Six weeks with the Boréal long-endurance drone for the State services in French Guiana
From October to November 2023, the prefecture of French Guiana trialled a long-endurance drone for its surveillance missions: the Boréal, a catapult-launched fixed-wing aircraft developed by Boréal SAS and fitted by M3 Systems with an observation payload. Sentinel operated the aircraft throughout the campaign, from the fire and rescue base in Mana.
Very different users
The same machine served, in turn, maritime surveillance, the environmental police, the border police, the firefighters and the Space Centre. On 16 October, a night flight over Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni with the border police showed what an airborne thermal camera brings over several hours of flight. On 31 October a maritime mission covered the coastline; on 8 November a flight was carried out for CNES.
Three Sentinel pilots took turns during the campaign. The general report handed to the manufacturers in December details the strengths and limits of the payload: zoom quality at full range, the value of a rangefinder, the need for geographic target tracking and an overlaid map. This feedback fed into the next version of the system.
Why a catapult-launched drone
A multirotor flies for thirty to forty minutes; a fixed-wing aircraft of this class stays up for several hours and covers tens of kilometres of coast or river in a single flight. In French Guiana, where distances are long and access is scarce, that is what changes the use: you no longer travel to the area, you observe from a base.
M3 Systems published an account of this campaign in January 2024, and the French Biodiversity Office devoted an article to the missions carried out with the environmental police.
