With a roar, the quadcopter rises from the ground before slaloming between blocks. At the helm is Quentin, a professional baccalaureate student with a drone option, a unique educational training in France, which interests the army.
Eleven students from the Louise Weiss high school in Sainte-Marie-aux-mines, an Alsatian town of 5,000 inhabitants backed by the Vosges massif, are the first to introduce this specialty as part of their Ciel professional baccalaureate (Cybersecurity, IT and networks, electronic).
In the electronics laboratory, teenagers are absorbed in various activities. Two of them are leaning on a test bench and working on the lift.
It involves “running the motors in stages, faster and faster to know at what speed the drone is likely to fly away”, explains Jean-Marc Bour, teacher.
Damien, 18 years old, is faced with an S500 V2 kit: “I have to assemble it from A to Z, to understand how we should build a drone, what material we use, what motor, what battery, etc.”, he lists. The goal: to learn to “create it ourselves”.
The only girl in the class, Charlotte is interested in a model of a ruined tower, reconstructed in 3D using images captured by drone.
During the training, the young girl learned a certain number of rules related to the use of these machines, such as the fact that “there are certain areas where we are not allowed to fly and that authorization is then required.”
By including a drone option in this professional baccalaureate, “the idea was to create an innovative sector which does not exist anywhere else for the moment by using the drone as a tool”, explains the high school principal, François Ginoux.
The establishment has formed a partnership with the Air and Space Force. Army instructors gave drone piloting lessons to students and toured air bases in the region.
– Growth sectors –
These are skills that “interest” the army, explains Pascal Fischer, who commands the Regional Recruitment Center of the Air Force. “We need drones” for surveillance and security of military sites, and trained people capable of “putting in place countermeasures” against hostile drones, he continues.
The Army had 3,000 drones at the start of the year, it will have 15,000 by the end of 2026.
“Our effort is to stay at the technological level and for each soldier to be an operator” of a drone, underlined General Philippe de Montenon, commander of the land operational force, at the end of April, on the last day of the vast Orion 26 military exercise.
Among Louise-Weiss’s students, Nolan, 17, is destined for a military career and hopes that his knowledge of droneautics will constitute “a little extra, an asset that others will not necessarily have”.
If using a drone as a weapon is “not the goal”, the teenager imagines instead using it for “scouting” or carrying out “reconnaissance” operations.
Besides the army, “other sectors are very promising”, underlines the principal, Mr. Ginoux, citing “companies which research heat loss on their installations” or even the agricultural sector.
Alban, 20 years old, considers droneautics more “like a hobby”. “But I also learned thanks to the partnership with the army that this also has applications on the ground. And I found it rather interesting,” testifies the young man.
Mr. Ginoux affirms that the drone option “has recreated a real revival of interest” for the professional Sky baccalaureate, ensuring that he must “even refuse students to register at the start of the year”.
The objective for him is to perpetuate this training, which could spread. “It would be interesting if National Education took up this experience to extend it to several high schools in France,” said the principal, emphasizing that to date, there is “no equivalent sector.”
