sort of why certain things were the way they were sort of thing. But I did not need any of that as background. One of my fellow coworkers, he used to work in the Woolworths head office doing something completely relevant. And he moved across into technical writing as well. So I did that for a while. Oh, sorry, go on.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: I'm not sure if I'm comforted by this realization that technical writing, writing's been done by people who work at Woolworths, but you know what I mean.
[00:07:58] Speaker C: No. So I should probably make it very clear. So it's the people who do technical writing, they Basically take technical data that other people have fed them. So an engineer or a pilot or someone. Someone else who's interacting almost more directly on the system, they give us information. As a technical writer. As a technical writer, we need to put that into the documents. Manual. So just like a car comes with a manual. Planes have manuals too, right?
Manned or unmanned, like it doesn't matter. They all have their own maintenance and operating procedures and everything else as well. So we would write a lot of that and then we would pass that back to the experts and they would review what we've written and it would sort of go backwards and forwards like that. And being a military contract as well, there were certain standards and things like that we had to meet as well. So.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: Requirements, one would hope.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: Yes. So don't worry. It wasn't. Yeah. And it's. I'm not saying that you need to, you know, just anyone can do it. The guy from Woolworths was awesome. Yeah.
So. But yeah, I. So I was in that job for a while and then where I was working, there was another opportunity elsewhere in the business for basically a drone pilot. It was a smaller but still military drone system. So I moved across to there.
During that transition, I was kind of looking around a little bit casually for jobs and I got a call back up from someone who post on LinkedIn that they were looking for a chief remote pilot. And I was like, oh, maybe I don't know if I really fit that or not. And I ended up having a conversation with the guy and I didn't take the job at the end, but that same guy called me back up, the managing director of strategic. He called me back up and he said, I really like what you do. I like you. I would like to bring you on board as a. Basically a remote pilot for our operation as well. It would just be casual and maybe like a couple of weeks every once in a while. And I was like, cool, perfect. That sounds good. Talk to my workplace. They were happy for me to do it as a bit of a side gig. And I went along with them on their first test flight of their particular drone. Um, and they build high altitude remotely piloted stratospheric airships. And there's a lot of words in there.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: There was an even, even bigger name. But so. And, and that's.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Is that what you would. Is that. That. That is Stratoship or is that is a straddleship or is that.
[00:10:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: So, yeah, I'm actually looking at a picture of Stratoship and. Well, we'll put it into the notes somewhere to describe, describe a Stratoship for us.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: So, a Stratoship. And this is, this is our prototype. So this is the smallest it will ever be. It's 25 meters long, 10 meters high, 10 meters round. It's about the same size as a tennis court.
So it's probably a good, good picture. And it's made of. So we actually use a fabric for a lot of it. And the idea is we basically sort of fill out this balloon shape with helium, so as it rises through the atmosphere, atmospheric density reduces and it sort of puffs it out more. I'm sure you guys have seen balloons float off into the distance and they eventually get to a size where the. Basically the air inside it's trying to get out and it pops because it can't hold it anymore. So when you see a party balloon go, you can think of that, but we don't let it pop. Instead, we actually use that pressure to hold it at altitude in the stratosphere. So it's around 60,000ft or 20 kilometers, depending on what you like. Wow. Yeah.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: And, and why, Jen, does one want a drone or Stratoship? Because I think we, I think we've. I think the list.
This is not delivering pizzas or, or, or following us on our, on our run or, or doing sort of, you know, you know, drone shots, flying, swooping over cliffs and so forth. This is, this is a very different type of application, isn't it?
[00:11:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
So the main purpose is that it can basically hold position high above a location. So if you want to, say, sit above a national park and detect ignitions for bushfires and catch them basically before they get too bad, that's a really great example. And from one stratoship sitting at 20 km high and cover over a thousand square kilometers of basically visual data just from one camera. So that's our main focus is emergency services. But there's also other uses, too. You could use it in agriculture. You can count cows with it. You can detect nitrogen levels in the soil with it. You can look at the temperature on the ground with it. There's a lot of really, really cool, interesting other things as well.
And the other side of it as well is if you have, say, an emergency situation and a lot of the infrastructure on the ground has been wiped out using a comms system. Sitting on a Stratoship, it's like having a comms tower, but 20km high and it covers a massive area. So that's over a million Square kilometers of radio coverage, which is insane to think about. I can't even think about it. But it's, I don't even know what a million square kilometers looks like, but that's what it, what it has been built to do.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: So, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a platform for cameras and sensors and a whole load of other sort of scientific instruments and other. And that can, that can stay at very high altitude for. And how long, how long can a Stratoship stay up there?
[00:13:21] Speaker C: That's it. So at the moment, the prototype we've built is designed to stay up there for a week and we're hoping to build the next one to stay up for about two months.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Wow. How exciting. So when you, when you say you're, I mean when you say you're, you're a drone pilot or you're, or you're, you're flying, that, that, that's more, that's more astronaut than sort of flying club, isn't it?
[00:13:43] Speaker C: I'm not on board though, you know.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: I know you're not on board.
I mean, yeah, I mean, and how does, how does it. Actually I'm looking at the picture and I'm thinking airships, but I'm thinking how do you, how do you navigate it forward and backwards? Does it have motors or.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Yeah, so it's just got a couple of motors on it, a couple of propellers on it. It looks, I know the propellers are just other aircraft propellers, they're just really, really big ones because again, you've got really non dense air. So we've got to push through that air differently to how a normal propeller would push through the air.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: So that's amazing. So what's the, so in everything around that? And yeah, I'm hearing that, but it's so it's, it's relatively, it's a relative, it's a relative prototype. So there's not hundreds of these. So you're, you're, you're, you're, you're experimenting, you're making the shredded ship better that the second one will be bigger and the first one's already pretty, pretty large. And I can imagine there's a whole range of different user cases in terms of customers, whether it's emergency services or commercial or agricultural companies.
So you're, I say what part of your job? Two questions. I'm going to mash two questions. Talk us through a typical sort of day in your, in your world and then which part of it do you enjoy most. So over to you.
[00:15:05] Speaker C: Okay, so my job is incredibly strange. So I'm a chief operating officer, which is the catch all for everything that the engineer is not doing. Basically my job looks different every single day, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much today I've been doing like client and customer meetings, so sales through to developing, marketing, things like that, doing payroll, putting job ads up on our website. So I've been doing a whole mix of like hr, payroll, accounting, sales, just today alone. But I can tell you now, next week I'm going to be going into the warehouse and helping inflate the strata ship and seeing where it needs repairs or what changes and maintenance it might need done to it. I get to actually crawl inside it and go have a look around and you know, in a few weeks time we're going to be taking it out flying again. So I'll be doing a lot of the ground operations and basically managing a lot of people. So we hire in a lot of casual staff as part of our ground operations.
I'll be managing them, looking after pretty much the whole launch operation myself. I'll be driving the truck up there. That's another fun part of my job. And yeah, and then we'll do the launch and there'll be a point where the pilot who handled the launch steps away and I'll be stepping in and I'll be flying around for a little bit.
Yeah, so it's just, it's a whole mix of lots of different things. So I, it was one, one day that was like no two days are the same.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: A gen of all trades very much, eh, yes.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's, and it's definitely a unique part of being like part of startup culture and small business culture as well as you end up wearing a lot of hats. But I don't know, I find a lot of the hats I get to wear have been really challenging in a good way and very interesting as well. To see the backside of a business. If you go work for a big corporation, you won't see the payroll. You just kind of see the money rock up in your account and you'll get a pay slip.
You don't see the hiring process, you don't see all the other bits that go in behind the scenes to that you get a contract and you get an interview and you kind of see those like two or three maybe very public facing points of it, but you don't see all the rest of it that goes on in the background. So that's been Absolutely fascinating. And you understand so much more about how business operations go and everything else too. So, yeah, I can't give a clear answer.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: And of the project, of the projects or that you've done so far, what, what do you think? What's the one you've enjoyed the most?
[00:17:44] Speaker C: Oh, gosh. So we did a. It was our very, very first test flight that we did with this prototype. So we did actually make a couple of prototypes before this one to test various points in the system and basically see will it fly and will it fly in the stratosphere and.
And one of those. We got to work with quite a few companies, including some like satellite companies and communications companies on the very first test flight of this particular prototype. And we took a whole bunch of interesting payloads or interesting like cameras and sensors and things like that on board. We got to install it all in and launch from. There's like a drone testing facility in northwestern Queensland in a little town called Cloncurry, if anyone wants to Google that.
Yeah. And it was just, it was fabulous to just see probably about the efforts of 25, 30 people all come together throughout different parts of this operation.
You know, get all the sensors and payloads working. Launch the first test flight. And it was just sort of beautiful to watch watch this airship take off into the distance. It was very, I don't know, it felt very old school in some ways, like, very like 1950s where you normally think of blimps, but also kind of very space agey in the sense that we're doing something that, you know, it's going to the stratosphere and it's.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: I'm sort of in my mind, I guess I'm juggling. I'm quite a lot older than you, so I'm seeing pictures of blimps and zeppelins and things like. And things like. And things like that.
One thing I hear a lot coming through, Jenny, is team, you know, and one of the things we talk about.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: A lot in aviation and I'm always.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Struck by it's just such a team. Yeah, it's such a team industry, isn't it? Yeah. And you're bringing.
What you're telling us is not just working within the team who you work with, but it's all these various partners and suppliers and technical people. And I can imagine a whole lot of stuff has to be planned to come together. And you know, it's got to be the right weight and the right specifications and a lot, I think, was it the Hubble telescope? They had a mistake where they. Well, One, one was measured in metric and one was measured in imperial. They had the lens, they put the wrong lens on the, on the curvature on the mirror or something like that. It's that kind of thing, isn't it? There's lots of moving parts and plenty to, plenty of potential to go wrong. But the other, the other, I think the other word I've just written down here, think. Listening to you, it sounds like it's the space you're in, no pun intended, is quite pioneering.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: It's definitely on the cutting edge of innovation. There's probably less than 10 companies in the world who've either achieved what we're trying to achieve or are going in that direction.
And what's really unique for us as well is we saw a lot of these companies going out there doing what they're doing, trying to basically do the same thing, creating a high altitude drone or high altitude platform. And a lot of them have spent millions and billions of dollars and it takes, you know, A team of 30 engineers 40 years to come up with the concept and they design it beautifully and things like that. And then they go out to, to try it and it fails because inevitably in innovation you're always going to fail the first few times.
But yeah, like, it's just the amount of resources that go into that. But what's really special for us is we've achieved almost a similar level of, can I say, success?
Definitely learnings. Yeah.
Yes, that's good. Yeah, it's a similar level of success but with a team of. We've got three people in our core team.
We don't have billions of dollars and we're still doing it. So in the very Australian underdog way, we are on the cutting edge of innovation, but with whatever's come out of our back pockets and a little bit of funding from, you know, the Queensland government and things like that.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: So go the Queensland government.
[00:21:41] Speaker C: That's it. Thank you. Queensland. Yeah.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Come on, New South Wales. Come on. Wa. This pitch in. Yeah, it's, I mean, it sounds very cool. And where do you, where do you see the future of this?
Because I say we, we know a lot about drones and you know, probably in commercial applications in terms of delivery and all those kind of things and even defense and so forth. But I think what we're talking about we probably quite new news to a lot of people. So where do you see this sort of going?
[00:22:12] Speaker C: So I think.
So there's two other technologies. When someone says, oh, but I want to monitor something or I want to look at something, there's two other technologies that come to mind. One is drones and arguably manned aircraft as well. So if you look at no Western Australia, they, the bushfire season every year they've got a whole heap of planes that go out there and they survey backwards and forwards and they just look for ignitions, smoke, fire, anything like that. And they just do that for hours and hours and hours every single day.
And. But you have to imagine the, you know, you have to have pilots the whole time. You've got to have fuel in those planes the whole time. You've got to have people maintaining those aircraft the whole time. It's quite a resource intensive experience. So then people say, oh, we'll just put a drone up there instead. But a lot of the drones aren't designed to fly that high. They still, they might be able to fly longer or maybe for the same amount of time that a plane might be able to fly, but they still have to come back down, swap the batteries out, recharge the batteries. They're still going to have a pilot on the ground. So. But then you might say, oh, but why not have satellite footage, right? And you're like, oh, that's a great idea. But satellites pass once overhead, probably about once every 12 hours on average.
And sorry, that's one satellite. So if you had a whole array of satellites that you had access to, and that's a whole other conversation for another day. If you had a whole array of satellites you had access to, you still might only get one photo of your spot once every six to, I don't know, four to six hours is realistic. Yeah.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: Significant investment, right?
[00:23:50] Speaker C: Yeah. So how do you constantly monitor something, particularly at a critical time like bushfire season, especially in Australia?
How do you really know that you're getting continuous data. So that's where something like a stratoship would come in.
Because it can just sit straight above, say a national park or a forest. It can cover a huge portion of that area. Even with our biggest national parks in the country, you could probably get three or four stratoships to cover the majority of that national park area and just sit there and wait for ignition detection. You have teams on ground, you have it streamed back to a data response center and someone can make the decisions. You know, is that critical? Is that something we need to go assess or can we just leave that far? Is it going to look after itself? So love it. So there's a kind of a sweet spot in between everything else, but doesn't mean that we can't have planes. We shouldn't have drones and all this, but we can definitely fill a lot of the gaps that don't exist at the moment.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and relatively cost effectively, I'm sure.
[00:24:49] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds like a brilliant use case. And. Well, so you've, You've from, from a frustrated Covid sort of pilot who went off in a different direction. You've. You've come a long way in what, three, four years? Something like that?
[00:25:04] Speaker C: Something like that, yeah.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And so out, outside of pioneering on the edge of the stratosphere, what do you, what do you, what do you do when you're not at work?
[00:25:16] Speaker C: I love riding motorbikes and I even have a little, A little scooter, a little moped that I love zipping around on. I also like doing a lot of hiking and kayaking as well, so. Keeps me busy, keeps me out of trouble.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: So you've got a lot on. And I get the sense, Jen, that, yeah, I'm going to extend the formal invitation to come back in a year or a couple of years and let us know where you've gone with that, this whole story, because I can only imagine that this is. You're just gonna go to places that possibly none of us have imagined, or maybe you guys have imagined it, but you're not telling us yet because it might scare us a bit.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: I would love to come back. That sounds great.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: That's great. And you know, and I guess if we sort of in wrapping this up, we, we go back into the conversation of, you know, how you got into aviation and sort of your experience of aviation, and I say you. And what would you say to.
What advice would you give to young men and women who may be considering a career in aviation, whether that's flying or whether that's some kind of ground handling role or an office role or an administration role or a drone flying role. I mean, what would you say to them?
[00:26:44] Speaker C: Just take any opportunity that comes your way. If it feels right or if it, you know, if you think doing it would make you happy, just take advantage of it. I think aviation has a lot of, like, it could be hard at times, but it is incredibly rewarding to be part of this industry.
But you won't know unless you take the opportunity. Take the deep dive. So jump on in.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Take the deep dive. There's your T shirt. I love that, Jen. Thank you very much. And where. And finally, where can people. Where can we find out more about what you're up to at Skysite and Stratoship to use a full name.
[00:27:20] Speaker C: Yeah. So probably the website is the best thing. And if you do want to ask any more questions, you're also welcome. There's a contact us form. You can flick a message through there. I will see it and I'm happy to respond to anybody. So the website is www.stratoship st.
Oh, God. Now. Now you're testing.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Don't worry, we'll put it in.
[00:27:38] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: We'll put it in the show notes.
[00:27:41] Speaker C: Perfect. So Strataship au. That's it.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: We'll put it all in there and we'll also, we'll link through to the website. You can. And I do encourage listeners to check out the. Check out the images, check out the pictures of the. Because as I say, if we haven't done a good job of describing it or I've not done a good job of describing. This ain't your typical drone that you're probably thinking about. It's think airship.
And yeah, you'll be somewhere in the ballpark. Hey, Jen, thank you so much for your time. We've loved having you on the Sky Careers Podcast. You're definitely coming back to update us on everything that's going on and we can't wait to hear about your future success. So thank you very much.
[00:28:27] Speaker D: Thanks for listening to the Sky Careers Podcast. If today's conversation has sparked your interest in aviation, then head over to our
[email protected] au whether you dream of flying aircraft or you're curious about the hundreds of other exciting roles that keep the aviation industry moving, Sky Careers is your gateway to discovering these opportunities. And if you are already in the industry, check out skycareers Connect and Sky Careers Leadership and consider joining our online learning community. Until next time, keep reaching for the skies.
