JWilsonphoto
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Good Morning/Evening Nick,
Yes, I finished up my backlog of aerials a little while ago. A couple of them I flew when the light was the best we'd been given, but not up to my standards, so I re-flew those as well. Today was all drone work, but the site is in a restricted area just off of Addison Airport's runway so I had a number of hoops to jump through. The process is pretty cumbersome, if I didn't have Mike Brewington and Deb Hale in the brain trust I'm not sure what I would do.
There are several routes one can go for approval, bu tit's very complicated. AirMap is an FAA vendor company and you can go to their site and fill out a bunch of information, theoretically they send you an approval code fairly quickly, but the Pandemic is getting the best of them at the moment so it takes forever and then you get a note saying the FAA is not granting waivers at this time. The whole thing is a bit deceptive because even if you get a waiver from them, it doesn't unlock the Geofencing on the Inspire so you can't fly. To get the Inspire in the air you have to go to DJI's "fly safe" site, enter all your info along with the serial number of the Inspire's controller module, the area you are trying to fly in, the exact dimensions of the flight, length, width, height, the speed you plan to fly, the weather conditions currently, the duration of your flight and then you have to check multiple boxes acknowledging the fact that if anything goes south during your activities, it's all on you. DJI then sends you a code which has to be transferred into the Inspire via the DJI GO4 App, and sync'd with the drone and the controller, then it unlocks and you can fly. It's kind of like scuba diving, by the time you get everything ready, you're too worn out to do it.......
I did get some great imagery this morning though, I'll post a few as soon as I get it all edited,labeled and off to the clients. As I was shooting this morning and marveling at the cool perspectives the drone allowed, I was once again grateful to Mike Brewington for his kind mentoring and encouragement.
Yesterday as I flew in and out I spoke with all of my controller friends at KTKI and so far everyone is healthy, although it is not out of the realm of possibility that someone could test positive and shut the tower down. I assume we would go back to a Unicom controlled airspace at that point which would be fairly terrifying given the mix of jets and students we have coming and going these days. Should that happen, my strategy would be to get in and out like a helicopter and spend minimal time in the airspace, very doable when your departure roll is 100' and landing roll is twice that.
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