It's relatively low skill to be a drone pilot; No certifications, no education requirements, no professional organization with yearly fees, etc. You literally just need to buy a drone, get a bit of practice, and start advertising your services.
If the current drone pilots want to keep the high salaries, they should add more barriers to entry. This would keep out the hobbyists from picking up side jobs and eroding the market and will also raise the cost of entry, aside from the hardware purchase.
For commercial drone ops you need to be certified by the FAA. It’s a quick multiple choice test, so not exactly onerous, but you can’t just buy a drone and start flying for money.
Not true in the US. The FAA wants to make sure you interact safely with the manned airspace system, as a user of the system. So they require various certs depending on weight of the UAS and what you want to do with it.
In the US, commercial drone operation requires an FAA license. By "requires" I mean legally requires. Hobby and Recreational use falls under Section 336. Commercial uses fall under Part 107.
Section 107 compliance doesn't add much to the cost of operation and so anyone who really wants drone footage and already has people on location (for example a construction company), can just buy a drone, get an employee licensed and shoot their own footage. The risks are less because insurance is simplified, the schedule more flexible, and nobody has to waste time soliciting bids, negotiating terms, and processing invoices.
Breaking news: relatively unhindered free markets tend to encourage prices for commodity goods and services to decrease when supply is limited primarily by other scalable commodities.
People who can not differentiate their goods or services in quality or price will find themselves in a mighty rut, and that's a good thing. Why should we expect the price of drone piloting to stagnate rather than decrease?
I think AI flown drones is a much more realistic goal now than AI driven cars. It’d certainly make it cheaper and easier for Google and Apple to update maps. Is there anyone working in this space?
Skydio R1 is actually on sale and has some seriously impressive tracking and sense-and-avoid functionality going on. FliteTest (a well known RC Youtube channel) has several videos where they test it with several interesting use cases, including high speeds, running between trees, going indoors and otherwise attempting to trick it, and it performs very well, not crashing once. If the next version is a little quieter and smoother on the video tracking, it'll be a serious competitor to manually-flown drones for various sports and "outdoor activity" types of videos.
Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site.
But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.
> Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site.
You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel.
Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
In my experience [1], construction project management econpasses a lot more then just testing, and both levels have to deal with structured and unstructured digital information.
There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations).
It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set.
[1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually
Construction has lots of tests. At least the landfill construction I was involved with.
Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding...
I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.
Iris Automation has raised money to bring (...) truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks.
Competitors to Iris in the drone industry specifically include SRI spin-out Area 17 (also known as a17), Intel RealSense Technology, Parrot’s SLAMdunk systems and DJI’s Guidance systems.
Depends what you mean by "AI". Autonomy in aviation is far ahead of what you can get in ground vehicles. Autopilots are commonplace, even in light aircraft. There are established systems like TCAS for traffic avoidance. Aviation remains incredibly safe, despite huge levels of autonomy, because of the regulation involved.
What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR). The future is not everyone flying drones with proprietary AI collision avoidance. One existing product in this space is FLARM which is used by a lot of glider pilots and light aircraft, they also make a UAV variant: https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/
Autonomous drones themselves exist, are inexpensive, and can be set to fly a survey pattern based on a number of pre-selected GPS waypoints. Ardupilot will do this. The data is used for mapping at a much higher level of data than online maps. Think agri, ecology, general site surveying, etc.
That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping. The flight time is poor. An aircraft modified for surveying can cover hundreds of square kilometres a day. A consumer drone with an hour's flight time (good luck) is going to struggle to compete.
Collision avoidance at the local level (e.g. are you going to hit a wall) is a different issue, and that can be solved by standard depth sensors.
>That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping.
You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes. A quick google search tells me you can pick up a drone with over an hour of flight-time for 3.5k-ish (I don't know much about drone pricing so someone may have better options)
Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
You can purchase 10 drones for the price of one airplane. Which I can't imagine an airplane could out map/survey 10 drones working together. I don't know much about drones or planes though so there are probably other restrictions.
Core difference is /pixel resolution. Drones can easily produce 2-3cm/pixel. Airplanes don't do that well because they can't get that close to the ground and move too fast. For larger areas, though, airplanes are MUCH faster. Realistically, at those larger areas, though, you run against satellites, too.
Depends what you want to do with your drones, but 3.5k would be really low end. I think 5k is more realistic, and you're looking at 15-20k if you want high precision (rtk) drones.
On the other end, it's probably not just any plane for mapping, so cost could be higher. Plus the gimbal and sensor cost is going to be non negligible.
Airplanes have to fly higher though, and thus at lower resolutions. The newest satellites are also getting closer to what they do, and they obviously have better coverage, so the market is shrinking.
Sure, because the OP called out Google maps and that's how Google maps (at high resolution) is created. Drone mapping does tend to be much higher quality because you get a higher image cadence at a lower altitude.
Fixed wing drones tend to be better in terms of flight time, that's certainly true. And you can get gliders which will last even longer if you manually thermal them.
> Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
Add on at least another 20k for survey quality cameras (up to hundreds of k) and more for getting your plane modified (hole in the fuselage) and re-certified. Pilots are expensive, fuel is expensive and getting your annual COA (Certificate of Airworthiness, in the UK), insurance etc is not cheap. Google's surveying aircraft have at least five cameras so they can use photogrammetry (structure from motion) to create their 3D maps. As soon as you introduce surveying LIDAR into the equation, add a zero or two onto the cost estimate.
I don't disagree that you could fly a drone fleet instead of an aircraft, but for country-scale mapping, aircraft make a lot of sense.
At the practical end of the scale, I was involved in a project where we were quoted in the region of $25k for a 4 hour LIDAR flight, and my colleagues considerably better versed in the subject than me were reasonably happy this was (i) better value for the region than they expected and (ii) cheaper than digital elevation mapping the same set of discrete areas by specialist drone with the drone operator driving in between. Limited range of current generation drones is the real downside...
The flip side of this unhappy mapping equation is that if you're happy with lower resolution remote sensing data the government satellite programmes are mostly free and libre.
Have you seen the size of a transponder? You're not going to put that in a drone doing 1h flights. They're about 1/2kg. 4G is more likely, but coverage can be an issue.
The bigger drones that could carry one are much bigger, and they fly for several hours, but they do not have the same ease of use as the smaller ones.
Flarm and Adsb (mostly in for now, out is more difficult/heavy but there are a few prototypes) are seeing some use. Companies are also trying to standardise around existing aeronautical standards, or to create new ones where needed.
But it's a free market and it's not clear which solution will win in the end. The regulators are also closely following.
> What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR).
Collision avoidance when in visual conditions is "see and avoid", which is all aircraft's responsibility. CFR 14-91.113.b [0]
There is no solely electronic negotiation of airspace permitted (at least not currently). It is unlikely that the FAA would change the law to require all aircraft to be so equipped and, even if they did, it would be close to two decades before any such deadline would come to be. Look at the slow adoption of ADS-B, which is only required in a select minority of airspace starting in 2020.
> What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR).
Before that happens, a good first step is to require all drones to transmit an ID linked to a person. I suspect that just that step would help to curb the worst excesses of amateur drone pilots.
Ask any pilot for American Eagle how much they make... I now work for the travel industry and so get to see lots of articles on how the pilots are underpaid.
I also saw an article here on HN about the seniority pyramid scheme (which I can't find now).
But how can we explain a 19:1 pay differential for workers with similar training and tasks?
Hilarious. How much did Greenspun make as CEO of his startup? Enough that he could retire and become a dilettante pilot, how much did his workers make?
sure, but what's preventing more (non-union) captains from being produced? clearly there's an oversupply of pilots compared to captains. what's the minimum amount of flight hours to achieve captain status? is it a high amount that there's legitimately a shortage of qualified captains?
The “captain” and “first officer” rankings are employer-specific and non-transferable. You can be a captain at United, but if you were to switch allegiance to Southwest, you have to join a new union and restart the career climb. The only exception is airline mergers - some Virgin America captains are eligible to join the ranks of Alaska Airlines captains, out of recent examples.
It takes 40-60 hours of instruction time and airplane rental time to earn a pilot's license. Total cost is typically $8-12,000. Once all the requirements have been satisfied, you have to go through a 4-6 hour long oral and in-flight examination. That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you to conduct any commercial operations.
A drone license costs $150 to take a multiple choice test with 60 questions, and you only have to pass 70% of them.
> That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you to conduct any commercial operations.
Which a commercial requires 150 total hours. And that is the bare minimum. You're still considered a baby pilot in the industry with that few amount of hours.
> A drone license costs $150
And is less than most hourly rates for a plane. That's without an instructor too.
You have to know things about weather and reading maps that you'll never use when flying a drone, bu it only takes a weekend of studying to pass the drone pilot test.
The map reading should be useful for a drone pilot. The "map reading" in a PPL course is mainly focused on identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot. There are apps that help, but you should be able to reference a sectional or TAC and know whether you're legal to fly or not. I would call it a fundamental drone pilot skill. The fact that is disregarded by so many drone pilots is one of the reasons why the license is needed.
You definitely don't have to know as much about weather for a drone pilot. You aren't flying that far. Sure it doesn't take much distance for weather to become important, but you learn it in a PPL because you have to do cross countries. And if you don't do your weather planning for one of those you can get yourself killed.
Plus, all the navigation I learned for my private would be useless for a drone pilot (hard to do much cross country with line of sight). Learning to check notams and read a sectional shouldn't take a reasonable person more than a few hours.
> identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot
Depends. If you work out of Los Angeles, it’s critical, if your drone business helps the farmers in Kansas or Iowa, there’s not that much airspace variation.
$2k/day is cheap for professional video and still photography drone or no drone. Not every project needs it. Not every project has that kind of budget. Not every potential client sees value in high quality professional work even when there is money in the budget and benefit to the project.
I paid 2k for 2 wedding photographers and they definitely put more than one work day into it between meetings, planning, actual day of work and photo editing.
Are you assuming that the drone pilot's $2k fee doesn't include meeting with clients, planning the shoot, actual day of work, nor doing any post-processing of the captured data?
The amount of effort, skill, and resources required to pilot a drone is much less than a helicopter. It's the difference between something a photographer could do on his own and having to collaborate with expensive service providers.
That assumes you can get a full year into it. Wedding photographers are fairly well compensated in part because of how weddings mostly clump up on a few days of thew week and months of the year.
Of corse it’s ultimately what the market will bear. But a lot of gig jobs of this type might be 100 days per year and often a lot less. And they need backup equipment, marketing, etc.
In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.
I'm really curious what could demand $10k per day :) not at all because I don't believe it, but because that sounds very very nice...
Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level "emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a 50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000 developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute)
(I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)
That’s correct. Product strategy and messaging from a team that also has a significant technical background. Also giving industry landscape/perspectives at customer and sales events.
To parent’s point, very specialized and experienced engineering consultants can make a lot. Even something like an expert witness report can be $4-5K per day.
But to repeat these tend to be gigs where this sort of click is running for a very small portion on 200 days per year. It’s not at all like regular contract work.
Flying a drone is much easier than most people think (at least drones from DJI or even the GoPro Karma). To not become a commodity, you have to provide something on top of just flying a drone to produce photo/video assets. For example, combining drone flying with storytelling (and ground footage) to create a video with a narrative is much harder, thus lucrative.
Right. A lot of people posting "pro/semi pro" drone footage on YouTube etc., have _really_ got to master the art of "planning a shot", so you don't have jerk-stop-jerk panning, zooming etc. The tools are there, the technique is learned. Just as buying an EOS 1D and some L lenses won't win you photography awards by themselves.
Just pointing out that this article features a drone pilot complaining that this is a race to the bottom when his 2k/day drone business is displacing a vastly more expensive helecopter-based video/inspection industry.
Reminds me off the day all those property by plane photographers got dropped like a rock by google-maps.
My brother worked with a cartography company - and it must have quite shocked the boss, that somebody could release sattelite imagery - " for free".
For the 2k/day pilot he was operating outside the bounds of the FAA - so essentially he was being paid black market prices. The legal competitors all had to fly real aircraft so he only had to undercut those inflated prices. Its not surprising the costs come down when legal avenues are opened.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] thread> “It’s apparent that a lot of this industry is a race to the bottom,” said Trench,
Bloomberg didn't say this, so can it really be a click bait headline?
If the current drone pilots want to keep the high salaries, they should add more barriers to entry. This would keep out the hobbyists from picking up side jobs and eroding the market and will also raise the cost of entry, aside from the hardware purchase.
Or, instead of the noncompetitive approach, they should differentiate themselves from the competition, and offer added value the hobbysts can't.
Most drone pilots aren't acting within the law. Bad news for them in a commercial situation is that mishaps will be a personal liability issue.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/part_107/
https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/
Section 107 compliance doesn't add much to the cost of operation and so anyone who really wants drone footage and already has people on location (for example a construction company), can just buy a drone, get an employee licensed and shoot their own footage. The risks are less because insurance is simplified, the schedule more flexible, and nobody has to waste time soliciting bids, negotiating terms, and processing invoices.
People who can not differentiate their goods or services in quality or price will find themselves in a mighty rut, and that's a good thing. Why should we expect the price of drone piloting to stagnate rather than decrease?
basic economics
But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.
You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel.
Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations).
It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set.
[1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually
Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding...
I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/iris-automation-raises-1-5...
Iris Automation has raised money to bring (...) truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks.
Competitors to Iris in the drone industry specifically include SRI spin-out Area 17 (also known as a17), Intel RealSense Technology, Parrot’s SLAMdunk systems and DJI’s Guidance systems.
What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR). The future is not everyone flying drones with proprietary AI collision avoidance. One existing product in this space is FLARM which is used by a lot of glider pilots and light aircraft, they also make a UAV variant: https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/
Autonomous drones themselves exist, are inexpensive, and can be set to fly a survey pattern based on a number of pre-selected GPS waypoints. Ardupilot will do this. The data is used for mapping at a much higher level of data than online maps. Think agri, ecology, general site surveying, etc.
That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping. The flight time is poor. An aircraft modified for surveying can cover hundreds of square kilometres a day. A consumer drone with an hour's flight time (good luck) is going to struggle to compete.
Collision avoidance at the local level (e.g. are you going to hit a wall) is a different issue, and that can be solved by standard depth sensors.
You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes. A quick google search tells me you can pick up a drone with over an hour of flight-time for 3.5k-ish (I don't know much about drone pricing so someone may have better options)
Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
You can purchase 10 drones for the price of one airplane. Which I can't imagine an airplane could out map/survey 10 drones working together. I don't know much about drones or planes though so there are probably other restrictions.
On the other end, it's probably not just any plane for mapping, so cost could be higher. Plus the gimbal and sensor cost is going to be non negligible.
Airplanes have to fly higher though, and thus at lower resolutions. The newest satellites are also getting closer to what they do, and they obviously have better coverage, so the market is shrinking.
Sure, because the OP called out Google maps and that's how Google maps (at high resolution) is created. Drone mapping does tend to be much higher quality because you get a higher image cadence at a lower altitude.
Fixed wing drones tend to be better in terms of flight time, that's certainly true. And you can get gliders which will last even longer if you manually thermal them.
> Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
Add on at least another 20k for survey quality cameras (up to hundreds of k) and more for getting your plane modified (hole in the fuselage) and re-certified. Pilots are expensive, fuel is expensive and getting your annual COA (Certificate of Airworthiness, in the UK), insurance etc is not cheap. Google's surveying aircraft have at least five cameras so they can use photogrammetry (structure from motion) to create their 3D maps. As soon as you introduce surveying LIDAR into the equation, add a zero or two onto the cost estimate.
I don't disagree that you could fly a drone fleet instead of an aircraft, but for country-scale mapping, aircraft make a lot of sense.
The flip side of this unhappy mapping equation is that if you're happy with lower resolution remote sensing data the government satellite programmes are mostly free and libre.
Flarm and Adsb (mostly in for now, out is more difficult/heavy but there are a few prototypes) are seeing some use. Companies are also trying to standardise around existing aeronautical standards, or to create new ones where needed. But it's a free market and it's not clear which solution will win in the end. The regulators are also closely following.
Collision avoidance when in visual conditions is "see and avoid", which is all aircraft's responsibility. CFR 14-91.113.b [0]
There is no solely electronic negotiation of airspace permitted (at least not currently). It is unlikely that the FAA would change the law to require all aircraft to be so equipped and, even if they did, it would be close to two decades before any such deadline would come to be. Look at the slow adoption of ADS-B, which is only required in a select minority of airspace starting in 2020.
[0] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113
Before that happens, a good first step is to require all drones to transmit an ID linked to a person. I suspect that just that step would help to curb the worst excesses of amateur drone pilots.
I also saw an article here on HN about the seniority pyramid scheme (which I can't find now).
http://www.askthepilot.com/pilot-shortage/
Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures.
Hilarious. How much did Greenspun make as CEO of his startup? Enough that he could retire and become a dilettante pilot, how much did his workers make?
A drone license costs $150 to take a multiple choice test with 60 questions, and you only have to pass 70% of them.
Which a commercial requires 150 total hours. And that is the bare minimum. You're still considered a baby pilot in the industry with that few amount of hours.
> A drone license costs $150
And is less than most hourly rates for a plane. That's without an instructor too.
Depends. If you work out of Los Angeles, it’s critical, if your drone business helps the farmers in Kansas or Iowa, there’s not that much airspace variation.
$2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can do.
In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.
Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level "emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a 50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000 developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute)
(I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)
To parent’s point, very specialized and experienced engineering consultants can make a lot. Even something like an expert witness report can be $4-5K per day.
But to repeat these tend to be gigs where this sort of click is running for a very small portion on 200 days per year. It’s not at all like regular contract work.