Question: does your job allow you to trval the world and how does your software work to program unmaned aircrafts

James Vokes answered on 13 Mar 2012:

I don’t travel the world with my job, unfortunately. Not yet anyway. the project I’m on just now, Watchkeeper, is based in Crawley but Thales is a *huge* company! They have locations all around the world so maybe one day I’ll be able to see a bit more of it by join a new project in a different country.

How does my software work? It’s very complicated and I’ll be honest I don’t understand all of it. What they do is decide what they’d like the software to do (like: “Fly the UAV, Take pictures of things we point at”) and then they break that down and down until you’re just left with basics (“Fly the UAV” would become: The UAV will be able to take off on a clear day, the UAV will be able to take off on a rainy day, the UAV will fly at this speed and will turn at that speed etc.) and then we’re left with thousands of requirements that then get shared between engineers who go about programing them in.