Cooperative-Drone Swarm Recovery Leader — Infrastructure Inspection

The mandate

The infrastructure inspection programme relies on drone swarms with distributed task allocation and dynamic exclusion-zone management. The organisation now requires stronger version control across swarm routes, avoidance states, and peer-reallocation logic to ensure all aircraft operate on consistent maps and task authorities during live missions.

The interim must start within two weeks for eight months, leading fleet containment, distributed-state reconciliation, regulatory readiness, two major inspection campaigns and successor induction. Recruitment begins after a sixty-day mission-authority baseline. Four weeks are protected for overlap; the term will not extend for general geospatial modernisation, new aircraft procurement or expansion into delivery services.

Handover requires every cooperative mission to resolve approved objective, airspace and asset geometry, aircraft and payload state, peer role, shared map, task allocation, local avoidance, command link, supervisor intervention, inspection record and return. The successor must lead unseen peer-loss and moving-exclusion exercises and accept residual radio, vendor-autonomy and historic map debt.

The authority may ground aircraft or swarm features, quarantine mission maps, restrict fleet size, require witnessed launch, direct the approved AED95 million recovery and appoint temporary workstream owners. Licensed pilots and aviation leaders retain flight and airworthiness decisions; asset engineers accept inspection evidence. The interim cannot issue regulatory approval, waive separation, buy aircraft permanently or exceed financial delegation.

Commercial drone delivery, infrastructure repair and replacement of fleet hardware unrelated to the contained defect are outside scope. The leader may require accessible peer-decision evidence and reliable manual takeover but cannot treat swarm optimisation as flight authorisation. Recovery is bounded to coordinated mission state, explicit human command and defensible inspection provenance for the present fleet.

Why this seat is open

The contained event exposed a distributed-authority defect rather than a failure of the supervisor who stopped the mission. Dismissal of the programme director left no executive spanning Flight Operations, Autonomy, Inspection and Regulation. Temporary leadership must rebuild the control model before major campaigns and a permanent appointment.

What you will own

• Reconstruct affected missions across objective, airspace, asset, aircraft, payload, peer role, map, task, avoidance, intervention and return.
• Define authoritative and local swarm state when aircraft receive updates at different times or lose peer and command links.
• Decide which aircraft, fleet sizes and cooperative behaviours may resume, require restriction, need testing or remain grounded.
• Command exercises for peer loss, stale geofence, GNSS degradation, moving exclusion, conflicting avoidance and supervisor takeover.
• Establish mission evidence that distinguishes regulator approval, pilot command, swarm proposal and each aircraft’s executed action.
• Govern recovery against released missions, state convergence, takeover performance, airspace exceptions and inspection-data completeness.
• Transfer command through two campaigns and successor acceptance of radio, autonomy, mapping and supplier limitations.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive swarm, unmanned-aircraft or cooperative-autonomy authority across regulated beyond-visual-line or complex inspection operations.
• Reconstructed distributed mission state across aircraft, peers, maps, task allocation, avoidance, links and human intervention.
• Grounded or restricted a fleet when local safety behaviour conflicted with global task or exclusion understanding.
• Worked with licensed pilots, regulators and asset engineers without representing autonomy logic as airworthiness or flight approval.
• Governed degraded GNSS, communications and peer membership across heterogeneous aircraft and proprietary control systems.
• Handed recovered cooperative flight to permanent leadership through live campaigns and adversarial distributed-state exercises.