You’ve fancied a “proper” drone for a few years. You’ve seen great photography online and in magazines, watched superb tracking shots in TV documentaries and finally you took the leap and bought one for yourself.
You got the proper training (from 3iC of course), taking the relevant courses/certificates and you feel ready to go.
But what can you do with your drone? After flying it around your garden (within CAA restrictions) and around the local park etc. together with taking pictures that you wow your mates with, you feel that you’ve exhausted everything – unless you’re a photographer of course.
And now there’s a very real danger of your drone being put on the shelf and never flown again. But stop, before you do that, just read some of the things that people are doing with their drones
Drone Photography
This is the No.1 use of drones. Commercial drone pilots are used to photograph almost everything, covering research, planning, building examination and more.
Wedding photographers can add a completely new dimension to the photography of the lucky couple’s big day by adding an aerial view of the wedding and celebrations.
Local authorities, and commercial organisations, use drones for aerial shots of their properties, enabling them to carry out property and land inspections without having to scale taller buildings or use scaffolding
Farming and Agriculture
Farmers are making use of drones to help them maximise resource use and management. The use of drones enables large swathes of farmland to be monitored far more rapidly than more traditional methods.
The use of GPS technology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allows fine scale monitoring and mapping of crop yield. This enables more effective cultivation, enabling farmers to fine tune fertiliser delivery and quickly identify crop disease before it becomes widespread.
Rescue
At the end of December 2020 there was a massive landslide to the North of Oslo, Norway. The landslide destroyed more than a dozen homes and a lot of people were missing. The clay soil was unstable and so made it unsafe for emergency workers to walk randomly in the area so drones were deployed, successfully, to find missing people and animals.
At the end of June 2021 an 82 year old man went missing from Abergele in Conwy.
Rescue teams from the RNLI and the local police searched high and low, searching land and sea for Mr Giblin, without result. The National Police Air Service got involved with one of their drones, with the drone being able to oversee a wider area than the foot patrol officers could cover, and it could cover the ground more quickly too. After 18 hours the drone operator spotted Mr Giblin in 4ft high grass, away from the area being covered by the ground search team. If the drone hadn’t spotted Mr Giblin the outcome is likely to have been a lot worse.,
Delivery
There are many articles about the use of drones as a delivery option. Amazon is looking at drones for last mile deliveries of small packages, for example. In Germany a laboratory is hoping to cut down the time it takes to send coronavirus tests across Berlin by using drones to avoid traffic clogged roads. Sending tests by drone cuts the delivery time from around an hour to just 10 minutes. Each drone can carry 40 samples, and it’s not just covid tests that can be sent for rapid examination. Any samples that need to be examined in the laboratory can be rapidly sent from hospitals to the laboratory.
In Helsinki the Lauttiksen Apteekki pharmacy, located in Lauttasaari is experimenting with delivering essential medication to patients to see how relevant, and effective, drone delivery could be.
Drone Racing
Drone racing is a highly specialised field of drone operations. High performance drones are flown by pilots wearing Goggles that display images from the forward looking camera on their drone. They race around, and through, obstacles, and, as with all racing, the goal is to win. Drone racing requires fast, agile drones and a pilot with lightning reactions. There are drone racing clubs that you can join and as your skill develops there are even Drone Racing leagues you can join.