UAVs Archives - Golf Hotel Whiskey

What could go wrong using a drone to video a wedding?

If you have ever thought about using a drone to video your wedding, you might be wondering what could possibly go wrong, with the answer being that you could end up getting hit on the side of the head as this video shows!:

Apparently, the wedding photographer was using a DJI phantom and a GoPro camera two days before the wedding to do their bridal shoot and the incident occurred near the beginning of the shoot. The photographer/drone pilot had done one successful fly by and brought the contraption around for another pass to make sure it was smooth. However, he underestimated the lift time and hit the groom on the side of the face.

The groom suffered a cut to his cheek and the side of his head, but luckily the couple laughed off the unfortunate incident and the video was eventually completed (click here to see the final video from the shoot, here for the full version of the video and here for the wedding video).

The YouTube page containing the video has also attracted its share of funny to outright negative comments about the wedding photographer’s flying skills….

The OppiKoppi Music Festival’s beer drone technology

If you thought there was nothing drone technology could do that would impact your life in a meaningful way (other than to perhaps spy on it!), think again because at South Africa’s Oppikoppi Music Festival, concert goers could use an app combined GPS technology to have a drone accurately drop plastic cups full of beer:

Since getting to the Oppikoppi festival, which is held on a dusty farm in the northern Limpopo, is a challenge in and of itself due to the poor condition of the local roads, the organizers probably wanted to make it easy to deliver beer to concertgoers.

Carel Hoffmann, director of the Oppikoppi festival, has said an app registers the position of users using the GPS satellite chips on their phones:

“The delivery guys have a calibrated delivery drone. They send it to the GPS position and drops it with a parachute.”

For the sake of safety, Dean Engela, the co-founder of Darkwing Aerials which is the South African company that is providing the beer drone for the festival, told CBSNews.com:

“There’s going to be one campsite designated to the beer drop. The campsite will be notified that there will be drones in the air.”

The octocopter will only fly outside of the festival area while it makes its way to “District 9” to deliver beer while those inside the campsite will be told in advance that a drone will be flying above them during the show. Currently, the drone is hand-guided, but the developers say they will eventually fly on a GPS grid.

The South African built drone was nicknamed “Manna” after the Old Testament story of bread that fell from the sky to feed the Israelites travelling through the desert following their exodus from Egypt. Hoffmann has also told the media: “It’s an almost Biblical thing that beer is dropping from the sky.”

Even Rand Paul, the United States Senate’s foremost critic on drones and drone surveillance, has tweeted a link to an article about the beer delivery drone, adding: “Perhaps I am not against ALL drones!”

FAA: Please don’t shoot down any drones

Over in America, the FAA has been forced to release a statement in response to a proposed ordinance under consideration in the tiny farming community of Deer Trail, Colorado, that would encourage hunters to shoot down drones. Under the proposed ordinance, Deer Trail would give $25 hunting permits to hunters to shoot down drones and then reward them with $100 when a valid (drone) hunting license and identifiable pieces of a drone are presented.

Resident Phillip Steel authored the proposal (more or less symbolic) and has told the media he has 28 signatures on a petition or roughly 10% of the town’s registered voters. Under Colorado law, local officials must formally consider the proposal at a meeting next month and they would have the option of either adopting the ordinance or putting it on the ballot in an election this fall.

However, the FAA warned that a drone:

…hit by gunfire could crash, causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air. Shooting at an unmanned aircraft could result in criminal or civil liability, just as would firing at a manned airplane.

Steel dismissed the FAA’s warning plus there are dozens of other laws being introduced across the country aimed at curbing the use of the unmanned aircraft or drones.

Meanwhile, the FAA is working on regulations to integrate drones into the skies and Congress has given them until 2015 to develop the necessary regulations, but the agency is behind schedule. Once the drone regulations are in place, thousands of drones could take to the skies – something that concerns privacy advocates.

UK aviation innovation is back: The DomiCopter delivers its first pizza!

If you thought that the UK aviation industry’s best days ended with the Spitfire or the Harrier Jump Jet, think again because Domino’s Pizza in the UK has just carried out the first pizza delivery by drone helicopter!

The “DomiCopter” was developed by Aerosight, a UK based drone specialist that shoots for UK broadcasts, cinema, commercials, independent documentaries and music videos. The video was then posted by T + Biscuits, the creative agency used by the pizza chain’s UK headquarters. So it’s more of a publicity stunt rather than a sign of a new innovative trend in pizza delivery is here.

And while the DomiCopter can reportedly deliver up to two large pizzas over a 6.4 km or 4 mile radius in 10 minutes or less, pizza deliver boys (or girls) need not worry about loosing their jobs just yet as there are a couple of catches with pizza delivery by drone:

The first pizza delivery mission was not technically a drone mission as it was controlled by an experienced pilot who was guided by camera (and no doubt earns more than a pizza delivery guy!). Nevertheless, Domino’s did say that GPS coordinates could potentially be used in future pizza delivery flights.
There are restrictions or potential restrictions on drone flights depending upon where you live and the regulations aren’t exactly clear or set in stone just yet. In fact and over in the USA, commercial drone flights are illegal until 2015 while most states have rules where drones can only fly up to around 400 feet and must get permission from landowners before entering private property (which could be handled online by checking a box when you order a pizza). That probably means drones would have to stick to flying over public roads rather taking a short cut over your neighbor’s house to land in your backyard.
Yahoo! News noted that both the Burrito Bomber and the TacoCopter turned out to be fakes, this video looks like a real publicity stunt!

Yahoo! News also grabbed the following pictures presumably from the above video:

No word on whether you need to tip the DomiCopter or whether you get a free pizza if the weather delays its flight!

Cool video: Flying robots or drones working together

Hat tip to David Cenciotti and his Aviationist blog for posting a video of the “Feedback Control and the Coming Machine Revolution” presentation by Professor Raffaello D’Andrea from ETH Zurich about the future capabilities of machines. The lecture is around 23 minutes long with the flying robots or drones making their debut at around the 9 minute mark when Raffaello explains how they work.

However, the most interesting point in the lecture comes at around the 19 minute mark when the three drones throw a ball in the air and move to intercept it. This shows how drones can be programmed to work together to accomplish tasks beyond their individual capabilities:

Pilotless aircraft: A great idea for Michael O’Leary (and a bad one for co-pilots)

Over the next few weeks, a twin-engined Jetstream will fly from the Warton Aerodrome in Lancashire towards Scotland but it won’t be an ordinary flight as the aircraft will be pilotless according to the Economist. That’s not entirely accurate as there will be a pilot. Its just the pilot will be flying the aircraft from a control room on the ground (but just in case things go wrong with the experiment, there will be a pilot in the cockpit to take over). The flight itself is part of a project to develop the technologies and procedures that ultimately will allow large commercial aircraft to operate pilotless.

No doubt such an idea would have airline executives like Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary salivating because after all, think of how much cost savings there would be if there were no pilots in the cockpit? Or better yet, how much more cost savings there would be if you had one guy on the ground “piloting” a couple of aircraft?

But jokes aside, we are nearly at that point already as modern aircraft are already perfectly capable of taking off, flying to a destination and landing automatically. Its just there are a couple of (very expensive) pilots in the cockpit to keep an eye on things and make sure the rules of the air are complied with.

So part of the experiment is to test how well air-traffic controllers can communicate with a pilot on the ground through the aircraft and how to make the radio and satellite links both secure and reliable. However, the engineers behind pilotless aircraft will still need to be prepared for the inevitable break in communication where the aircraft will have to figure out how to safely operate or land on its own.

The Economist also made the point that while pilotless aircraft may not be here just yet, such experiments are are improving aircraft systems while in the early days of commercial aviation:

Many early large aircraft had a crew of five: two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio operator. First the radio operator went, then the navigator, and by the time the jet era was well under way in the 1970s flight engineers began to disappear too. Next it could be the co-pilot, replaced by the autonomous flight systems now being developed.

So if you are a co-pilot who has not made Captain yet, you better work on getting that promotion before your job goes the way of the flight engineer and the navigator!