It’s a challenge to hobby fly anything in the UK now, register with this organisation, take a test with a different organisation, get a licence from this organisation, you cannot fly here, here and here, you cannot do this or that. Locally, it’s a real pita to even fly model helicopters. Andy
Yep, I bought mine to see, as a proof of concept, if drone videography/photography had commercial potential. I do a some photography and video work in the line of my business, though it's not the main business activity these days. I concluded that the hoops you needed to jump though to do this in a business capacity just wasn't worth the hassle and expense for what little use I'd make of it. Would have needed to buy something with a more capable camera, or even one capable of carrying a cinema camera. The latter would have been around £8-10K + a £5k camera. Considered selling the Mavic a year ago until I saw how little they fetch, keeping it for future amateur use when I find the time.
My eldest son went through all the hoops, registered, took a test etc, and then found his drone really useful in his line of work, Agricultural Technology. But isn't now using it so much and has found like Bumpkin that his £3.5K Drone from 4yrs ago is now worthless. He'd need to be investing even more now to contemplate doing anything commercially with one now.
I've got a couple of drones. Found some great areas to fly them, up near the American airbases over the last couple of week. No other drones around so its been great flying.
I had Permission For Aerial Work (PFAW) granted by the CAA back in 2017 for a couple of years. I found my way into doing roof inspections for a contact I had at a project consultants, photographing the roofs of commercial units for insurance purposes. It paid quite well but I didn't continue; I only had one contact for the work which didn't seem a strong enough client base to pull me away form what I do the rest of the time, and try as I might I couldn't drum up any customers elsewhere. In the end I sold up all my gear - I really needed to change drone. I had an inspire 1 which was too big and cumbersome for the quite close proximity flying I needed to do, and I didn't feel it was worth investing in newer, smaller drones that were more suitable. Good while it lasted though.
got filmed a couple of times by drones this year/last year and was very impressed by how small they were to achieve good quality video footage. Lots of battery swaps but appeared effortless to use. Would love to have got one myself but all too late now, and judging by prices quoted above i was being a bit naive anyway.
I dont know how good you need to be to fly those things but at the MX track my son rides they have a bloke who will fly alongside the rider for the full lap so thats jumps and everything. IM always amazed at both the quality and how they keep everything in frame.
The ability to visualise in a spherical space, often with only the visual feed to guide you. I struggle with large scale r/c helicopters that fly at slow speeds, can’t imagine learning the skill set required to follow motorsport. Andy
Chris, if you're referring to my post; that's for something capable of carrying a hefty cinema camera plus the the ancillary equipment to transmit, and receive, footage back to the operator. You can get relatively OK 4k footage off of a consumer drone for around £1k.
I was looking at doing something for live broadcast. The drone itself was from a company called Acecore I think, and was somewhere in the region of £20k - before you started putting a decent camera on it. RF systems approx £40k. I forget all the ins and outs as it's well over six years ago, but it was looking like 100K for the system I wanted to do at the time.
