Safe Drone Flight - Procedures & Practices for New Pilots

1. Welcome!: Hello, welcome to safe drone flight procedures and practices for new pilots. My name is Scott Lucy or I'm your instructor for this course. We're going to talk about all the things that are involved with flying a drone beyond getting your license, your FAA Part 107 license, and all that. So you can fly, but you know how to fly your drone safe, where you're gonna go, take some pictures, you're going to take some videos. They're great photography tools, but they are serious pieces of equipment, so you've got to know how to use them. It takes time to learn this stuff. My aim here is to short-circuit that and get you up in the air safely and competently. And you can go do lots of cool things pretty more quickly if you've watched this course. So the things we're going to cover, why this matters. What's, what's, what's the deal with drones in the law and stuff like that. You know how to start with a toy drone to learn how to fly indoors safely for cheap money before you go out and crash your your DJI drone, not crash it but you know, but mess around with your $1000 Drone, right? Where and how to do this safely and cheaply first, your flight kit, all the things that you need to evaluate your environment that you're gonna fly in to fly safely. All that stuff, the batteries and the software, and all that good stuff that drone pilots use regularly. And you want to know about and you're going to learn about one way or the other. So it's best to do it here and get it done quickly. Preflight planning, how do you evaluate a flight location? You controller settings, how do you set those controllers up so you can do this right? Your, your, your flight environment, how to practice, how to go outside your backyard, fly around, do things intentionally. Really wanted to be ineffective drone pilots. So you can put that drone rate where you want it safely, get that picture, get that video. It's really amazing stuff you can do with your drone. So that's what this course is about. And you know what insurance, if you want to protect your investment or protect yourself, that's a great thing to note as well. So that's it. So that's what this course is about. All that good stuff that you need to know if you're going to fly that drone for creative purposes. And we'll, we'll hopefully get some great pictures, post some of those pictures or videos wherever you want as part of the projects. So good luck. Let's do this. All right, thanks. Let's go. 2. Why This Matters: Alright, why does this matter? Why are we taking this Skillshare course? We are trying to become real drone pilots. I guess the best way to put it too. We all start off as beginners and we need to, need experience to get to the point where we're comfortable flying drones. We could do it safely. We understand the risks involved. We understand all the things that could happen, and we can deal with them properly. Of course, this will get you there more quickly and that's really what we're all about trying to become real drone pilots really quickly. The reasons why we want to do this are primarily here. I got seven of them. Why this really matters. We're looking at protect number one and protect others from injury. That's first and foremost, innocent people that are just walking around. And you happen to hit somebody with your drone, that's the worst-case. If you are flying this drone and you hurt yourself, that's number two here. That's one thing, but someone who has nothing to do with this and hurting them is really what we're trying to avoid at all costs, right? It's not, nothing is worth that, right? So by honing our procedures and learning the different techniques, what to do in emergencies. We're going to reduce our liability. Keep this from happening. The most important thing. We're also going to talk about insurance and care packages and other ways to protect yourself financially. But really it's about the not hurting somebody. Forget about the money, forget about the liability. Just don't, we just don't want to hurt anybody. So that's what we're after here. Number two is protect yourself from injury. So don't do a hand catch unless you know what you're doing. Don't fly the drone into your head, like don't hurt yourself, right? Even though you chose to engage in this potentially dangerous operation, we don't want anyone to get hurt. That's that's what we're going to focus on here. Now, even if you've gotten your part 17 license and you have your license and you are legally able to fly. Like doesn't mean that you actually know how to fly, how to manipulate, manipulate the sticks and then do things properly. So that's what we're going to try to get you to try to have short-circuit that tried to lessen that learning curve and get you to experience drone pilot more quickly than just kinda wondering around and trying to figure it out through trial and error. So number three, limit property damage. If we just don't want to hurt, break anything, we don't wanna break anyone's when neighbors windows, we don't want to smash into a car. Dope, just don't want to break anything, right? Like beyond physical injury, injury to someone's property is not good. So taking this course is understanding these things will help with that. Number four, avoid criminal liability or charges if the FAA catches you're doing something wrong and illegal. We go over that, like to understand the the FAA rules that apply to you. And what the law enforcement officer and the police officer in town is going to say when he when he pulls up and you're you're flying your drone and says, you know, someone complained that you are you're spying on them, things like that, right? Like, understand where you're getting into and how to deal with it. With that in this course. Five, avoid civil liability or a lawsuit. So if you fly in your neighbor's house and break their window and you have to pay for that. That's one thing. Or if you fly your drone in, it causes the car to swerve. If you have in your drone crashes in the street and a car swerves and hits another car like that can add up really quickly and you are on the hook for all that, right? So understand that. Avoid that at all costs. Like really figure out what's going on, but that think about how that can add up with the property damage to the cars, injury cases, doctors, like all that is on you. Right. So just like if you're driving a car, so even if you have insurance on your drone and you get your thousand dollars Drone replaced, that's nothing compared to Mercedes smashed into each other and doctor's bill. So you want to be aware of what's going on in insurance and liability insurance and whole insurance and primarily avoiding that situation to begin with. We're after here. Six, protect your investment, even if you're just crashed your drone in your backyard into a, into a tree and it falls 50 feet and smashes open. You know, you gotta go buy a thousand dollars Drone to replace it. You don't want to do that. So this course will help you understand that. Practice, how to practice, how to, how to avoid these situations entirely. Then seven, we've talked about this. How to save some time, how to get to be an experienced pilot more quickly and understand what's involved and how to deal with situations as they occur. And if you've thought about these things and sort of watch the videos and spent a couple of hours watching these videos and practicing properly. It's going to save you countless hours in the future, so worth your investment in time. That's big, right? So that's probably why most people are here I like to do is to save the time, which is great. Yeah, I think the other stuff is more important. Right? Don't don't hurt anyone, don't her any property. Saving time as huge as well. So I think we're good. Let's go Let's figure this out. 3. Hobby vs Part 107: Let's talk about hobbyists versus professional pilots, right? So part 107 versus hobbyists that it's just flying for fun. And there's been various rules about this, and these are updated rules as of 2022. This was a little different a few years ago, but not really relevant anymore. So let's look at how this works right now. So in essence, everyone, according to the FAA, anyone flying a drone is a should be a part 107 pilot. Unless you meet nine rules, alright, nine exemption rules. And if you meet these nine rules and you are flying for these nine roles, within these nine roles, you are can then be considered a hobbyist, right? And you do not need your part when I'm seven certificate, right. So let's talk about those nine. So the first one is flying strictly for recreational purposes. Okay. And this is really comes down to the intent of your flight. Are you flying? Just to relax, just for fun? You just enjoy flying drones, flying drones as fun. And you know, so really the idea you're getting your drone on, you just got to take it out and have some fun and maybe take some pictures of your kids or your yard or whatever. And it's just, you know, you're not going to sell it. It's not going to go on a YouTube page. There's really even, even if you were working, doing something for your church or a non-profit like that's still considered a professional flight because the intent is to help someone else. It's not for your relaxation and fun, you're doing it to help for somebody else. So that would be considered professional. So really it's all about the intent. Are you there? Are you doing this to relax and just have fun? Or are you doing it for some other reason? If it's another reason you're in Part 17, all bets are off. The second rule is the community-based organization rule. Are you flying at a basically in remote control airfield? So an RC pilot, they have fields out there and they have rules that they've had forever that the FAA worked with them on. So they have their system. Are you flying within their system? You're good. That's hobbyists, that's fine. You can go and do that and you're a hobbyist. Rule number three is line of sight and you need to be able to see your drawing or all times. Not necessarily scarier drone the whole time, but you need to be able to look up, find the drone at any given time. But you really know where it is, be able to see it kind of be aware of where it is. Not flying with goggles on or just looking at your screen, that's not really a line of sight. You need to be able to see it. You shouldn't be any trees in the way. So that's what line-of-sight is all about. So that's part of what I mean. That's a part 17 rule as well. So no matter what, you always need to be flying line of sight in the US. Do not interfere with manned aircraft ever. Again. This is part one of seven rules. So in kind of common sense, if there's a helicopter around, stay out of its way, land, or you hear another plane coming. You need to yield to them and stay out of their way. So pretty straightforward there. You need rule number five, you need authorization in order to fly in controlled airspace. So this means that if you are flying around an airport, you need to go to the website, the part of the Atlantic system, LAA and see. It's been ArcGIS web based site or you can get this land. So authorization through other apps like a loft, formally Kitty Hawk, War, aaron map. There may be a few others, like aloft, but you log into your phone, knows where you're at. It tells you, okay, yeah, you can fly but don't go over a certain height and then you can find those heights on the ArcGIS website. And that will pinpoint you, whoever's controlling that airspace will know that you're there and what time you're flying and just be a record of you flying there and making sure that you're keeping it low enough to avoid to avoid any aircraft. So prior authorization is required in controlled airspace. Keep your drone under 400 feet. Same as part 17. So I don't think the exemption exception for inspecting a structure that would automatically put you into Portland, Oregon territory as a kind of a professional activity. But keep your drone under 400 feet and you're good. You need to have number seven and have take the trust exam. Really it's more of a training. But you can go to a website, take a 23 question test, and get a certificate, print that certificate out. Keep it with you and with your drone stuff. And this is a free online tests you can't fail. It is probably good for everyone to do this. Just another piece of paperwork you can have in your packet, whether you're part one of seven or not. But if you're certainly if you're not part 107 and you're just a hobbyist, go Google trust exam, FAA, you'll get right to the FAA.gov website and take the test and get registered as having passed that exam and you're covering yourself. Number eight, register your drone. This like part 107. A little bit different but like what? Portland. All drones should be registered if they are less, greater than £0.55 in less than £55. The maverick minis are technically not or lighter than that, but if you're using them for professional purposes, you've got to register them anyways. I say just register them all. If you are flying apart one of seven, you need to register all of them and get a unique number for all of them. If you're flying. Hobbyists didn't want to register a register your drones as hobbyist drones, you get one number, you attach that one number to all your drones. So, but anyways, it's $5 for your, whether you're doing it for yourself for the hobbyist or per drone for your part 17. But that registration is important. Faa wants to know if they find a drone at a car accident scene or find a drone that is flying near emergency responders or something or whatever it might be. They want to be able to find out who owns it and go find them. Sort of an accountability measure, which I like. So that's number eight and number nine, no dangerous flight. And this is common sense, but things like, as I mentioned, stay away from emerging. Emergency responders. Don't be near fires, wildfires, or even fires in your town. Obey the temporary flight restrictions. Don't fly over stadiums. Certain areas in Washington DC, you can't fly. Things like that. Things like alcohol and drugs. Don't drink and fly. Really, like I said, common sense, reckless drone flight is pretty, you know what, when you see it. Use common sense and be safe and sort of a catch-all. But you know what that means? I think. So that's it. So that if so again, if you are if you meet all, all nine of those rules, you can fly as a hobbyist. You don't need your part 107 license. In reality, I think you're probably better off getting your license, spending a $150 to sit for the test, study a little bit. You can do it and get your part where seven and then probably unlocks more, more ability to do things. And it's a way to train people to fly safely. So I recommend just get your 107 license if you're if you're gonna be flying your drone regularly, your part 17 anyways, but it's up to you if you want to stay as a hobbyist, that is fine as well. So that's it. So that's hobbyists versus part one of seven. Good luck with whatever path you take. If you take the part one of seven path, we got some, we got some stuff in here that'll help you out as well. Other courses and things and lots of stuff available to help you pass that test. So that's still up. 4. Toy Drone Training: When first learning to fly a drone, it's best to start with a toy drone and learn that way. Learn how drones work indoors. No risk of really destroying anything lightweight drones, ferry crashes. And what I recommend, and a lot of people recommend is the rise tailor our y, z, e, t ELLs. The rise Teller is a small toy training drone built by rise and DJI. So I think it's a I don't know if DJI bought them or they just work together or what, but essentially, if you can find it on the DJI store here and you can buy them for $99 or a 149.449, you get a little bit more more batteries and things. But, you know, you're you get this drone here. It looks like this dropped my my prompt guards. Let me put those back on. So this is what it looks like, what the prompt guards on to give you a sense of the size, can see how easily they come on and off, which is what you want. So here it is, right? So this is the hundred-dollar kind of training drone that you could get with the prop guards on. Here's the version without the prop guards. See these numbers here. This is the Wi-Fi connect, that's the Wi-Fi name. So when you go to log on with your phone, you will you'll know which drone to connect to. Your phone will know to connect to this because you'll see that d 29451 come up on your computer, on your phones in your login to that Wi-Fi because that's how it flies with the connection. So what you do is you get one of these ninety-nine dollars drones off of the DJI store. You can find them in other places as well. And you get one of these games, Sir. I think it's the t1 d for $40, and this serves as your controller. And it's got the same thumb movements as a real DJI or any drone controller mode. Two. Hooks up to your phone via Bluetooth, give you instructions on how to do all that. But this is a great way to learn because this can crash. Not too worried about it. It's pretty durable. It's got prop guard, so those are recommended. They'll keep you from hitting a wall or if you do hit a wall, it'll, it'll go and it'll just bounce off. These are meant to be, you know, you can find these outdoors, but you start indoors where in an empty room where you're not really going to hurt anybody. They're pretty stable. They have a vision sensor on underneath it. There, have some intelligence. There's no GPS to them, so it's good and bad. It's good because it will, GPS will never take over and try to fly home. If it gets in trouble, It'll just land where it's at. So they're good for indoors or very light. And like I said, very sociable. And after a while you just learn to find doors. You'll learn how to land, you'll learn how to fly with the orientation reversed. You do practice exercises, and it teaches you how to fly, which is what you want right? Before you take a $1000 drone up in the air that can hurt somebody, you use one of these. So that's the drill. And you can do with the same exercises. Start with these. At some point you can take it outside. You don't wanna do it on a windy day because the wind can push these things. It doesn't have that GPS to kind of hold it where, where you want it. But it, it's, it's really cheap way to learn and they're fun. These are the batteries. So get, you know, about five-minutes a piece. So that comes with one. Forgot to do this for real. I would get three or four, have a charger and just keeps swapping them out, let them cool swap them. And that way you can do a little bit more. And that's how I first started. I got a drone not they didn't have these nice telcos back down. I got a cheaper one. But I would do I got three batteries. I would do 15 minutes a day every day. And it's fun to it's it's not like it's work. And you just you learn the muscle memory. You'll learn how to rotate and you're writing your left thumbs and it takes, it takes a little bit, but it's not too bad if you're, especially if you're a gamer, shouldn't be any problem, but, but go get yourself a telco. Go get yourself a game. Sure. $40 remote off Amazon. Hook it up to your phone and do the practice exercises until you get good, until you're ready to fly. Real john, if you can fly one of these and land it and do whatever you want and just kinda get it to be automatic. You're more than ready to take a real drone up. The real drones are a lot easier to fly because they have GPS, they have some intelligence to them. They have safety features built-in to the software where these don't. So if you can master these and fly from room to room, you're doing well. It's even got a camera on the front so you can see a little bit. It's not the best video feed, but it can help you learn SPV flying. So long as you're indoors and take some pictures if you wanted to. And there's a mini USB port on there and you can take them off if you wanted to. But I think that's it. If you want to check out the rise robotics.com, you'll get more information here about what's involved in some other promotional materials. But definitely the way to go spend a hundred and thirty hundred and forty hundred fifty box wherever it is. If you're gonna get serious about this gay self, arise teller with the game sir or controller and you're ready to Iraq. 5. Necessary Paperwork: Quick video about license and registration to things that are required when you fly. You got to have your drone license on you. Here is what a drone license looks like. So if you have your part FAA Part 107 FAA Part 107 license, you will have a license sent to you after you pass the test. You get one in your lifetime. So keep it, have it with you. Tuck it next year license and your wallet and you'll be good. I think that's what everyone does. Even if you go to renew your license and get your renew every two years, then I got to send you a new license, keep track of your number and in their system and know that you have passed or not. So that's important to keep track of this license, keep that safe. Have that with you. I like to have that license. Not only the hard copy with me, but I have a copy with me in my flight book. That way. They always have it just in case so backup and lens the credibility. You also have your license, your registration numbers for your drones, which you should have with you at all times. So go to drone zone, FAA drone zone, and you can download a PDF of your registration. That's what that's what these paper copies are. So what you can do is what I like to do is have them with me, punch them, put them in a binder, have that binder with you along with any other relevant paperwork? Right in your drone flight bag and you have everything with you. So you have your paper copy of your license in there and you have paper copies of all the drones that you fly. So whatever you're flying, you have that that registration with you. So the drone needs you registered, you gotta go to the FAA drone zone, pay the pay the $5 per drone last three years, I believe they'll send you an e-mail when those expire. So you got to slogan and pay five bucks every couple of years, but keeps it legally. You got to put the registration number on the drone on the outside of the drone. And that's all part of the part 107 requirements that we need to do, but we won't get into that, but we have another course on that, but license and registration, something that's important to do. You just gotta get it organized upfront. Once you do, you're good to go for for for forever, right? So just get that straight and you're good to go. 6. Landing Pads: Landing pads. Here is my collapsible landing pad. They carry in my drone backpack. Got a little zipper case, comes out of the bag. Does this, opens up to about three feet. Got some tabs here with some spikes so I can put spikes in and keeps gives you the ground if it's windy day. I liked this one, costs probably probably $20 on Amazon. Pretty cheap and gets smaller ones if you want 30 inches or whatever. I think that's probably three feet across. So I like to use them for a few reasons. Number one, it keeps the dust from blowing out for you. If you're if it's a dusty around, the drawing is going to blow up dust. If you're landing, taking off and landing on grass, which is pretty common, it keeps the blades from hitting the grass and you might get an error from that end. 7. The Flight Bag: Let's look at your flight bag or all the other equipment that you use that's not part of your drone kit. When we go flying, we have our case with our drone and everything associated with each particular drone in that case. So the drone itself, batteries, extra propellers, things that are very specific to that drone. I have spare cords in their registration cards in there, so everything you need is packed in your kit. I recommend the hard case, right? Everything is nice and nice and organized in here. And it's labeled and it's worth, if you're gonna do this professionally, worth having everything in one place. Nice and protected, nice and waterproof bag around the back of your truck. No worries there, but that's one part of the operation. But let's talk about the flight bag, right? So I recommend a flight bag, basic standard backpack, which contains all of the stuff that is not drone specific that you may use for every drone flight. So when I go out, I'll grab the drawing that I want. Make sure the batteries are charged and double-check that, but also grabbed the flight bag and that has a bunch of other things. So let's look at what is in there. So first of all, we have our landing pad. Bring a landing pad with me. Collapsible zip bag will show that when we do a video outdoors in another video. But I recommend bringing a landing pad just to ensure that you have a nice flat place to land if there's dirt or debris, you've got a nice clean space. The drone has something to lock onto. It's obvious to passers by what's going on and makes it look very professional. If it's windy, you can, you can spike it down. So I recommend the landing pad. In many, many cases. I just think it just as a professional, it just makes it look good. And I think there's really no downside to carrying that. It's pretty light, pretty collapsible. So have that in your backpack. Got my logbook. Login all times that I fly where I'm at, the minutes I fly the you know, the reason I was there, the client, whatever it might be, the times, the date. So that way I have a record of every place that I've gone, which is nice. And it also lends to credibility. If a police officer comes by and says, Hey, you know what, what are you doing? I can say, look, I'm a professional drone pilot here, all the places I've been. He can he can quickly see that. Okay. You're you're legit you're more of a pilot than a, you know, a guy with a drone, right? So that's what we're aiming for and that can help helping us situation. So in good data to have and part of, I think being a professional drone pilot, logging everything. So the logbook is important. I have a binder full of information, has all my registration cards in them. So when you register your drone, you get a print-out PDF of your drones. I have copies. So I print these out of copies of all my drones and I will talk to them inside or you could three hole punch them and put them right in there. You need to have the registration with you when you fly. Now, you can also have registrations of drones you may not be flying, but you have, if you have them all in one place tucked in there, you don't even have to worry about that. They also have a copy of my license in my I always had my license with me. But I also have a copy of it inside my flight book and a copy of it in my my binder as well. That way I always know that I have my license with me, So I mean, I always do anyways, but you never know just why not? It takes it's pretty easy to, to print out. Let's see. So I also have many other things, many other tools and things. Have a set of binoculars. So if I ever hear something kinda wanna look around the horizon, scan things before I get started or I lose my drone in a tree, the crash landed or something. Or I can just look around. You can find a pretty cheap pair and throw them in your bag and you never know when you need them. Good pair of sunglasses polarized as goods, especially for flying around water. It really helps see things in a nice sunny day, can really help your visibility, which is important. And you know, just ice stream, good pair of sunglasses, you know, like like like Maverick and Top Gun. Along those lines. I always have a hat with me so I can push it down. If I got high sun, I can keep the sun off my forehead and five had, but also it will help me with my eyes so I can see better. So always good idea to have sunscreen. Just have it with me. Bug spray. I don't have any right here but bug sprays never know when you're out. But mosquitoes getting your whatever it might be. Um, other more practical things, extra chords. So typically we'll have these in a Ziploc baggie so I just can tuck them away. But I rarely need these chords because I have chords with my drones, so I have an extra set. You never know when a court is going to break. Just they wear out there. So maybe you need to if something, have an iPhone chord, a US micro USB cord, a mini USB cord. Those are the three main ones. Backup sets, just the case. They don't take up much space to pretty light, so no worries on that. Always good to have chord drawn a case for your SD cards, right? So waterproof keeps everything in one place. I can spot it in my bag. It's got the red around it, which is nice. These little things are obviously very small and can be lost very easily. And this is where all the money is, right? This is where all the work is that you're doing, is you're putting it on these things. So nothing worse than going to a flying for hours and then losing your SD card and you lost everything he wants all that time. Can be brutal. A case like this keeps everything in one place. So that is always a good idea. Also have backups. If you fly like, Oh my God, this SD card is full and I don't know what's on here. Not uncommon. And pull out another one and then you can figure it out when you get back to your office. But starting to have to delete or reformat your SD card can be a scary prospect. Oh boy, I usually procedures are usually take everything off of my SD card, but I'm not really quite sure. It can be a little scary, so just have an extra one. You're always going to need them. Important part of what we do. Have a few of those around you. You're always going to need one at some point. Charging brick case, your phone goes down. I think the DJI software can hot sun can fry your phone, use your power up pretty quickly, and you never know when you need that. So again, some small lake can stick it in there. I like to have a tool set with me. Some just multiple had screwdrivers on here. So I can whatever I might need to do, whether it's pulls them apart or just use it as a pry bar or wherever it is. I like to have a tape measure. Their water. Bottle of water is always good. And what else we have here? And business card. Business cards are always good to have it in your pocket. Someone comes up if you've got if you've got a business card and you're flying, goes along way to credibility again. So police officers and you can say, excuse me, officer, I am going to work with you. I'm gonna get the drone down on the ground first. Here's my car. He can look at it. So whatever minute it takes to get the drawing on the ground, you can kind of get the process started. So that is about it for your flight bag. So this is what I have. You know, everything is loaded in here and I can just grab it and go when I get back, make sure everything is back in there and so I'm ready to fly. So I've got two things when I go. The drone case itself and all the other stuff that goes along with it that I need for every flight on, keep that in a separate drone bag. Right. So that's it. Anything else? I mean, might need spare medication or whatever whatever suits you. Extra pens, pad of paper. Just a good place to haul all your stuff around. I have a little place to work at a minimum when you when you get there on site. So there we go, fight back important part of this. Let's do it. 8. Micro SD Cards: Let's talk about micro SD cards. These little guys. They are very important to what we do. And there's some details just pretty, pretty straightforward, but there's some details that you should know about them. And you should get used to managing them and having a process and a system or procedure that you do every time. You hate to lose all that time and effort you spend going out flying for four hours and losing your SD card or it didn't record or the sum got corrupted or whatever it might be. The drones these days are good about telling you when there's no SD card inserted in. A lot of the newer drones have a backup memory capability to them so you can save some things, but I wouldn't rely on that. In order to do your run a business or to do drone stuff. There's too much involved to not have this nailed down and in all set, so you got your SD cards. They're not all the same. So that's point number one. You need to get a, UHS three card. Well, you can probably get away with something less than that, but I recommend a UHS three card. There are different speeds, read, write speeds on these on these things. And the drone, usually a pretty high-powered machine and a good processor. So you need a card that can keep up with it. Otherwise, it can make your videos jittery depending on what your settings are. Just get this straight up front and you'll be good to go. So get a UHS three card. You can get them on Amazon. I just saw looked them up. I've got one here, 256 gigabytes for twenty-seven dollars. So you could fit a lot on there. I don't I wouldn't recommend it to 56 gigabyte because that could lead to a false sense of security. Like you can start to put a lot of stuff on there and then never changed it. And if you lose that SD card for whatever reason, you lose it physically or it gets corrupted and or gets reformatted, everything on there has gone. So if you're not backing it up regularly, you've got an issue. So I think, you know, 64 is probably I like those better. Those are $18.49 as of today. So that way your data is spread out. What I like to do is bring it right back and get it out of the drone. And I use a USB card reader and just slides in and out right there and it's just hangs off of my computer and a USB slot. And it's easy to pop this thing in and out and it shows up as a drive on my Windows machine and off I go. So it's pretty, pretty straightforward. I like to never save anything on these things. I don't want to rely put my data on these things. So immediately transfer that over to my Dropbox, which is what I use. But whatever your cloud storage system is, or even portable hard drive or whatever it might be, whoever you store your files. I like to just get everything, keep a copy of it, kinda the raw data. And then as I work on it and tuck it into specific project file folders, I'll make another copy that way you always have the original backup and that gets backed up. And this can be a, you know, a bit of a trick. Storage wise. There. You're going to do this a lot. You're going to collect a lot of data, especially if you're doing video. You've got some large files, but having a system in place is crucial to being a professional. Be surprised that how often you can say, well, you know, I remember flying in a certain place and got some videos of a bird's nest tonight, boy, I'd love to have that for B-roll or backup. Background images or video for something else you're doing. And you can, you can go and find it and if you get really into it and maybe you can have a robust system where you have multiple hard, hard drives and can really scale it up that way, but that's the real costs. So if you get, you'll get to that point. You'll, you'll know all about this. You know how to store files. So this is nothing new. Photographers and videographers have had to deal with these large datasets for a long time. So the stuff is out there. But for beginners, you know, a Dropbox and Cloud storage with your SD cards. And having that procedure in place, you did a flight, you come back, you take it, you transfer it off. You can leave it on there if you want to, or you can delete it. It's up to you, but it's another backup, but don't rely on the SD cards for backup and get a, UHS three and a card reader. And I think you'll you'll be in good shape and a case to carry them and keep them protected. Keeps your backups if have to switch SD cards while you're out in the field, you don't want to stick that thing in your pocket or stick it anywhere you want to get it in here tucked away. They're tightly, tightly in there and almost difficult to get out sometimes, which is which is perfect. They push right in there. So get one of these as well. So a cheap investment for the peace of mind and the protection that you need. So SD card, UHS, 364 gigabytes, what I recommend. And you'd be good to go in a card reader, in a case. Alright, Go for it. 9. Online Pre Flight Planning: Preflight planning, an important part of any drone flight. This is going to talk about how we do typical preflight planning, how we kinda research things before we go out and fly and figure out where we're going to fly and some of the tools that are available to us and how to use them. So if you've taken part 107, you know how to read airspace maps. And that's great. But how do we do this every day on a regular basis? The procedures that both meet the requirements of part 17 or hobbyists and also are that work that's our regular part of our routine. So what I like to do is use this website here, the FAA is ArcGIS website. Visualize it to find that if you just go, you can Google FAA, ArcGIS and you'll get to that. One of these links, those and this will come up. And so this gives you all the airspace map information that you could want. It zooms you into wherever. Let's just type in Boston to orient myself rather than scrolling around. So with the center mouse wheel, I can just roll in and out. And FAA information is fed into this web based system and I'm using Chrome here. Nothing fancy. So this is what we have. So our airspace circles are there. You can type in an address. Let's see. I'm just going to make something up. See if I can find it. You have geo coding capabilities here, or Google's Google Earth or Google Maps search engines, right, can get you to any address that you want in the country you, so you just plug it. I just made that up. So in mid-field mass Main Street, when worked pretty well. So I can see it. Let's say I have this real estate job and that's the address I haven't given. I'll type that in before I go do the flight and say, Okay, yeah, Here I am. I am outside of this airspace here and whatever this is. Right. The Norwood airport. The Norwood Municipal Airport, memorial airport there. I'm outside of that, so I'm good. I'm in class G airspace. Good to go. But let's say I was in here a little bit more than now. I'm within their airspace and if I'm within the circle, I can get lance authorization. So using the loft app app or the Error Map app, I can go to the site request request authorization to fly there. This grid here, this has 400 feet. So it's telling me That's your ceiling. You're probably you're stealing anyways, but I think it's saying if you have 100 foot building, you can't go up to 500 feet like you normally could outside of the airspace. So as I get closer, like this is two hundred two hundred or three hundred three hundred feet. So if I was in there, I could probably get lance authorization. As long as I said, I'm going to keep it under 300 feet and don't go above 300 feet. They're going to pin me on the map in a certain time, know that I'm there. But it'd be good to go with Lance. So check out that lecture to see how we get that land so authorization. But this is before you even start a good way to say, okay, where am I? Do I need land. So authorization by looking at these circles and these boxes. And it's going to give you an idea of if it's a 0, you're probably not. You just to close, they're not going to they're going to deny you. If it's if it's a 100 feet, you just got to indicate you're not going to go above a 100 feet and don't go above a 100 feet. So this helps you plan out where you're at. That's kinda the main functionality of this website, is figuring out whether how high you can fly and whether you need to deal with lance or not. There are some other features we should talk about. The first one here, this base map gallery. If you want aerial photographs, you can dial those up. Click on the imagery. And now we can zoom in and see you individual houses, and that really helps figure things out. Let's say, I'm flying this house right here. I can use my ruler, my measurement tool here and click distance. I click and I can say, okay, here's my, sort of my half-mile radius and get estimates. Okay, I could fly from here, probably see my drone in a half-mile about a half-mile visibility, line of sight. So that would say okay, you know, I could probably if I wanted to take pictures of the school, I think it's a school. I should be able to take off from this house and keep it within line of sight. You can also see other things like if there's substations you got to worry about or schools or anything, anything at all. You can get a good sense of what's going on, what type of traffic you're going to have here. Major roads, you can get a lot more detail than you can from this other the other maps that ArcGIS has, but no, this is the pencil map so you can get artistic tool if you want to. But anyway, so, but, but that base map, good functionality there. This layer tab, you can turn things on and off prohibited areas pending national security flight restrictions. If there's something coming up in the future, TFR or something you can they'll put that on here. Special use airspace, military operations areas and restricted areas, things like that. Things that if you've taken part 17, you should understand. But you can map them all out here on ArcGIS. I'm gonna get rid of this pencil base map. And just keep it simple. Alright, so that, That helps me see things better. So what else do we have here? We can see we've done the measurement tool. Let's get rid of that. We can throw a legend up here, which could get pretty big, but might be helpful for you to see what's going on. We could print a map, another layer list. But really that's probably the, the main gist of it. Those are the ones that you would really use most of the time. You can even draw out some arrows and put a circle around the house that you're doing and print that out and say, Okay, this is where I flew. Here's a half-mile. Here's my half-mile estimated boundary. You could do this stuff in ArcGIS or QGIS if you really wanted to make a nice-looking map for your report, but gives you some basic functionality to draw some notes and things. But that's, but that's it so that you know, great tool for figuring out where you are, figuring out what Lance is probably going to kick back to you. So you can plan that out and figure out your planning before you go and fly. Alright? You could also do this. I've seen people used to do this in Google Earth Pro, download KML files, put them into Google Earth Pro. If you have other data in Google Earth, that might work, but I think this, this has gotten to the point where it works. It gives you probably more functionality and it's updated immediately. If you have KML files, they you have to keep getting the newer versions, but this gets fed to you. We also have sky vector. Let's talk about that. This gives you the the FAA charts, right? Terminal area charts and the sectional chart. So these are the more of the official, this is what man pilots used are typically doing longer point a to point B type of thing. And it's designed for manned aircraft, not so much for drones. So there's probably a lot more in here than you need. But this is what we learned for the part 107. So you're probably familiar with this if you have 107, but but here I can't really tell exactly if I have a home here. I don't know if it's within or outside. The ArcGIS maps can really pinpoint that down and you can print that out, print to PDF. Save that as part of your file for that flight. And you're covering yourself, right? If a police officer comes and says, Hey, you are too close to the airport, I'm taking your drone. When you go talk to the judge, took a drone back and say no, judge, I here Here's where I was. Here's the address, here's the map. I printed it out. Then you can even have it with you and show the officers. You don't I'm actually I'm the side of the line. I believe I'm within I'm fine and you know what you're doing. So anyways, but here are the the sectional charts and we can click on the Boston Tech wherever you are if you want to zoom in a little bit more. But this is the loops. The typical stuff that we're kind of used to. Arcgis is making that a little bit easier in GIS stuff. So that's what we got, That's preflight planning. Some online tools that are make our life pretty easy. 10. LAANC Authorization: Alright, let's go into the a loft app and requests Lance authorization will create a username and password standard stuff. So go in, fill that out and you will have access to be able to login when you do log in and you'll find your GPS location and zoom me there. And gives you all, you know, gives you a map that you can scroll around. All sorts of information here. Weather conditions wins, KP index, GPS signal strength. When your sunset is cloud cover. Everything, everything we got here, it looks good. If we want to do, but if you wanted to use this for pre-planning purposes, It's a good tool. It's sort of like UAV forecast. Lead is more just wet for weather, but this gives you weather and plus other things as well. So you might want to consider just, just using this if that's if you're so inclined. However, whatever works for you or your workflow is up to you. But if we hit the Add button and then we have some options here, you've got checklists and Flight Logs and you can do all sorts of stuff here. We're gonna go into the requests Lance authorization, the top one. And it brings up this functionality here. I'm going to zoom in to some place, kinda tricky. Cambridge Summerville is west of Boston and find a representative house. So I will, let's say I want to fly that house right there. I'm going to tap on that and here we go. And if I pull this up, I've got, it's got six things to think about, things to worry about. It's telling me that you're only gonna get out to authorization for up to 300 feet. You know, we're not that close to login, but within Class B airspace. We've got chambers, Harvard stadium, WBEZ, other kind of larger structures that you should worry about. And then a national historic site, which is a myelin halfway. You're not allowed to fly there, but we're not 0. So it's just kinda warning us, don't fly, don't fly over that. Don't find you're there, you're gonna get in trouble. Gives you some warnings and stuff, but, you know, it's kinda just lays out where you're at to get authorization. We hit the get authorization button here and it asks us whether we're part when a seven or recreational, we're gonna go with part 107. And it's telling me that at dislocation I can get Auto approval up to 300 feet. Say let's say I'm gonna do a two-story building. A 100 feet is really more than I need, which is kinda typical. Let's just set that to 100 feet and say, alright, that's all I want, a 100 feet. And then I'll hit Next on to step two or four, saying what, when, and where do you want to fly? Let's just set this for Sunday at 130 PM and hit Okay. There. And then I just want let's say one hour. So from 130 to 230 is what I'm asking for. It says authorizations can be made up to 90 days in advance. You can be made up for 12 hours in duration, ten nautical miles in area. So it's got other information about night flights and civil twilight and things, but it knows the area that I'm looking at. So let's move on to step three or four. Says eligible for pre-approval for everything I wanted to. If I hit Next, it's going to give me permission. I'm not going to actually do this fight. So I don't want to clog up the system with unnecessary data, but that's as easy as it gets. So you will I would hit Next and it would send information, send a text to my phone saying you have approval, which is nice if you get a neighbor or a police officer, a law enforcement officer saying, you're not supposed to fly here, you're too close to the airport. And he said, Well, no, actually, I am doing things the right way and we're good. That's it. So then you'll have your have your approval. You have it in writing on your phone and a text. Have it in your email, and you're covered, you're good as long as you fly at that area within those according to all other FAA rules, of course. But you're good to go. So really pretty simple process. You just got to do your Sign-Up once you got to enter your license number and the issue date of your license, things like that. But you get that setup, just do it once and you have a loft on your phone and I would check it out for other things as well, could be a good resource for logging other things as well. So that's it. That is a loft in a nutshell and pretty easy. It's it they did a good job with us, the FAA, Good job. 11. Weather Evaluation with UAV Forecast: Here is the UAV forecast app, which is a great tool for flying. Both to find information that is practical, that you need to know what a fly and also for liability FAA reasons to make sure that you're doing everything and can document what you're doing. So here is a screenshot for the iPhone version from my phone. What do we have here? It's basically a bunch of boxes. Green is good, yellow is iffy, and red is no good because everything here is good, so it gives me a good to fly, but we can look at each individual box and get information. So when GAS 12 miles an hour. Okay. Good to know. There's no legal requirement, but if the winds gusting at 50 miles an hour, I want to know this. Now your visibility is greater than three miles, so that's good. You can click on each one and it'll, it'll tell you how you want to set it. This is the default is the 33 miles. So if visibility is less than three miles is going to turn red and say, yeah, I don't fly. The yellow one here is your sunrise, sunset. So it's telling you you've got a sunset coming up at 509 today. When wind direction, wind speed, temperature, everything else looks good. Your KP index is nice and low. If it was above five, you got to worry about that for interference issues, it's telling you you got some airports nearby. This is set for Boston, but it's giving you giving you the all clear, but this is the information you want and not a bad idea to just take a screenshot of this if you want to document everything on your flight. You can also look forward into the future 24 hours ahead in the free version, if I want to look forward to like Sunday, let's say I have something scheduled for Sunday. I gotta pay. I think it's not sure 25 bucks a year or totaled to pay, but you can unlock more functionality. I don't find that I need it, but you might want that might be worth it to kinda, if you're flying a lot, you want to plan things out and you want us to add this, what's, what's this weekend look like in Connecticut? And who really knows what the weather, but it gives you some indication of that. So that's UAV forecasts. So I can find it in the App Store or an Android and it'll, it's a good way to plan your flight's getting the information you need and information you want, right? So there it is. Go use that. 12. Know Your Controller Switches: Let's talk about the control or flight switches and the different modes that the controllers have. They're all a little bit different. They all have different functionality. You need to really figure out the drone you're flying, what it has and what it can do and which switches you can pull. Let's start with the simplest ones. We've got a maverick many first-generation controller here. There are no switches that all right, so you really can't do anything. No sport modes. On the controller itself. Maybe let's set things in the controller. In DJI go but we'll go for, but nothing right on the switch. Got a maverick air controller here. We've got a, a sport mode switch here. Right? So click it to the right that it turns on. When you're in sport mode. Things move more quickly. More. Controllers get a little more sensitive. The drone is going to fly faster. Your battery is gonna get depleted more quickly. And that's something that, you know, don't mess with sport mode until you're ready. So first time you flip it over, make sure you're in a big open space. Get used to it. You kinda, kinda recalibrate your your muscle memory with your thumbs. But you've got to switch right on there for that. For the, I've got a smart controller here. This is for a maverick to probe. What I use it for. You can use it for a lot of different drones, but the DJI spark and smart controller with the high light screen so you can see it in the sun. Great controller. If you aren't doing anything with glitchy or DroneDeploy or automatic things. You can't really load up software on this like you can with your phone or your iPad. But if I just want to go take pictures and the video or just fly around, this thing is great. It's got a T, P and S mode here. T is the tripod mode. So if you want it to be nice and steady and kinda dulled down and kinda help you get some smooth shots are just kinda hover real, real tightly. You hit the type T for tripod mode. P is programmed mode. It's just your standard flight. And S for sport mode, which we talked about. On all three, GPS is enabled. So there is no Addie mode. You are, I've heard of people going in and using tin foil and hacking in their software. I don't do any of that. I don't recommend any of that. Flyways are becoming less and less common. The controls are better, connections, better. So it's not as, not as worrisome as it used to be, but in any event, so don't don't do that, but I guess it's up to you. We've got a P4 pro controller here. It's got a switch upper left. We've got P, S and a on here. For those. P is, is program mode. If I'm using some sort of software that's going to take over their flight of the drone, like DroneDeploy or glitchy. That's where you get the set that to. P. S is the standard. I'm sorry, P is, P is the program mode, S is standard mode and a is Adi mode. So adding mode is turned off. The GPS. The GPS does a few things. The GPS hold your drone steady. The GPS can configure out where that is works with the accelerometer and the compass and hold your drone steady in those. So if the wind is pushing your drone, it's going to know that it's being pushed and it's going to stay in one spot. So that's one function of the GPS. The other function that GPS is it helps you get fined you where you are in relation to the home point which it, it it captures when it first takes off. So it can fly you back. So it says, I know I'm at point B, I'm going to fly to point a when someone hits the return to home button. Or I've lost connection with the controller. Than that, it will fly back automatically using, using its GPS location. And that's the second. So GPS is a few things that keeps the drone steady. It keeps allows the drone and get back to where it needs to be. The P4 pros. Have this Addie mode switch. You can turn that write-off. Now, you're flying fully, fully on your own just through the controller or the computer is not really doing anything. It's listening to you entirely, which can be good or bad. The vision sensing, sensing is off. You get near a tree, you better know what you're doing. So that's, that's the, the, the Inspire drones also have this switch, right? So sorting more of your professional, more expensive drones will have that, that Addie switch and allow you to do a little bit more so you're not going to get that in the air is in the Mavericks, the minis in the Mavericks, but you start to ramp up and get to a, obviously you've got different size function controllers here. You can do a little bit more and have more ability to flip those switches. So that is that, that's your controller switches. And the, I guess the main takeaway is that i've, I've said this in other parts of this course. Know your drone, practice, your drone. Understand what you have. Think about it before you go and fly. So okay, I'm flying a MacBook Pro here, PRO two or something. Do I have Addie mode? No. Okay. What does that mean? How's that going to affect me if I get an emergency situation and I need to start hitting buttons. Like I understand the functionality of what's going on as the GPS engaged, Can I turn it off? And it's good procedure. Like this isn't required by the FAA. They don't say understand, think about this and understand. This is just part of safe flight. Flying within your limits. Understanding what's going on and how everything works and being able to deal with emergencies. So while they don't specifically stated, I think it's part of it's sort of implied. Know what you're doing. Practice this, have some experience doing it. Know what the switches do, know what your particular drone has. If you are lucky enough to have many drones, you know, it can get confusing if you were flying yesterday. Oh wait a minute. I can't find my mini today. I can't I can't do that. I don't have a support mono or whatever it might be, like. Understand that, and you'll be good to go. 13. Important Height Settings: Let's look at some of the important settings in your, in your flight app. In this case, we're going to use the DJI go for app, which is sort of a modern control our program that most people are going to be using and you may be using something else. Dji go or some other third party software. You'll find the settings in there. But this is typically where you're going to go. So we'll use DJI go for looking at the main screen here, I have my fan of force not connected. But if I go to my upper right-hand corner, there's three dots. And if I click on those dots, I'm going to get into the settings page, right? So if we click that, we're gonna get to hear the main controller settings. And in here there are two things we need to look at. And we're going to first look at the return to home altitude, which is the second one down. So this is when the drone disconnects from something, it's going to pop straight up. You know, if your controller gets shut off, the battery malfunctions. If you hit the return home button on your controller or on your screen, it's going to go straight up, make a beeline over the whole point, which was should've been set at the beginning of the flight, make sure that's always set. And then it's going to go straight down. So this is telling it how high it's going to go. I typically set this to 100 feet into meters. I'll set it to 30 meters. I know that that's higher than pretty much any tree that I'm gonna be dealing with. I may set it to 120 If I'm not quite sure or from an odd area, if I know I got plenty of how you want it to be high enough to clear everything, but doesn't need to be 400 feet. That's going to take a lot of battery and get up real high and the lower the better, but also as long as you are clearing everything, alright, so set that to about, I know I have mindset to about 30 meters and it'll stay that way. Next time you open up the drawing, these settings will save, so you need to really just check it once when you, when you first get your drone. We also have the beginner mode here. If you're just starting out, I would recommend clicking on that. That will slow everything down. It will keep your drone within 100 feet of you no matter what. So a 100 feet high or a 100 feet distance. So as you create a bubble around you, so you get yourself a big wide open field. You can, you can learn how to fly without the drone going beyond that, no matter what happens, it won't go beyond that. A 100 feet. So that's a nice feature. And then the set max flight altitude here under the beginner mode, that that should be, as we know for part one or several pilot 400 feet, 122 something meters set to 122 and you'll be just under 400 feet and legal in the United States and I think most countries is the same. So that will, won't let your drone and go up further than that, no matter what. So that's what we want. Maybe we'll be breaking the law if the FAA Part 107 regulations, if we go higher than that, unless there's an exception, but we won't worry about that now I'll take the 107 class if you don't know what that is. So that's it set to 30 meters for the return home altitude and 122 meters for your max flight altitude. Here in DJI go a main controller settings. This top blue drone looking symbols is where you're at. I find once you check it, every now and then while you're in there. Once you set it in, it'll it'll remember it. But good to know. Don't mess with them, but make sure you know what there at. Alright, great. 14. Virtual Flight Check with Google Earth and Google Maps: Alright, let's look at some of the preflight virtual scoping out that we do online before a flight. I mean, obviously we use the sky vector and your ArcGIS maps to figure out airspace and everything. But it's also important to kinda figure out the very local nature of your flight area, right? So kinda look at get down even closer and look at the satellite images. And there are three tools that do that best. All of which are Google products. So we'll start with Google Earth Pro, which is what we have here. We have our flight area. We can zoom back. This is Eastern Massachusetts. Southeast semester is we can kind of see what what we have here. And if I wanted to just type in airport, I'm going to get all the airports in the area, as we should see that on our airspace maps, but Google will help us do that as well. So we can leave that up. And then if I zoom into the site, I can type in a search and figure it out. But oftentimes you'll just know where it is and you can find it. But let's say I'm going to fly here. And I can see that there are no airports anywhere near where I'm flying. I should know that already. But just as a way to double-check. So we can also Google, Google, Google Earth Pro, and you can turn on a lot of other information and it certainly will get you there. Quite a useful tool you could even layer in GIS files if you wanted to. But a lot of different things we can do. But what I like about the best thing about Google Earth Pro is my ability to measure things so I can use the, the ruler tool here. And let's say I wanted to kinda figure out what half-mile is from where I may be flying. I can click and find out kinda really roughly and quickly if I wanted to fly like this wooded area, like where's where's it? A half-mile. Where's my line of sight going to disappear now if I've got big trees here like I do, I'm going to have to worry about that in, factor that in, but but that's what Google or they'll help you do as well, kind of figure out the lay of the land, right? So I can see I've got a field here that I mean, that's my flight area. I've got some tall trees here, got long shadows. So I know that those are pretty tall trees. I've got a road here with power lines. Again, the shadow is like so I've got power lines over here. I've got traffic that I can't fly over over here, at least need to be aware of the possibility of traffic there. And you can just kinda get, zoom in and see the actual site and get a sense for it. And figure out your surroundings and how that is going to play out when you're actually go there. It gives you a good sense of what's going to be there. So that's, that's, that's the nice thing about Google Earth Pro. If I hit this button here, this will take me right to Google Maps the same area. So it zooms me in. If I go to the on the map button, the Layers button here and I zoom in enough I can start to see parcel boundaries. I wouldn't really put too much stock into them. I don't know how accurate they are, but you have to think about your take-off and landing spot and who owns the property and make sure you have permission or its public land, and be aware of what's going on, who owns what? We've got lots of houses, lots of small parcels. So this is residential areas. And if we can switch back, we can kinda see that get a sense of the neighborhoods that are around and things like that. So that's what I like about Google Maps. I can switch into the map layer and I don't know if this is available everywhere. I don't think it is, but it seems to be kind of more populated places. You'll get those parcel, parcel lines that you can use to help you and you click on things and get images and even go into the street view, I click on the little guy, drag them in. And that helps a lot as well. So I can see, alright, I've got this field, I've got some tall trees over here. And oops, and that will inform me, right? I've got some power lines here, I can say, okay, these are some pretty serious power lines. Double road, I've got maybe pedestrians here. Anyone that drives on the road is probably going to see me. Things to think about, right? But with the Street View, with the measuring tool, you can really figure out some good stuff. You can also use the web-based version of Google Earth, which is a little bit slicker. You can also use the measuring tool there if you want to. I think this is kind of where Google Earth is going to gives you that a lot of the same functionality. You can use your your Peg Man and drag them down onto that and get a sense of things as well. So get right into the map and be able to look around and see what you got. So if I want to get out of that pigment again, and even this even has in some areas the 3D view as well, right? So now I can start to see tree heights. Again. Not, not, wouldn't be relying too much on this, but it certainly can see that there's a lot of trees around and houses and it gives me a much better sense of the landscape that I'm gonna be dealing with. So three Google tools that are very important in sort of that last check on a flight area, if you don't really know it. What's around, what roads around, what power lines around? Are there trees around with some neighborhoods, the airports we should already know as safe licensed pilots. But there's lots of good information in here to help us map out our our flight and make a, make a safe flight plans so we can do it right. 15. A Quick Site Evaluation: A flight site looking to evaluate things that we need to think about when we're flying. Got a nice grassy area is going to be my main flight area. I've got some tall trees over here. Kinda thinking about those a little bit. Those are about a 100 feet tall, familiar with this area. Got a garden over here. So I could crash land over there if I needed to have got some lower 55 or six foot shrubs over this way, That's probably my best bet if I had to kinda dumped the thing, dump the drone, wrote over here, I got to be aware of that. No power lines to deal with in a house behind me here. So pretty straightforward site. Nothing too worrisome. And I've evaluated the trees and the bailout spots and we're ready to go. 16. Takeoff Procedures: So what we're gonna do is set up the drone, set up your space, go through the things that you do when you go to a site and you get set up. So we've evaluated the site, we've evaluated everything online and looked at Google Earth and figured out the airspace. And now we're going to wrap the site. We're going to get things set up. So safety vest, I like to wear lets people know that you're not yahoo, Right? So optional but probably a good thing to do. Landing pad. Pretty easy to set up. Alright, so there you go. I've got stakes, but there's no wind today. If I wanted to stake it down, if I needed to, I could. We've got our flight book. What I would do next is just right in time of flight, the date where I am. Just to keep track of everything. It takes probably 30 seconds, so we'll do that next. And I've got my checklist for the drone. So FAA regulations, you got to have a checklist to run through. So I keep that in here with everything else. So I've got everything ready to go and with me at all times, I could check the the wind speed if I needed to. My wind speed gauge my anonymous centimeter and demeanor, I can't say it. So this takes I've got basically 0.2 miles per hour, so that's pretty obvious, but gusty, windy day, you might want to check that out. And then we're, I think we're ready to go. So we've got our fan of four here. So we're going to set this up in the landing pad. Got my prompts, can put my props on. They all work a little differently. These you match up the colors. So we've got the black prop. And they spin on pretty easy. But each, each drones differently, different. So you gotta kinda figured out your drone and get those on sometimes like the maverick errors are already, already on. Right? So pretty easy. I've got charged battery, I've got my SD card in. Gotta charged remote controller, set up my iPad. I keep writing there in the drone case. Emma, Here we go. Right. Cut the cord, would connect the cord, connect everything on, and we'd be ready to go. You know, I'd run through my checklist. Lot of checklists out there. You can find a lot of them on the web. You can make your own FAA regulations. So you got to have a checklist, you gotta go into preflight check. So at this point I'm on the take-off part of it. I make sure my software is all calibrated. I would make sure we do a compass calibration if I needed to wherever the software told me. Usually you're using DJI go, go, go for. So that would be pretty self-explanatory, but makes sure everything is updated, make sure your database is updated, your Fly safe database. The software walks you through all that. So too hard. Then we'd we'd get her up in the air. So we've got everything set. My software is running through its pre-flight checks. I can see the gimbal is working, the cameras coming through. I am waiting for GPS lock. So sometimes the GPS takes a few few minutes, he had gone. So now I've got six satellites, so it is locked in, so be aware of that. Don't take off too early if you don't have your GPS, if it doesn't say you're ready to go and green, now I'm up to eight. That's when you know, the GPS is locked in. Your risk of fly away if you don't heed your GPS. So I could take off now sometimes, right now I'm up to nine. The longer you wait, the more time it gets to connect in with your drones. So I check my home point on the map and make sure that that is showing me what I expect to see and it does. So now we're ready to go. I'm going to put this into GPS mode. So now we're ready to go. I would say clear, make sure everyone knows that we're about to fly and take off, sticks down and in to get their motor running. And we are ready to go. So we go up with the left stick ten feet in the air. Let it sit for a second. Test the yard, just the rotation, back-and-forth. Make sure everything's good. And just listen for was it for anything weird? Take a look. Everything is fine. Do your flight mission. Then you'll end it, right? So same idea. Landing. Make sure everyone knows it's coming. Tell me I'm getting close to the ground here and down left stick and we're good. So that's that's it in a nutshell. Make sure he got really about preparing your site. Making sure you've got plenty of room, landing pad, get everything set up properly, and you'll be good to go. All right. 17. Law Enforcement Officers: Law enforcement officers or LEGOs as they are sometimes referred to. These are anyone that can has control over you and can tell you to do things. And typically we're we're we're talking about police officers, municipal or city and police officers. But when we're talking about drones, we're also talking about park rangers or campus police, or could be a local zoning individual planet. It could be a lot of things. Fire departments, right? They are flying near a fire and the fire to fireman says, Hey, land that drone. Like, I take that as a command I need to obey by the law, right? So but typically what we're dealing with, police officers, you're out flying, neighbor calls the police on you. Policemen shows up. They may or may not know anything about drones. They may be well-versed. It may have taken classes, I know in our town, maybe the police officers have taken a class. They understand what drones are all about and what they're doing. But I'm sure that's not the case everywhere. So you don't know what this police officer knows when they come up and say Excuse me, please explain yourself. Right. Which is which is their job. You got to respect that. So what I would my advice is land the drone first. Say Excuse, excuse me, Officer. Always be polite. When you mind if I just I'm gonna land the drone now for safety reasons? I'm just going to land before we get anywhere conversation, he may want to talk to you and figure something out. I think that they would be reasonable that so you get the drone landed, say okay, Hello. I have I'm a licensed pilot or not or, you know, here's my paperwork. This is where having all of your paperwork in order and with you and in your backpack and you can say Yes, here's my hair, my records, here's my license, Here's the registration of the drone. This is the property that I'm on. I have the homeowners permission or I'm on public land or understand all this, you know, this is a good reason why you want to think about all this stuff beforehand and be able to back it up so you can he can say alright, I understand. I got a complaint from a neighbor. I needed to respond. That's fine. I understand. Or if he says no, it looks to me like you're taking pictures over someone's fence. I'm taking your drone. That's you know, that's it. That that could happen as well. Again, having your paperwork in order when you go to see the judge or you go down to the police station later and talk to the chief of police and say, I didn't do anything wrong. I like to explain myself and I think drones, this is happening less and less, I think because it's not such a big deal to see a drone anymore. People have seen drones out there in the world. They've been around for a few years. Police officers have dealt with these many times at this point? Typically. So those yeah. Alright. No, He's taken a real estate picture. I think a good way to way to deal with it, maybe to say excuse me, officer, if you'd like, I can show you the pictures to show you what I've done. I my my cameras pointed at this house and not that house and anyways, but the important thing is remember, be polite, have your paperwork in order, and law enforcement officers aren't just police officers. They could be park rangers, they could be anyone that gives you a lawful command. They are technically representatives of the FAA. If so, if there's an issue in a car accident or whatever, they are, essentially acting as of yet phase representative. The chances of you getting stopped by an actual employee of the FAA are slim to none. There's just not enough of them, but the chances of you being having to deal with the police officer at some point if you're on the drone business, It's pretty good, right? So just have your heavier, heavier, heavier stuff in order. Have your act together, have your story straight, be able to explain yourself. I often find that wearing a vest is always a good idea. Even if I'm not going to be near a road. It, it sends the message to anyone looking at me saying, Oh, he's not trying to hide it. If you want to come talk to me about what I'm doing here I am. I think it rather than kind of hiding behind a bush, trying to fly a drone like that's going to look suspicious. So the orange vest Always, always seems to help or makes me feel better. Like, Yeah, if you want to come talk to me, I'll explain what I'm doing. I'm not doing anything wrong. But that's the drug. So just be prepared for it probably will happen at some point. And you don't want lose your drone for any period of time and even have to deal with anything and any sort of court appearance two months later or something could affect your business. And you just you just want to be safe. You want to be honest, you want to be upfront about what you're doing. You're not doing anything wrong. Stay within the law. You have your license probably. So there's a reason for it. So it should be good to go. 18. Practice Exercises: Let's talk about practice. Practice. I'm having thoughts of Allen Iverson practice. Practice. Yes, we're talking about practice. How to practice your drawing skills. If you're gonna be a drone pilot and you're, you've bought yourself with $1000 drone and you don't want to crash it, right? So these are, it's a skill to learn and once you weren't any kind of got it, But you gotta kinda keep up with it. So practicing is always good and there's, there's ways to do this and you got to keep practicing yoga practice, Sorry Allen. As a reminder, checklists are required of all flights from the FAA. So whenever you're practicing and you should do, you need to do a preflight check and just kinda get used to it. Practicing is learning the stick movements. That's all part of this, but it's also morning and procedures getting used to doing things to professional way. So I would kinda kinda do that. It lowers your risk and ensures safety. It's required by the FAA, which is kinda really all you need to know covers you from a liability standpoint, makes it look professional. Just get used to using your checklists and you'll be good to go. Here's one we used at Suffolk. But there are many out there online. Find one that suits your needs and should just be comprehensive in something that you can, you can deal with and review it before you fly, it'd be good to go. Alright, so how do we practice? How do we learn these drones skills? The most efficient way and the best way? I like regular repetition, five-minutes days better than 35 minutes a day, once a week, right? So if you just do it a little bit every day, you will pick it up more quickly than if just blocks of time. So then even over time, even if you've mastered this and you are a great pilot. If you put the controller down for six months, maybe over the winter, if you're up here in New England like we are, and you pick up your skills again, your drone again, your skills are going to be eroded like sort of like golfing or whatever. You come back after an off-season and you've gotta kinda practice a little bit more. So you want to have this skills, these thumb movements, the feeling of flying, the kinda the unthinking mind. Ready to go. You know, things are gonna happen when you're flying. You have to deal with stuff. The more that you can kinda offload your subconscious and have mastered without really having to think about it, the better off you're going to be. In a lot of respects. Different variables that you're going to encounter when you're practicing or different things that you can set up. Try flying with different drones. You can turn your GPS on and off, or adding mode, attitude mode, you know, turn that off. What the wind kinda pushed the drone around a little bit. Keep it from hovering. So it'll, it'll drift more. When you take your thumbs off the stick, it's going to keep going. So learn how to do that. The real skill drone pilots don't use GPS mode, they don't like it. They don't want the computer or to Everest be thinking for them. They understand that when they take their hands off the sticks that they need to do the air brake themselves and pull the drone back that's about to hit a tree or something. So that's kinda the goal you're trying to get to and not need GPS mode when you're, when you're flying and just find attitude monument, you'll get smoother shots. You'll, you'll, you'll just be, It's kind of the next level. There's a beginner mode which limits your height and your distance away. So you can turn that off. I know at some point start with beginner mode, so that way the drone never goes beyond 30 feet or whatever. And if you're in a 30-foot yard, you can feel safe, that comfortable that your drawing is not going to go too far away. Practice using the screen, the first-person view, kind of get used to kind of going back and forth, which is what we do when we fly. Always, always know where it is, where the line of sight isn't always be able to find the drone immediately. But, you know, you're gonna have to get used to looking at the screen, reading your telemetry, seeing what the drone seeing, especially doing videos and stuff, camerawork, you want to put the drone just write. A big obstacle is reverse orientation. So when the drone is facing outwards, everything kinda makes sense. When you spin the drone a 180 degrees and the drone is facing, you, write as left and left his right. This is a percentage wise, but a huge percentage. Reason why people crash their drones. When they first start flying there, they get up, they look up, they see their drone as close to a tree, the drones facing them. They're like, Oh my God, the trees to the right. They push the stick to the left. But that means that drawing is going to go right because the left is the right because it's facing you and boom, right into the tree and down they go and they're like. That was quick. Never saw that come in. You start to learn automatically to either put yourself in the drone like the cockpit, or just, just remember that the lights are facing and it's got it goes the other way. You get used to it. It takes up, but it takes a while. It takes a lot of practice to get to that point where you start to think like the drone. Weather conditions, practice in high wind. Just do it safely because you may have a job where you go out and you need to get a shot and it's high wind situation. And if you know what you're doing, if you practice it, you can handle it. But when you first start off starting low wind, obviously, but once you get, when you get better, practice in high wind and you'll be good to go. It's about challenging yourself and that's a variable you can set depending on when your phi and then your camera focused practice. Put a bucket out in your yard or a rock or a tree or something and try to focus on that or kind of plan out your shot, what you wanna do, even if you're not recording. Okay, I'm gonna do a rising shot over the trees and then pan to the right and then think about it, what you want to do and then try to execute it and see what it looks like. And because that's where you're gonna do when you go to a client, They say, Oh yeah, I kinda wanted a sweeping shot around the corner and the reveal of the cliff and the golf course and the background and blah, blah, blah. Or you need to be able to think that way. And the client may be like, I don't know. You make it look good, right? So you have to know, alright, yeah, what would be cool? This, that the other thing, a little cinematography and that's one thing there'll be able to envision it, but another thing to be able to make the drone do what you wanted to do and do it smoothly so you don't know what people want, like, Oh, that's a drone shot. You know, a drone shot when it kinda choppy. A practice that right. Audio. All right. So mission one, your initial inspection. So when you're first flying, first-time, in every drone flight, what you want to do is you want to take off and just hover a little bit. Listened to the draw and use your ears. If you start to learn the pitches of these drones after you fire them enough, you use something like sounds a little squeaky or something's not right. So take a listen, wiggle the controls. Just give him, give a little shake, make the drone kinda of flop a little bit. See if everything is unstable, see if it's doing what you want. So just left stick elevates it, sticks in every direction to get it to wobble. And you should be good to go. Mission two-way and Tooby. I've set this up so with or without GPS. So mission to the box flight. So you take off, perform your initial inspection, your initial inspection of the drone just hover a few feet away, eight feet or so. When the drone facing outwards fly a two-foot box. So right stick to the bright. I mean, right sick forward to the right and flying. All right. Stick. So right and everything that the drone is always facing away from you. So it makes sense. And once you kinda get that down, reverse it, go the other way. Land the drone where you want it to land. Start with GPS mode on so it stays nice and steady. At some point in turn, GPS mode off by attitude mode and then the wind is going to push it a little bit and you got to kind of get used to it that way, but that's a good first step. Just a simple box facing the same way the whole time. So here we go. Alright, stick the red lights there. That's the front of the drone, always facing outwards. So p is where the pilot is, so lifted up. Fly box, you're good to go. Mission three, turning box flight. So same idea except when we get to a corner, we're going to turn it 90 degrees, like say, We're gonna go clockwise. Turn it to the right. Same idea with wiggle it. Lift it up eight feet or so, get it up over your head. Fly it like a cigar, four-foot box stopping at each turning point, rotating it 90 degrees, and then land the drone. So point-to-point navigation, once you get to your point, use the left stick, right or left to rotate the drone. And then you bring it back. The important part of this mission is it's easy, the first couple, but then when the drone is, you turn it in, it's facing you. That's when you got to start to think about the orientation and things are gonna be reversed. So this is a good way to kind of get into that. In a nice slow methodical way. Mission for inverted box flight with GPS and without GPS. So takeoff, use the usual stuff. Rotate the drone a 180 degrees so it's facing you with the drone always facing inwards fly a two-foot box. Controls will be backwards, right? So. This requires both sticks and coordination. At this point, you can start to do banking turns, which is kinda what we wanna do when we're flying. And once we get better, we don't we don't wanna go point-to-point. That's when you see that in a video. You're gonna be like, oh, that's a drone. You kinda, you know, if, if it's a nice, smooth, smooth kinda banking corner with the control, with the camera facing in the whole time. You have to think about which way the drone is fine. You also have to think about which way the camera is pointing. So rotating the New York, turning the drone so it's always facing. And so you've gotta do, you bring us to be doing two things at once For we'll, we'll get you down that road. Mission five circular flight. So now you want to smooth out those corners. Do the same thing. Or you can even do this with the drone facing the same way the whole time. You start that way. So it's more of a circle instead of a box. Simply. Alright, stick but set of corner to corner, just make a circle. And then mission six, inward facing circles. So fly the circle with the camera facing on a central point the whole time. So you don't have facing us, say you put a, put something out in the middle or just kinda aim for the middle of the field. So now you have to ra, ra or rotate your drawing while you're flying. So it's, it's really two thumbs going on at once. And try to keep it smooth and you just got to keep practicing it counterclockwise and clockwise until you can kind of be thinking about, uh, two parts of your brain that wants, it's a little tricky. And then seven normal figure eights, the drone up, start to do circles and then crossover. And then you alternate between regular and inverse orientations when you do this. So take a look at this. This is, this usually comes pretty natural once you've got those circles down, but now you're kinda have to do in the figure rate, you've got to make sure you've got a big wide area. Think about those turns and what's coming next. And you start to feel a rhythm at some point, which is great. This is what you want, but when things go wrong, you don't want to rely on those kind of that automatic nature of it. So you got to it. It's easier to, easier to fly forwards. On this one. You kind of imagine yourself in the cockpit and it starts to make sense. But when you're facing outwards, the whole time trying to keep the camera outwards. Now you're really, now your brain is gonna go nuts. Try to figure this out. So this takes awhile. Camera facing a central point of interest the whole time. This is really difficult, but you'll get there. Just keep practicing. So you'll, you'll work through the box drills pretty quickly. A couple of flights you're ready to go, but then once you start that reversing the orientation, it's, it can be very difficult. And then inward facing figure eights, set of facing outwards. The drone is now facing inwards. Central thing. This is ridiculously hard. This is the type of thing that you could probably master it at some point. But if you take a month off and try to do it again, it's going to be you're going to have to kind of get back into that zone because it's really difficult. But both these missions, all these missions sevens, the figure eights can be tricky, but you'll get there eventually, right? So this is how we practice. You can start with the Telco drone indoors with this stuff or even take the teller drone outdoors. Just careful with that. Don't do it on a one-to-one or you have a day and follow this progression, think about what you're doing before you fly. Mean anything we can take the drone up and just just flying around the yard and that's fun. There is certainly some used to that. But I find that it's more efficient to intentionally do something like think about what you're trying to do and then execute it, right? That's really how we're gonna get better quickly. So that's just kind of you're gonna, you're gonna be professional drone pilot and you wanna be a good, safe, efficient drone pilot. This is the way to do it. Okay, so and then at some point you'll have this stuff mastered and then the sky's the limit. You can then start to link together a great cinematic shots and create a great real and but all of this stems from the, from these initial training that is very valuable. And you got this, it just takes some time and you just got to practice it. Practice. I'm thinking playoffs. Playoffs. Yeah. Go go practice. Worth the time. Good luck. 19. Emergency Procedures: Alright, emergency maneuvers. This is going to happen to you at some point. Things always happen as a drone pilot, you need to be ready for them and putting some thought into this upfront is a good way to operate. So it's talking about emergency maneuvers. What could cause them? What do you do? Things to know before you start flying your drone is how to get it out of GPS mode, right? So you wanna be able to have complete control of your drone for many reasons. But there's a switch on your drone at some point where you can switch it to add the mode and have complete control of it. And it's sometimes the drone may be relying on the GPS to take it where you don't want it to go. So you want to get it out of there and just have it be controlled by the controller and view and that's it. So learn that, figure that out. It's drone is different. So oftentimes it's just a switch on the controller. And you can, you can find that pretty easily, figure that out. But that's, you know, know, that for each of your drones, you want to know how to do an emergency tornado descent. We'll go over that in a second and then, and then think about where to dump your drone. Alright, so these are the things we want to be thinking about. Why do you want to get your drone out of GPS mode? Sometimes you may be faced with a flyaway situation. The drone is trying to fly home, but home is where you were yesterday and Connecticut or a 100 miles away because your GPS didn't reset your home point. And you've took off too quickly and you didn't think about it and now it's trying to go home because the battery is dead and off it goes and it's heading for the horizon. It's going to keep going. Trying to get home, won't get there, and you're going to lose it. So particularly a problem if you were heading towards an airport or a city or a school or something like you just, you gotta deal with that, right? So this is what you would call fly away. You want to turn that GPS off. And now the drone is simply going to listen to your controller and that's what you want. So it could be it could be a battery issue or it could be didn't have a Jeep, good GPS like but whatever it is, you want to you want to get it out of there. So figure that out. There's often a just a switch on the drone or under controller and flip it to add the mode typically, and then come back. Or it'll, it'll start to listen to your controller. It'll stop the GPS directions. So do this with your functioning drawn practice this. When you're drones off. You don't want, I'm going to want to take it out of GPS mode. I'm going to lose my ability to hit the return to home button. Nowhere it is and fly back manually, right. Practice that. Practice like, Oh, I got to flip that switch for for whatever reason I gotta get this thing back. So, you know, it's like I said, fine, you're fine your joints not as easy on some drones as others. The maverick Pro, for example. But you can get it out of there. At some point you may want to do an emergency tornado descent. What am I talking about? This is the best way to get your drone down to the ground as fast as possible. Again, practices with a functioning drone. You don't want to be doing this for the first time when something's gone wrong. So this is something you can practice. Why would you do this? Examples? You see, all of a sudden you hear a helicopter getting very loud very quickly coming right at you. You just need to get that thing down immediately. Or you spot a red tail hawk or an eagle or something coming after your drone and zooming in for the kill because you flew next to its nest and it's a mother and she's guarding or babies and she's she's coming in. You've gotta get that thing on the ground, or you've got a dog coming out at you, bargain and you want to get the drone down so you can deal with the dog without having to worry about the drone. Same time or something happens with the drone. Prop comes off. Battery level drops dramatically. There is some malfunction with your drone. And you got to, you know, it's, it's, something's not right. You're like, Oh my God, something's not right. I gotta get this thing down. Or hailstorms coming or a windstorm or something. I'm like, oh my God, all of a sudden starting to rain. I got to get this thing on the ground asap. So how do we do this? Take your left stick, put it all the way, all the way down, and that will drop the drone down straight. Then with your right stick, push that thing all the way up and to the right. What's that gonna do? If you push the drone, right, stick up, it's going to fly forward. If you do it to the right, it's going to, it's going to go forward. So as this is going to, the left stick is dropping it. So it's gonna go down in a circle. Print. When you first practicing this, you get down to about 30 feet. That's when you kind of level off and bring it back to normal. But this thing will be coming down pretty quickly. As you get better and better. You can get to a point where 1015 feet, you could stop that spin. You kind of get used to it. You don't want to drop your drone straight down, just straight left stick all the way down because you might get a prop wash effect where the drone is dropping so fast that it can't get enough air and it starts to wobble and could enroll and then you've lost it. So never drop your drone straight down. Make sure it's spinning and flying a little bit so it's getting fresh air as it, as it spins. If he can get it over soft ground. If you find a nice field or low shrub or something, if possible, may not be possible but worth, worth trying. And evaluate places to dump your drawing. You should have done this in your preflight planning. It should have looked it around, but sometimes you just, you know, time is short and the drones malfunctioning and you just want to drop that thing. Fine. Think about finding some soft ground, tall grasses, good soft ground, dirt is better than pavement obviously. Or trees or shrubs, ones that you could reach up and grab the drone out of the tree if you needed to or better. Just regular grass tall trees if you have to. If you have to, maybe it'll drop down a little bit or maybe gotta go back with a ladder to get it. But it's better than dropping it on road and causing a car accident obviously. Or even even water. If you could dump it in the water and you're probably not going to get your drone back. But it will get wet. But if it means that or a car accident put it in the water. So that's what we got. 20. Loss of Signal: Let's talk about a loss of signal situation different than a fly away. A loss of signal happens when the controller, controller does not, is not talking to the drone anymore, right? So these two have lost connection could be could be a few things, could be the battery and this thing wasn't charged enough, fit short-circuited. Maybe you hit the off button by mistake, shouldn't happen, but maybe it does. Maybe you're something on your drone, the antenna connecting them. Ms. Malfunctioning, whatever it might be. What's going to happen is the drone will revert to its, to its training, to its computerize instructions which are to fly home, right? So it's sort of like hitting the return to home button on your controller or on your app. And the, the drone is coming back hot, right? It's not listening to you. It knows that if it loses connection, it will follow what's routines. So generally that will be it'll go straight up to a certain height that you set in your app. Typically, I'll set mine for a 150 feet so it's higher than any trees or any houses. I'm going to go up and I make a beeline to the point where it took off from the home point which it recorded in it. It still has its GPS theoretically is still working. So it knows where it is, knows where it should be on a map. It's gonna go up, it's going to be line to the point where it's going to land and it's going to be BBB drops straight down and try to land itself where it took off from the home point. So typically if you hit the return to home button and it comes back, you could hit the controls and kinda take the drone over again. But if this functionality is gone, It's not going to listen to anymore. So the game here for a loss of signal is to just get everyone out of the way. Just to say, Hey, there's a drone. I can't control it. Heads up, right? And just keep an eye on drones, see where it starts to come down and start beeping. Just make sure no one is in the way. This will probably happen anyways, but there's no stopping it. So it's not really going to make, maybe it's got vision sensors might send something, but it's a bad situation when the drone is flying itself and there are people around. So that's the deal with the loss of signal. Just understanding what's happening. Don't panic. It knows where it is. It knows where it took off from. It's gonna go up over and down in and just clear that, clear the area. It'll land and you should be, you should be all set, but that's lost the signal situation. So be ready for it. And a good way to practice is just to hit that return to home button and see what it does and kind of get used to that. Do it while you can take take the drone back over. But just kinda watch, see what happens and then do the same thing as a good way to practice. So good to be prepared for that situation. Alright, thank you. 21. Avoiding Blowaways: Blow a ways. What's up with blow away as well? How is that different than a fly away? What's going on here? A blow away is similar to a fly away where your drone takes off, but instead it not because of the GPS or because of some malfunctioning, It's because the wind is true, strong wind picks up and your drone can't fight through it and get back to where, where you are. So typically this happens with these maverick minis. Less than a £0.5. The wind can really push these things. And, you know, you might, you know, when you go first take your drone off, you don't really, you should know the wind speed, but you don't know it can increase over the 20 minutes you're flying or whatever, especially if you're near the water and things can change quickly or you just might not realize that it's a lot Wendy or 50 feet up than where you are, you first take off. So if this starts to happen, typically, the drone is half-mile downwind. Maybe it's different, more windy over there. And you try to bring the drone back and adjust, can't fight the wind. It's pitched forward as far as it can go. It's just too light and the wind is pushing it. And your battery is low. And it just can't can't push through the wind to get to where you're at, right? So it's eventually going to run out of battery. So this is what we call blow away. With the blow away, you kinda need to. It's avoidable. It to some extent. So you've got to think about if it's windy, reduce your flight area, don't let it get too far away. And if it does get too far away, if it's upwind, you're fine, right? The wind will push the thing back to you. If you fly towards yourself and the wind is behind it is going to have no problem getting to you at all. It's just when it's got a crosswind or a headwind, right? So think about the wind direction. Think about starting your flight downwind of a whereas if it has to fight to get there or if it can't get to where you want it to go, you know, or I wouldn't have come back. So blow away, avoided. The other thing to consider is if you're, if you find yourself in this situation, the drone is out there like, you know, you can start walking towards it, maybe get to it. The other thing is, don't wait too long, don't wait until that battery is really depleted because of the bad. At some point, it's going to hit it, hit the wind is pushing it. It's probably during I'm pretty quickly. When that battery is reaches a critical point, it's going to it's just going to say, all right, I'm gonna land no matter what. It's going to drop in land, wherever you're at. A couple of things to think about what that is. You can't really control that. You don't know wherever. It's just going to land, wherever it wants to land, right. Whether that's in the middle of the street or in someone's pool or in a big tree. If you can recognize this more quickly and have a little bit of battery power left, you could probably put it, drop it in an area to point the camera down, look at it, figure out where a good place to land is. Give yourself some battery power in order to put the drone where you want it, where you know where it is, you can go find it. The worst thing is that everything cuts off. Now, your drone is gone. The other thing is your battery is dead, so it's not gonna be able to find your drone functionality isn't going to last very long. So it staying on, staying lit up, sending information. You'll be able to find it. If you have some battery power, if you completely burn through all your battery power, it's going to make this more difficult. And so if you find yourself in a situation like this thing isn't coming back, it says it's got five minutes left. I'm going to find a place to land and I'm going to start walking. So kind of be aware of that, that the, the battery power isn't just for bringing the drone back. It's to keep it lit up and keep it in a state where your, your, your controller will be able to find it and keep the Find My drunk. So careful with these things. Like I said, if you're upwind doesn't matter when to help you. But if you're downwind, you don't want to lose these things, alright? So avoid blow a little prior planning. 22. Drone Hull and Liability Insurance: Drone insurance, few different things to know about drone insurance. If you're going to get into this game. Different different types, we'll talk about. Both of them. We have sort of standard coverage that protects you all the time and protects your, your investment in your drawing. Let's say you have a inspire two and a nice camera and you've got $7 thousand worth of stuff in the air. You know, you've, you've invested a lot anyway. You don't want to lose that. You want to make sure if you crash it for whatever reason, even if no one gets hurt. You wanna you wanna be covered like a like a like a car policy. You can get stuff like that through drone insurance.com or there's a few other ones, but they do a good job of breaking down your pricing. And it all depends on the value of your drone and how often you use it and all sorts of things like that. But you know how you want to pay physical damage protection. And then, so that is layer one. And you can do one drone or five drones or ten drones, whatever, depending on what your unique situation is. So that's coverage for your business. When you are not in the air, someone steals your drone, you crash and break it, things like that. It's actually more just protecting your property like not flying, but just why drones around in the air. So include that three is $3.11 a month. If you're running a real business, it's nothing like it's probably a good idea. Layer two is your flight liability insurance. So that is if your drone crashes and hurt someone on-demand, it goes through the app on your phone and you go to the flight site and you login the GPS, knows where you are, knows the airspace that urine, it knows if their schools around, it knows if you're in the middle of the city, the GPS can tell it a lot of information. So with that information, they'll give you an on-demand quote right there and say, okay, well, yeah, We can give you a policy for a certain amount. For a one-day policy at 30 bucks a day or 30 days. Again, it's very tailored to your actual situation. So withdrawn insurance.com. It is a great idea. If you're running a business that relies on these drones, they'll get you covered up every which way to Sunday. And probably a good idea helps you fly better, helps you fly more comfortably. You're not going to be so worried if you have to crash your drone into a tree because of whatever reason, emergency procedure. Know you have insurance and you're covered like I can deal with this. It's not going to ruin my business. It helps you make better decisions. So that's drawn insurance.com. There's also verify fly. I'm used to be called verify now it's about so-called verify, but the company was verified now it's thimble. So we go to thimble.com, verified drone insurance. You can download an app. I've used this before a few times. And same idea, it knows where you are, it's got your GPS location, draws a circle around you. It tells you exactly if you stay in this in this blue circle. And it knows what's in that blue circle. And it says, Okay, I will give you a one-hour block. Let's say you can use 1148 hour sessions. So you said, you know, I'm just gonna go take some real estate pictures. The situations is lots of cars around. I'm just not feeling all that comfortable with this. I'm going to pay go online. Choose an hour long policy, gives you, you know, policies. Million dollars, ten million dollars. You set that with a slider and the price goes up or down. So typically, it's typically like $10 though. So you go somewhere, you're not all that comfortable. You can pull up your Firefly, get yourself $10 million of coverage for ten bucks. And chance Sarnoff, it's going to happen, but it gives you that price instantly, your credit card is loaded in there. You hit Okay, bye. And you've got an hour window. It says, as long as you stay in this circle, in this time that you told us you were going to fly in. We know the rest. You pay ten bucks comes out of credit card and you're good to go. You can set it for the flights in the future if you wanted to, although not sure what the benefit of that would be. You don't have to deal with putting it in the app. But, you know, if it's raining that day, I'm going to work. But anyway, so this is a good app to have on your phone to just be able to get insurance instantly. It's very easy to use. It makes sense. And it gets your get yourself covered for any possible mishaps that your drone may cause car accidents or smashing someone's find through someone's window at home or, you know, God forbid hurting somebody, hitting somebody in a medical bills and things like that. So a good idea helps people with the peace of mind helps protect you, which is, which is what we want if you're gonna be a professional, alright. 23. Drone Manufacturer Care and Refresh Packages: Let's talk about the care packages that come with your drones. So let's start with DJI. They have their DJI care refresh package. You can go to their store, DJ.com slash support. So I service as DJI, refresh, you will come here, You can Google it and find it pretty easily. But these are the support or products that you can get. The care refresh package. You pay extra when you buy it and it will they'll send you a new one or fix your drone if you break it. So 12 year plans are available. What we have basically when you first buy your drone and you haven't activated it yet, you can buy this. And they will fix your drone up to two drones a year. Or as part of your plan. Let's look at the maverick three, the one-year plan that's $239. So if you've got the money, probably worth it if you're gonna be flying every day, it's part of your business. It's not a bad idea. You're gonna be, you. You may crash, right? So good to have the air to S for the one-year plan and does $99, so that's probably more reasonable, but then again, It's less than a if you go buy a new one for 800 bucks, like you gotta kinda way that you activate it when you first buy the drone within 48 hours or purchasing it. And it basically as an insurance policy for your drawing if you crush it and break it. And so that's DJI is version. Scotty has a similar thing, Scotty of care. For one year, you get a hundred and four hundred and forty nine dollars, you get the same thing. You get replacement up to two costs, replacements, even up to one lost drone replacement. So if you lose it, they'll send you another one. So 30 days if the original order, terms and conditions, and you've got to read the fine print. I imagine these change a little bit every now and then, but it's sort of a reduces your stress level a little bit. So yeah, it's nice for financial purposes, but if you don't have to worry so much about the ruining your business completely. If something goes wrong, you may have a little less stress. Hopefully you won't fly anymore recklessly or anything like that. But essentially, I think if you've got the money, you can, you can, you know, it's probably a good idea to get one of these care refresh packages up to you though. Different than insurance, but similar, similar concept, peace of mind. 24. FAA Basic Rules: Okay, Welcome to Part B of this course, the Skillshare course here about safe drone flight. We're gonna go over the FAA regulations and the drone regulations that will govern you. Should you be flying particularly related to fewer professional, which most of the time we are. This is not a test prep course for getting your license. It's just more of a review of the regulations and things to know if you want to go down that road, there are other ways to get that license and stuff, but this is a good Just a recap of the stuff that you need to know for safe drone flight right flank legally and safely is important. And so we want to make sure you understand the rules and regulations that you're expected to follow. So we'll run through these. Let's see, we have starting with drone registration basics. You need to register your drone. So you need to put a little sticker on there, and that sticker identifies your registration number. You get your registration number by going to the FAA Drone Zone website, paying $5 on your credit card, they'll give you that number. You stick that on there out in the open. We can get to it without any tools that will assist anyone that may find your drone or something happens that the delay just wanted to be registered just like every airplane has a registration number, minimum age to register your drone, you have to be 13 years old or more, but not that big of a deal to get them registered. People often think, well, if my drone is too small and light, I don't need to get it registered. And sometimes that is the case depending on your country, doesn't mean you have to, you can ignore all the other regulations though. So it's really just, it's kind of a mis misunderstanding. If you're gonna do anything with your drone professionally or make any money with it. And you gotta, you gotta have your license and you got to have your drone registered. So be aware. This is what the FAA drones own website looks like. So just officially need registered if it's more than £0.55 and under £55. But really easy process takes about five minutes. Here's what a licensed looks like. If you wanna get your license, You've gotta be 16. Your license is good for two years. And if you move, you have 30 days to renew your address. They just want to make sure they can find you if they need you. And you got to have your eyes on your on your fly just like a driver's license. How fast can I fly? A 100 miles an hour is the top speed you're supposed to say under or 87 knots to the same thing. This is difficult. Most drones can't really achieve that unless you're racing drones or have a customary drone with a DJI drone, It's tough to get 200 miles an hour. And then also the reality is you need to keep your drawing within your line of sight. So at a 100 miles an hour, It's something that small. It's gonna be tough to keep track of with your eyes. And so you're kinda fort and with illegality there. So you always got to be able to see it in a 100 miles an hour is gonna be gone pretty quickly. So it's not really that realistic, but good to know. You can fly up to 400 feet above the ground, above ground level, AGL. There's an exception to that. Here's, here's 400 feet max. That makes perfect sense, right? Your drone tells you right on your screen. I'm going how high you are at any given time and you can set it as an alarm. We talked about this in an earlier lecture. It will be, but I'll let you know, won't want you fly above that so you can set that right in there. Most drones are already set there. But you can't fly above 400 feet. If you're say you're doing a professional job and inspecting a building and it's a 100 foot building, you can go up to 500 feet over the building. Within a bubble around that building, a 400 foot bubbles. So be careful if you're going too high. There's some where you can get into danger a little bit there, but we'll talk about that later. But you got to be aware of that. You can start to get up there. Airplanes start to fly above 400 feet and helicopters, helicopters you do anywhere, but there are other planes you are you got to watch it. If you get if you want to use this exception. Be aware of what you're doing. You might want to study that up a little bit more. But in this case, the strong can fly up to 800 feet above the ground. Only if they're working on that building there, that that brick building. Alright. Agl above ground level we just talked about versus MSL, that means mean sea level. And say you're flying in Denver, Colorado at 5 thousand feet above sea level, and you fly your drone a 100 feet up. You are a 100 feet above ground level. Like so let's use this example. I am, I have a Cliff here, that's a 40 foot cliff above the sea. I am 300 feet. I have a 300 foot tower here. That yellow dot there is 300 feet above the ground, right? Makes sense. And it's also 340 feet above the sea level So that 340 feet MSL. So there's a difference there be aware of them. As you become a pilot, you become very aware of them. Some things are listed in AGL, somethings are listed in MSL. Gets a little complicated, but it makes sense once you, once you kinda get it straight in your head. So that's the difference there. So pro tip, if you're going to be flying these things, take off from a high spot. They, they're they're measuring your 400 feet above ground level. So if you were taking off on a cliff, you can fly down below. You have a 400 foot ceiling above you. So that way you can have a little more operating range. So if you fly off from the bottom and you go up 200 foot cliff, you can only go 200 feet above that cliff, right? So think about that. Can I fly our people? No, not really. This is a gray area. What is flying over people directly over them like a dot or the footprint of the drone projected straight down. If you're at a sparsely a beach that not many people are at, how can you really tell if you're directly over somebody? I think that would be that's seems to be considered fine. If you're flying over a crowd of people, a parade, a concert like no way I could definitely flying over, people don't do it. There are ways to get around this with some of the new regs. But if you're just starting out, just, just don't fly where people that clues cars as well. So you can't say, Oh, it's a enclosed car like that, that doesn't work. You're allowed to fly over your visual observers, who are the people that are helping you out? That's called a visual observer, but not over people themselves. So can I find my drawing from a moving vehicle? Yeah, technically you can, but, you know, like if you're in a back of a boat and you're filming the boat are filling a water skier, you're in a moving vehicle, you're the pilot. Your only job is flying the drone? Yes, you can do that. Can I can I drive my car and fly my drone? No. You can't do that. You can't do two things at once, right? There are some weird rules in there. We'll get into them, but they don't want the Amazons and the Googles and the UPS trucks shooting drones off their roof and delivering things. And so I just can't do two things at once. Good way to kinda keep it straight. If you're on a water skiing bot, you can feel in your body, you're fine. If you're driving your car and flying at the same time, you are not fine. If you're working for Google and flying a package dropping drones from the back of a tractor trailer truck. You can't do that. If you work for a rural hospital that delivers blood samples to a lab and you can see the drone, then you're okay, right. So there's some weird regs there, but, you know, it's kinda common sense. So what happens when two drones come together, or a drone in a plane come together, the drones always have to yield. So no matter what, even when you have two drones that come together, both pilots have to yield, right? So clearly you have to yield for anyone with a man manned airplane, right? Like there's, there's a life at stake, right? Get your drone out of the way. Don't even get close to it. But if it's to drones and to drones are coming together and there's an accident, they crash into each other. You're both liable. So good to know. If your final drawing you gotta, you gotta get your way out of everyone's way. No matter what. How far must I be able to see. Hello. This is called the line of sight LOS or be LOS beyond line of sight. So always be able to see your drone. That's a law. Your visibility. When you look at your weather app or you can look at the weather and there's no visibility like mariners have this a lot. If there's fog around, how how far can you see? Three statute miles is what? You can see if that's visibilities has two statute miles. Do not fire drone, it means there's fog around. You can't really see very far. They want to make sure you have a clear line of sight, 500 feet below the clouds. So depending on where the clouds are, you measured down 500 feet. Almost always, they are way up there, but when you get some low clouds, you know, you're you're up in the Rockies and you have clouds around you that may come into play. Difficult to know how high the clouds are at any given point. But just whatever that's, that's the law. 500 people at the concert or 2 thousand feet away from clouds horizontally. So if you see a fog bank coming in, it's 3 thousand feet away. Half a mile, 2500 or so feet. You're good. If it's a couple of 100 feet away and you see a fog bank coming. So I can see right in front of me. Then you got to worry about that 2 thousand feet. And visual observers, the people that are helping you, That's their job to sit there and watch your drone. Sometimes you use visual observers to keep a safe flight. They must be able to see the drone at all times with unaided vision. So binoculars don't count. They can have contact lenses or glasses and normal, normal site aids, but not not, not binoculars essentially. So here r is a visualization of that 500 feet above for clouds, 2 thousand feet horizontally for the fog. Night operations, flying a drone at night can be difficult. So a is going to want you to be able to see the line of sight at all times. They like to see visual observers. And they will define what you know, when day and night begins. We'll get to that in a second. But night operations are possible for hobbyists and pros. But look into those regulations a little bit. There's some new ones on there. And when his day and night, that's the tricky part. Especially given your location if the sunset in Seattle, Washington is different than the sunset and Boston, even though they're very different time zones. But also if you're more in the western end of the time zone, you're you're sunset is going to be at 930 at night, whereas in Boston and maybe 830 at night. So you got to dial that in use or not use a weather app, time and date.org. You can find this information pretty quickly. Anywhere. Weather app you can google will tell you what your son said is at any given location. When exactly is night? According to the FAA and these pilots, the end of evening civil twilight and the beginning of mourning civil twilight. That's night. What does that mean? What is when his civil twilight? Civil twilight is 30 minutes before sunset or 30 minutes after sunset. So you've got your sunset and sunrise. And let's just say sunrise, sunrise and sunset. Then you've got 30 minutes on either end. That's the civil twilight area. So you have a little bit more than what's published on the web. An hour on each end, the sun is, the sun is down below the horizon, but there's still plenty of light around. So they factor that in. But there are things that need to happen when you're in that civil twilight. You gotta have anti collision lights with visible from three statute miles. So I get a picture of that in a second. So check check your app, check the Google. And you can see sunrises at 530. You can go to. And you can start at 05:00 AM, but you've got to have your lights on if you're going to find those 30 minutes best to just stick between sunrise and sunset and you're good. You can dim the lights if they if they're too bright or too flashy, like you can adjust those if you need to. But go to time and date.com is a good way to check that Google will tell you to. So here is a screenshot of that. So time and date. This is plugging in San Diego or 2019. You can plug in any date and it tells you exactly on that day at that location, what the sunrise and sunset is. So now if you interviewed doing operations like this is good to write these in your notes shows that you've thought about these things, you care about them, you're following the law. Reads to proof that you're a good responsable pilot. This is, this is a light here on a maverick to a Lume Cube. Popular model. Put it on the top of your drone. It's really bright. And that'll, they want to make sure that other airplanes can see your drone in dark conditions were white. So that's what that's for night operations. I mentioned that there are ways to do this. You gotta have these anti collusion lights on and if you're going to fly at night for sure. There's unique challenges in terms of your eyes and being able to see things and limited depth perception. So you can't really judge well how far away things are. Difficulty perceiving reference points, collision avoidance without aircraft. So there's some regulations in there and some tips that the FA gives you will leave those alone for this, for the purposes of this. But if you've got your night operations, do a little bit more research. Make sure you're doing it right. It can be tricky. Then there's some remote ID requirements that remote ideas like having a transponder in your drone. They're not going to be effective until 2023 at the earliest. So drones will start to be, this will come standard. You may have to add something. I don't think they've quite figured this out yet. So understand remote idea is something that's coming. We don't have to deal with it yet. But you need to think about this. And if you're flying after 2023, go to Google, probably update this by them, but there are, there are going to be some rules on that. And they just want to make sure that these drones are broadcasting their location and who's flying them to the world. So a little bit controversial, but operations over people will change in 2023 at the earliest. So there's different size aircrafts and parachutes and different, there's different risks. If we have a little tiny old drone or a big drone with a big camera on it, that's £40. It matters. And you got to learn these categories. I'm not gonna go over all these in detail. But basically, if you've got a small drone with prop cages and has remote ID, you'll be good to go if you have something that will cause £11 of kinetic energy, blah, blah, blah. I think the new drones will be rated as this, like the manufacturer will work with the FAA. So we'll see how this plays out. We're not really worried about it yet. So you can't really fire where people yet, but soon enough you'll be able to and there will be more information coming out on this. So I'm not going to get into this too much until we know exactly how it's going to happen. We have the regulations, but how it's really going to be implemented is a different story. So let's just leave this alone for now and move on. Flight over moving vehicles. So you can operate over cars at some point in the future. If you want to get from one place to another, if you want to cross a road that has cars driving down it, you'll be okay. Can't hover over the road or anything like that. And you must meet the four categories we just we just showed. And they're proving your certified. There's gonna be more vigilant with this. Just kinda clarifying this heavy licence. Be willing to allow the FAA or a representative, which means most often a police officer. And you gotta you gotta have your license. You got. Allow them to expect to draw and you got to allow them to look. We've got all your records. So I think this was probably the case before. If a police officer wants to look at your drone or he has the right to. But anyways, it's being clarified more now. That's it. That's everything in a nutshell for for FAA rules and regulations. And we'll move on to Section two next. 25. Managing the Crew: Now I'm moving on section to managing the crew. So we've talked about the basics of FAA regulations. But there are things to think about when you're flying. If you have a crew, when you need a crew, What do they do? What are their official titles? And that's your job as a drone pilot to manage all those, be the quarterback and figure out what everyone's roles are. So you'll hear the term if you get into the drone world that remote pilot and command the PIC. Remember that the remote pilot and command the person designated as that person. Almost always it's the pilot, you know, who's flying the drone. They are in charge of everything. They are responsible for everything. Everything stops with them. Any damage is going to be related to them. Any anything that goes wrong, it's your fault, kind of like being the CEO of a company. Anything that goes wrong, it's on you. So that's the remote pilot and command. There is a sort of a one thing to think about. Like if you're a remote pilot and command and someone is standing next to you, you can hand the controls to them. They are the person who manipulating the controls is what the FAA calls them. Okay. They want to make sure if something goes wrong, you can grab that controller and take control immediately. And that's so in that case, you are still here always the pilot and command urine responsible for everything. But someone else may be flying. Doesn't happen that much. Usually you're just, you're flying yourself. But just be aware of that visual observer we mentioned in part one, section one. Someone who's simply watches the flight and can relay information to the pilot and command if need be. Can't use binoculars so they can stand somewhere else. Keep an eye, just another set of eyes. If you're doing something that's a little dicey. Good to have visual observers. How do we scan the sky? You're supposed to scan systematically focusing on different segments of the sky for short intervals. So I'll look at one on my diagram here. Roll it over to, to kind of look there. Let it, let it settle at your eyes. Settle for a bit. With three, go to Ford is kinda like this. Not scanning around like this and not staring at the same place, but just kinda, kinda move from different areas. Let them settle, let your eyes settle. Short intervals, move on to the next place and can go from there. So crew crew resources management, this is FAA defines this as the effective use of all available resources. So basically use anything you can to fly the drone safely and properly. And you've got to integrate this into all parts of your flight. Asked people to write questions before you even start and your preflight information. Get everyone involved, have your visual observers brief the crew. Foster communication. Constantly. Tell people what's going on, what the mission is. Hey, there's a dog over there. Watch for that. Hey, visual, gerber, go talk to the person with the dog. And just make sure that communication is flowing between everyone in the area, all the people that you're working with directly to the people you're not working directly. It's basically just communication and making sure everyone knows what's going on is safe. Risk management. You have to manage your risk, right? Pilots think about risk a lot. Part of that decision-making process. So when you're deciding what to do and you like, my battery is actin weird. It just kinda spiked like kinda keep fine. Yeah. Probably. Is there anything going to happen? Probably not. What's going to happen if I, if something goes wrong, right, That's risk-management, something really goes wrong in the FAA is going to say, hey, what were you thinking? Explain to us what went through your head. They do this with man pilots. You almost You almost hit another plane. What what would your decision when did you see things? When did you make this decision? Why did you make that decision? They want to figure this out. See if you're not a good pilot, but they also kinda want to get into the minds of pilots and to see how they operate. And maybe they can put in procedures to mitigate that. But anyways, the idea is just reduce the risk. And they have checklists for this and little things. Things that will help you remember the pave checklist is one of them, stands for pilot, aircraft environment and external pressures. So how's the pilot doing as she experienced? Are they new pilots? Are they experienced pilots? Do they not get a lot of sleep? Has the aircraft, is it an old four-year-old drone with that had some issues in the past. Is it brand-new? Your environment? Is it windy day? Are there a lot of people around that you need to think about traffic, whatever it might be, lots of power lines and worry about what's in your area. That's the environment and external pressures. Are you did you not get any sleep last night? Did you just have a fight with your significant other? You can read more about this in some of the FAA is materials, the remote pilot, small unmanned systems study guide. You can look into that more if you'd like, um, and read all about it, but just want you to be intentionally thinking about these things. Another checklist here is the decide checklist. This is sort of your thought process as, you know. As something is unfolding a situation, as unfolding, detect the problem. Why? They'll say When did you detect the problem? When when did you see another drone coming? Estimate like first thing I do, I need to react like is this thing is that other drone 100 feet below me and not even anywhere near me. Okay. I don't need to do anything and we're going to continue on my way or no. Well, I think it's getting close. I gotta do something. Choose. Think about your, which your options for doing something. Choose the best one. Identify, figure out what actions are needed, okay, I gotta get out of the way. What's the best way to get out of the way if I take a left turn and drop the drone, is at best, do is just do it right finally, okay, I'm gonna do this and we do that. This is how I'm gonna do it. I'm going to go in and then evaluate like so it's a constant feedback loop. Did it help? Is, am I going to solve the problem or not? Right? So again, you can read more about it, but this is just intentional, unintentional. Pilot. Decision-making is a big deal. Hazardous attitudes. So there are five hazardous attitudes that the FAA identifies. So things like, Hey, watch this, I'm going to fly this drone between those fence posts or invulnerability like, Oh, this won't happen to me. Like, I know how to fly drones, right? Or anti authority, like they can't tell me what to do. Or resignation. Like, Oh jeez, my drones flying away. Well, I guess I guess that's it. Or impulsivity. Like I just got to do something, something's going wrong, I got to do something. I don't I can't think through it. So these are the five-halves. There's attitudes that the FAA cares about. Drugs and alcohol. Don't be drunk. Don't be on drugs, right. So eight hours between the time you stopped drinking too, when you fly drones. So if you have a beer, don't you know, you're kind of get your drone window opens up. Your blood alcohol level must be less than 0.04%. So sort of like a like a driving test, drunk driving, driving under the influence. Any drugs that affect your capabilities in any way. So even things like benadryl and make you feel drowsy, like don't, don't fly your drone. It's kind of common sense. Or who knows marijuana, medical marijuana, anything prescribed, whatever it is, if it kinda makes you go the loopy, it could be blood pressure medication. Don't fly. If the package is don't do not operate heavy machinery, don't fly, right? Or if you've been convicted of marijuana crimes, they can suspend your license. This is loosening up, I imagine, as states legalize marijuana, but these are Federal laws. So stress management. If you start to hyperventilate and how do you stop it? Breathe into a bag. If you need to reduce stress in the field, reduce stress at home. Take medication. Reduce stress at home is the correct way to deal with this like Yeah, you can take medication. Would that affect your judgment? Now you're opening up another can of worms, so but hyperventilation is something that FAA worries about. Just getting lightheaded and breathing heavy and kinda panicking. So that's it. That's part two. And move on to part three, section to move on to section three next. 26. Emergency Procedures: Alright, section three, we're going to talk about emergency procedures. Part of our review of proper procedures and practices for new pilots. Contingency procedures. Basically, what we're looking at here is always have a backup plan. Always think through the mission what could go wrong? Emergency situations can happen at any time. Think about all your options to avoid risk. What's your plan to be? What's your plan and see? The FAA wants to see you've thought through everything prior to your flight. So That's the drill here. We talked about this in emergency procedures in terms of what you actually do with the sticks earlier, but this is more like planning it out. So preflight planning, when you're looking at your airspace, is that going to change? When we talked about this, when you're looking at your maps, like are you near a airspace? You have to think about that because you can be takeoff from unregulated airspace and be just fine. But if you go into the neighbor's yard and maybe there's an airport within a certain amount and close to you. So understand that that's not that common, but you should be aware of that. No. If they're spectators round or dogs or kids or people or anything that could affect your flight. If you're fine near an airport, even a small one, have their phone numbers ready if you need to call them for any reason like, Hey, my drone is having a fly away. If there's any sustenance coming in, you might want to let them know and until I figure out where my drone went. Right. So what do we do? Flight termination and the mission early we've talked about this kind of short examples. Find trees, find low shrubs, flying grassy areas, fields, anything soft if possible. If not, the idea is, first, don't hurt anybody. Second, don't cause any property damage. Third, get your drone back, right. So think of it in those terms and you'll be alright. If you have a fly away and you're near an airport called air-traffic control and say, Hey, my drawing is headed your way. Just so you know, you won't get in trouble for calling them. You will get in trouble if something happens, you're now you're really in trouble. So if you do everything right and you just had a malfunction and something happens, you're covering yourself. So fires on onboard lithium-ion batteries can be flammable. So in rare circumstances they will catch on fire and in your flight and you may operate for maybe a minute or so. But again, it on the ground and think about where your landing it to. Your drone is gonna be toast anyways, this is a situation where I'm, if I had water, I'd probably try to put it in the water or a road or something. I wouldn't want to put it in a dry field because this thing is going to burn. So when you're charging your drone batteries, put it in a protective pouch. They sell them on Amazon for a couple of bucks. Don't allow your batteries come in contact with metal, coins and keys and things. Don't want to get punctured or dented or anything, if anything, that looks weird. Don't use it. Seriously. Don't use it. When should I report an accident within ten days? If you do something, it has to be significant. And here's the criteria. If it damages something over $500, not including your drone but your break someone's window and they have to replace it and it costs them $1000. You've got to report that. Or a serious injury in serious injury happens or a loss of consciousness or overnight stay in a hospital or something like that. You need to report that the FAA wants data on this stuff. They probably won't do anything. I mean, you may get sued otherwise by the person just if you hurt them or break something or there's like a whole civil matter and that's just like a few smashed car with a baseball bat, they're going to come after you for the damage. But in terms of the FAA and whether you did anything illegal, this is what you've got to follow. So serious injury equals hospitalization, head trauma, broken bones, lacerations that require sutures, stitches. You can file electronically on the website or you can call them the fizz toe the flight standard district office. Probably best to do it online, I would think. So. This is when you want to have your records and tax because if they say, Oh, yeah, we want to talk to you, alright? Okay. What? Send us a copy of your Flight Logs are checklists right now is when you need all that stuff and you never know when you're going to need it. So haven't always. There is a section three and section four next. 27. Standard Procedures: Section four standard procedures. So we've talked about emergency procedures, but there are also things that you just need to do all the time regularly. So let's talk about these standard procedures. So your preflight checklist, you need to have a preflight checklist. Showed you one that I have in my flight bag. So it'll say check the propellers, check the battery. Basically kind of go through, check any loose parts, give it a good a good going over before you fly. So you have that checklist with you. You can make copies of it and actually check it off if you want to or just have it checked, maybe a laminated copy scene that you can have a particular mission checklist if you were like, this is a complicated thing. I've got many people involved. Let me make a copy of this and edit it so I have a specific checklists. Can be good for communicating with the critics. Okay, here's my checklist. These are the things we're gonna do. This is how the flow of the day is gonna go. Sometimes you have like many batteries, many flights, many things to do. Many people involved planning all this stuff. I was what a real pro will do. And kinda by thinking through it all, you're avoiding. It's just more efficient. So there are, there are eliminate Roy said in an earlier video, there are many checklists to use, download one or make your own schedule maintenance is stuff you perform on a regular basis, like changing out your propellers every ten hours, updating your firmware, updating your Fly safe database, if it's DJI, deep cycle your batteries and let them go all the way out every now and then to keep them healthy. Maybe replace your motors. And I've seen people do that, right? Well, there's, you know what, I'm going to buy the motors and replace those because those will burn out and eventually, So if you've got an older drone that you really like, i've, I've heard of people doing this and write it all down right, right out in your log book on this date, I swapped out my propellers. And then you can say, Okay, you know what, I've been flying for nine hours. I'm going to replace these soon. Let me order them. Or I've been flying this drone for 200 hours on these motors. When one dies, it gets burnt out. The drone is going down and losing everything. So might want to replace those things like that, but write it all down. That's, that's the important part and you'll cover yourself. Unscheduled maintenance. Propeller Nixon branch gets a crack in it and a little chip that's unscheduled. Maintenance still needs to be done. If you have a hard landing and you break some of the plastic and you have to glue it back together, right? That's expected of you, that you will fix all of these things or have someone do it for you. So replacing a burnt-out motor, whatever, pulling it all back together, things like that. Do I need to keep track of it? Yes. It's FDA requires that you keep track of. You have a record of everything in your drone. Didn't really say how you have to do this, but they say, What were you doing flying the drone with the big crack in the plastic like that's you should fix that. That's part of the reason that this happens. It shows that you are not a very good drone pilot. Like keep track of all this. They come from the aircraft world, right? Or they do the maintenance and checks of aircrafts like all the time, right? Every little bit of it. For good reason. There are people up there and they their lives depend on the aircraft operating properly drones. Not as much. You're right. No one's going to die if, if the drone crashes, but serious things can happen as well. So you need to have that pilots mentality that some drone pilots weren't pilots to start with, right? So they don't kinda used to this, right? So you get a logbook, write it all down. But anything you did for maintenance, required documentation. I showed you my binder in an earlier video. Everything you need to have on hand when you're flying, this is your part one was seven license. If you're flying professionally, your aircraft registration paperwork, you can print that out off the FAA drone zone. Any kind of waivers or permission that you have to fly in a certain area. The maintenance logs, which we just talked about, and then the flight book, the logging the time for each each drone that you flew, and when the prompts will get get swapped out and when the battery, if it's a new battery or whatever, that way you have, you can have the data of all of this information with you, coverage yourself legally, which is important, and it shows you what those are. Those prompts are old. I got to change those out, right? It just helps you be a safer pilot. And that's important as well. So that's it. For section four. 28. Airspace: Section five airspace, right? So we're fine our drones around. There are different things to think about when you're flying like airports, particularly where are the other planes? Where can I can I not fly my drone, right? So there's, there's a lot to this. And understanding the airspace where we fly and what the FAA considers. Its space is important and part of being a drone pilot is understanding all this stuff. So here we go, let's dig into it. So latitude, remember latitude and longitude. I bet you took some sort of course, geography course at some point and had talked about latitude and longitude. Latitude and longitude. There are lines that run across the grow the globe. So I remember it with a, across the equator is a line of latitude, 0 degrees latitude. Think a for across. They measure the line runs east to west, but they measure how far something north or south it is. So it's a little bit tricky and you gotta kinda slow down a little bit and think about this. But the lines of latitude are parallel lines that gets circled the globe that measure how far if you're at a point in the middle of the globe and you angle that up. How far north and south are we? So the basis of this is the equator. Longitude is the other lines. They run around the globe as well. They all, all running all the way around. So that's what I think about this. Oh, and it's a big circle. They're all the same. These measure how far, east or west I am, right? So it's called a great circle. So there's big as the Earth. There. There's one that runs through Greenwich, England, right? And right near London. Basically London. That is what we all have decided as 0 degrees. And then we go all the way around 360 degrees around or one eighty, one eighty West. And those measure how far east or west we are. So with those two numbers, you can pinpoint any point on the earth. Alright, so commonly use geographic coordinate system, a GCS. We won't go there. If you want to get into GIS stuff, I could do that too, but we're not going to for this so many ways with these two points, you can learn or you can figure out where you are at any point on the earth, right? So here in Boston we are at about, I think it's 41 degrees north of the equator, roughly 7772, I think degrees west of Greenwich, England. So if I look down on the globe, that angle would be 72 degrees West of Greenwich, go all the way round to 180. And that would be like the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And then you go East in London and go a 180 degrees around the other way. But anyway, so with that east or west and that north or south, we could find things on this globe, this round object that we live on. They use a base of 60, so sort of like a clock minutes and seconds. So half a degree 30 minutes is not equal to 0.5. I like to think of this kind of the numbers go up as you move towards Alaska for me in Boston anyways, but pretty much anywhere in the US. As you go northwest, the numbers go up, right? So if you're moving to the west line of longitude, if you go out to St. Louis or California, that number is gonna go up. If I go to start to go up, if I'm in let's say Florida and I'm gonna go up to North Carolina and start moving north. That number is gonna go up as well. So this matters when you're looking at the airspace maps and you're not really sure where which. You only see one number and you're like are moving to the left or right. Well then you're going to start counting up or moving up the map. I'm going to start counting up. There are lines on these airspace maps. The FAA has a bunch of maps that define all of this airspace. And this morning, when I say airspace maps, that's what I'm talking about. So I'll show you those in a minute and I'll explain them in a second. But things to remember, the equator is at 0 degrees, north pole is at 90 degrees latitudes. So 0 up to 90. At, we have the Greenwich, England line. We go a 181 way, or the other way can be either east or west or positive and negative. Things above this map. The map I'll show, I'll show that in a second. Why don't we move on? So you have to figure out where you're at. And in order to read these maps properly. Remember it's a base of 60. So here's a map, a sectional chart that one of these official FAA charts. And we can see we've got the one-on-one line running north-south here, that's a line of longitude and the 48 degrees east or west. And like I said, if anything north, like the next lineup will be 49. The next line below here will be less than 48, or a haunting. We got 101 here. And then we've got 102 over here, right. We're moving towards Alaska. I'm moving west. That line in the middle, it's unmarked. Right? But this is 100 degree, 101 degrees, 30 minutes. Okay? And then within those you could go seconds and really, really get precise. Then this line of latitude here, this tick mark here, this does not have a label on it, so this is 47 degrees 30 minutes. You have Forty-seven. Forty-seven degrees 30 minutes, 48. That's what we're seeing here. So that's how you do this. And then you can use these little teeth marks to count off exactly where you're at. You got to think, okay, this is this little teeth mark here is 47. Note, I'm sorry. That is these are all part of the a 100 and twos. Right. So this is this one right here. One hundred and one and fifty nine minutes. You can either count up or count back. Think of where I'll ask it is. Alright, so that's how you read these maps. And we're going to take the test. They would say, Hey, where's this airport at? You'd have to decipher it. So a big part of that FAA exam if you're ever going to take it. So look for the numbers with the degree signs. Like I said, the numbers go with the tick marks. Each tick mark is a minute or 30 minutes. Remember that 30 minutes is not 0.330 minutes is 0.5. So sometimes you have to translate that. Go into this, the math of it, but it's really not that hard. So like 46.9, almost at 47. That's 5446 degrees, 54 minutes. So basically multiply things by six to get there, to kind of figure that out. So 98.6, little past halfway, it will pass 98.5, right? And then, which equals 98 degrees 36 minutes. So multiply that 0.6 times six and you get 36. So that's how you do the translations if you ever need to. There's just an example. Another example map showing, showing that information. Alright, so let's talk about the class airspace. So there are, the FAA designates their airspace and they draw these polygons on these maps. And that helps us to figure out where we're at and we know where we're at, where we're flying. And we have a latitude and longitude. We can, we can figure out, we can look on these maps and say, okay, I am at one-on-one, 48 and I'm at this point right here. There's an airport here. There's no airspace information, so I'm good. That's how you do that. The FAA wants you to be able to read these maps. But some of the things you'll see on these maps are usually airports. The most common one. So class B or sports, this is the big airports. This is Boston, Logan and New York, LaGuardia, and chicago O'Hare and LAX, and all these big airports and big cities. These are where the big planes are coming in very regularly. This is where they, they don't want your flying your drone anywhere near these guys. Represented as a solid blue line on these airspace maps. They have like levels, it's like an upside down wedding cake. I'll show you that in a second. In air traffic control is in charge of everything that goes on here. So you can't fly an airplane into Boston Logan's airspace without talking to the tower. When talking to someone and they say, Okay, yes, we see you can do this, that and the other thing, it is highly regulated and don't fly your drone anywhere near that. It's without knowing what you're doing, right? So this is what it looks like on the map. So you've got most of the Greater Boston is covered. And it's like I said, it's this part here in the middle is what you really have to worry about. That's where it goes down to the surface SFC. So you can't fly your drone in there without special permission through the system, which we have a video on how to do that. This is what it looks like that upside down when it kicks. So this is Boston is right underneath here. And as you get further out, the airspace goes up so it can fly my drone underneath here. As long as I don't go up too high. And this allows the planes that come in and land vector down into that space without knowing that no one else will be there, right? So we can find the middle. This is the top-down looking at that wedding cake. Alright, that's class B, the big airplane, the big airports. So you gotta, you gotta kinda think about these shelves and this is where they indicate the shelves. This is 70 over 30. You've got to add two zeros on here. So it's really seven thousand, three thousand. They just do that to save space. So this is seven thousand, forty thousand. So the top of it is at 7 thousand, the bottom of that layer is at 4 thousand. You can't fly inside that you can find underneath it. So I can fly up to 4 thousand feet, which remember we can only go up to 400 feet with our drone, so we're well below that. We can fly our drone in this area. And this area I just can't go when it says SFC, that means surface. That means it goes right to the ground. That's where I got to. We got to worry about things with my drone. Alright, so it takes a little bit to kinda figure out this, the shelves a little bit kind of conceptualize that. As a drone pilot, you got to worry about that center core. The rest of them you don't have to worry about. Alright? Sometimes you'll see these compass roses and they kinda look like the latitude, longitude lines and they're like, Oh, that's a solid blue line. Well that, yeah, that's really interesting navigation for pilots don't, that's not anything you have to worry about. Class C airspace are airports sort of like Logan and O'Hare and LAX, big airports, but the next level down, the smaller ones in my area, like a providence in Hartford or Manchester. They still have national flights, but typically smaller planes that don't go as far. The airports are a little bit smaller, but they're regular, regular commercial traffic. There's a tower there you gotta deal with. They don't. They will also have these upside-down wedding cakes and air-traffic control. So usually it's just one shelf. I think it's almost always one shelf. So center thing again here. If it says SFC and the bottom, I can't fly anywhere in that center core. I can fly underneath this part over here because it goes up to 2500 feet and I'm gonna be flying well below that. So you need to be able to read that map and figure that out. But anyways, that's Class C airspace. One shelf. But same idea, I just explain that. So don't fly in that center core that says SFC class D airspace is our smaller airports in my area, Nantucket, Norwood, Barnes, stubble. These are represented by a dotted blue lines. Like down here to cylinder doesn't have those shelves. It's always on the surface. There is air-traffic control. Sometimes these airports shut down for the night and the air traffic control leaves at five o'clock and you're gonna kinda know when they're operating. Generally, I've just say don't operate around them. But here's the Nantucket airports, So I can't fly anywhere within this cylinder. Alright. Within this dotted blue line, it goes up to 2500 feet as indicated by this 25 in brackets. So not allowed to fly in their class D. Alright, and this is what it looks like from the side view. So just like a cylinder, one level cylinder. Don't confuse the compass rose. Class E is everywhere. Everywhere else, right? So everywhere else is class II. Usually it starts at 700 feet up. So again, as drone pilot, we're up to 400 feet. Were not up there. Were assessed this fly. Sometimes it starts at 1200 feet, sometimes it starts higher. That is what these faded magenta lines indicate. Not that relevant to drone pilots, but sometimes like I said, that exception where you can go up to 400 feet, but if I have a 400 foot building, now I'm up to 800 feet, that I may be into that 700 foot area, then I'd be illegally flying and airspace and not allowed to. So that can happen. Gotta be aware of that. But for the most part, cross E airspace is way above us. Anything inside of the fade is 700 feet. Anything outside of it is 1200 feet. Most of the time, it's outside of your at 1200 feet. Alright. So 700 or 1200, depending on which side of that that fade urine. So here you go. So 700 feet in here, 1200 feet in this area. Sometimes you'll see these dotted lines, class II to surface. And anytime you see a dotted line, that means you can't fly there. This is where typically the planes fly out in and out of Nantucket, So they keep that area open. Sometimes you'll see that on these maps that can be a little confusing, but just consider it a blue dotted line and you're fine. Class G airspace is think G for ground. Not really shown on the map. That's pretty much everywhere else in the world that's not near an airport and not way above us. It's that layer, the ground, this is where the drone pilots fly. Usually starts at 700 feet or 1200 feet. So this is sometimes called uncontrolled airspace and it's controlled like you're still rules, like you can do whatever you want. There are still other planes flying around. But this is this is the drone pilots area. This is where we live. In class G airspace. That's anything down here underneath the E. That's yeah, that's airspace. In a nutshell. If you're going to take the test, you gotta kinda, that's a lot of the tests is understanding. Being able to read these maps and figure out where you're at and making sure that you're not flying near airports, which is really what the FAA is concerned about. Safe drone pilots. So are we asked to draw there? 29. Special Use Airspace: Special use airspace. We've talked about the typical aerospace classifications, the airports, the air that surrounds us, airports that we should not be flying in. And let's look at some other special uses. So the first one to think about is prohibited airspace. What is prohibited airspace? Basically exactly what it sounds like. Don't fly there. Ever. Designated by these circles with the check marks on the inside. And if it has a P, there, means P450 can go get more information about it. I think this is Camp David. The National Mall in Washington DC, the White House. Don't fly there ever, ever like n, you will be arrested if you do. So. There's a reason, right? It's something they don't want you anywhere near there watching, so don't ever fly and prohibited airspace is pretty, pretty simple. Just remember that if you see a P dash, whatever, that is, prohibited, restricted airspace. So this is a little different, starts with an R instead of a p. This is our 4401, a and b. So this is a restricted area. You can fly here. If you have permission. In order to get permission, you need to call the proper authority and you could these maps will find this information online. And usually it's, in this case camp Shelby, like an Air Force base, right. So they've got planes take it in and out of there that are probably doing lots of training, testing, things called the proper authority. And they're set up to take these calls in and ask for if you can fly. There are a few allowed to fly, there are no others say no. It's, it's hot or cold. If they say hot, you can't fly there, something's going on. You don't want your drone anywhere near there. If they say cold, yeah, no, we have nothing scheduled for today. You're good. You're allowed to fight it, but you gotta you gotta call them first. So restricted airspace, call them. Get a hot or cold determination to let you know if you can fly. Warning area starts with a W and W dash 237 B over here. You can fly here, but just be careful really what they're saying and saying, you know, something's there's a reason other international flights are coming through here all the time, whatever it is, but it's just, this is more for man pilots to say, yeah, be careful there's something, there's something here, there's a lot of activity around this area. You know, just, just be careful, alright, so warning areas, you don't do anything, anything there's no one to call. Just be aware that you are in it flying in a warning area and you'll be good. An alert area is the same thing as a warning area in terms of how to deal with it. Now this will start with an a. So a to 11 here. And the blue high-volume. Sometimes they'll, they'll tell you around on these maps for high volume of rotary fixed wing flight training. So there's probably a helicopter school there or rotary and fixed wing. So any kind of school. So helicopters and or planes are flying there a lot. There's a flight school every day. They've got new pilots up. I'm saying, alright, you don't need to. The airspace is okay. But just be aware, be careful understanding what's going on and be prepared to deal with it. So that's alert area starts with an a military operations area. So this is the pine Hill East MFA. Write this area with the jagged lines on the inside. Same idea as the last two. It's just a warning. But you might understand that there's some military operations going on. Be prepared to deal with them and explain what you're doing. These guys don't really tend to care about drones and you've taken a picture for real estate or whatever, you know, they they're worried about their job and doing what they need to do. So be prepared to speak to them. And you'll, you'll be alright. But it's really just, again, just you don't have to do anything technically, but be prepared to deal with the military. An MTR is a military training route. This is where lots of fights you're going by sometimes very fast or they're flying jets around, think Top Gun. They are, they are labeled and there is a little bit tricky to figure out. The four-digit roots are more important for, again, you don't need to do anything in particular. Just be aware that every now and then may go bomb and by you at zinging value, 500 feet high and low. Just if you can look on the map to see where this is commonly happening, you're in good shape. Same thing. There's three digits, four digits, numbers, but just be aware of those gets a little complicated with what they mean. Don't worry about it. But if you see any kind of MTR in your area, just planes are flying, rely on real fast and be prepared. So those are your, your kind of your ADH uses. Typically more out west. If you're if you're in the Midwest or the rocky, Rocky Mountains, California, western half of the country is, has seemed to have more of these areas than we do here in the Northeast, but good to know. They're there, they're everywhere. If you read the map, this is part of being a safe pilot, understanding what regulations are around you. There are some that pertain to you all the time and some that don't. And being able to read this map will tell you which ones you have to think about. 30. Airport Operations: Section seven, airport operations, continuing our theme here of understanding the airspace and regulations that can come and go at airports and other various times. Regulations can pop up and you need to understand what they are, what they're all about. So we'll start with a no TAM notice to airman. Airman. Air person's probably more, more, more better. General information not a pilot may need. They will publish this information on the web. And it could be the tower has a burnt-out bulb, so be aware of that. We haven't fixed it yet or there's this place is out of gas, is mostly geared towards man pilots. But as a responsible drone pilot, it's good to check these notations there. Here's the web site. Easy to look and dial in your area and say, okay, what's going on here? That's a lot of times has to do with airports and things. And usually we're not fine airports as drone pilots. So not all that relevant, but good to understand what it is if you're doing something kind of tricky. Again, goes to phi, say, Oh, I checked my notes, hymns. I understand that what's going on in this area, you're makes it look good. Carbons yourself. Temporary flight restrictions, TF ours, here is a one that I pulled. This is the Mets Stadium here. Used to be shaved. What city? City field now, something like that. Anytime there's a baseball game, they'll put up a no fly zone. Temporary flight restrictions around the stadium begins at a certain time, a couple of hours before the game, couple of hours after the game. So the six-hour window there, they don't want you flying. No one can fly there. Anything there there there helicopters there, blimps. Are there drones, particularly without permission. So don't fly a drone overstated. We're gonna get in trouble on many, many reasons, many regulations. But that's what a temporary flight restrictions as they'll they'll block off an area for a six-hour window. They'll tell you in advance when it is. So this is scheduled so few days in advance. You should know anytime there's a home game, any college football game or open stadium concert, the FAA will put on these these CFRs, put them up. So be aware of those. Understanding runway numbering can be useful when you're looking at the maps and if you like, you know, kind of zoomed into an airport and you say, oh, you know, understanding that these airports are based on the compass bearings. And if you add a 0, this would be 90 degrees and 270 degrees. On this runway. And due south and east are due east and west, right? And kinda understanding, looking at the runways and saying Okay, this is where the planes take off, is where they're going to be low. Even if it's a small airport where it's just like excesses and it's not controlled airspace. Understanding that okay. This is their typical path, right? Even if you're far away, if the air, if you're in line with that airport, that runway, you got to think about that, that's important. Whereas if you're 90 degrees the other way, lot less chance that the airplane is going to be real low, whether it's when it's taking off and landing. You know, the the airplane will be really low over here and over here, not so much on the sides. So reading, being able to read those numbers will help you figure out how they orient. Airplanes do this. This isn't really relevant for drone pilots, but it's good to know where they typically will be flying. Faa would kinda wants drone pilots to understand what's going on if they're flying your drone near an airport. And their traffic pattern, when they, when they come into the airport area, they have a certain procedure where they want to land wind and we'll circle the airport, go buy it, take a look. And there's a procedure that they need to do when they enter the area. So if drone pilots understand that, I say, okay, I'm flying around this airport. I know that the airplanes are going to come back this way and that's where I should be looking at. So I should tell my visual observer, hey, we got an airport here. Keep, keep an eye that way. That's where the planes typically come from. So understanding this pattern will help you understand where planes may be coming from. If you're going to be, become a man pilot and Your Man pilot course, you can have to learn all of this. I think the FA just wants drone pilots have a basic understanding of what's going on that can change right upwind and downwind. There's a wind changes and whenever it might base, but you should be able to draw this out and understand the thought process of how this all works. Chart symbols are lots of, there's lots of things shown on those maps. Many different symbols. There's 131 page document showing them all that the FAA publishes, though aren't all that. A lot of them are pretty obvious. If you're going to take the test, There's this is a good thing to look at, but understand that we've got towers. Airports are the circles. They'll give numbers next to the, these towers, these, these little mountain look at things with the dots. Sometimes it'll have a dot on the top with a light. So you know that it's lighted. You can say, Oh yeah, that's the latest Tower. The numbers or the height. So the height above sea level and at an above ground level. So that gives you two numbers. And you can figure out how high these things are. So there's someone says, Yeah, you got to inspect that tower. Oh, yeah, it's on the map. And that's how high it goes. It can help you. And if you could go 400 feet above that, you can start to calculate the mission a little bit using these numbers. Really, there are obstacles for man pilots, right? That's where they got to worry about them. But they need to the FAA wants you to understand what you're looking at. As far as drone pilots understand whether the tower pokes into the class E airspace. So I can't I can only inspect most of it, not all of it. Right. So lot of other things to deal with. We've talked about most of them. You get used to it. It's a bit of a mess here. I think this is Cleveland. So there's a lot going on. A lot of towers. Couple of airports. Sometimes we have other airports like a like a small airport right here. Another one right here. That sit underneath the shelves are those bigger airspaces, so it can get very complicated pretty quickly. But again, that center core is what you're worried about. And then anything in these dotted lines are off limits. Unless you want to go to the next level. We haven't really talked about that in this course. It's more advanced stuff. So, but anyways, but there's a lot there on here. This explains it a little bit. Here's a tower symbol. I've got two towers. The highest one is 4,977 feet above sea level. It's a 1432 foot tower. Alright, so above ground level and we could, we could calculate the mean sea level if we subtracted them. So these are unlabeled towers. You've got these weird numbers here. The maximum elevation figure. This is more for pilots crossing over them, they're saying or the highest thing that you've got to worry about in this square is at 13,400 feet above sea level. So good for if you're planning a long flight. We don't do that with drones. So other things, you've got helicopter pads and if they're blue, they're towered, if they're magenta, they call this is non towered. They have lights on the top. There are light it up. See plain bases, VFR checkpoints and worry about that. That's a thing that you'll see these little flags everywhere. That's visual flight rules, man, pilot stuff. So a lot of stuff on there that we don't really need, but good to know what they are. So you know that, that's not important, right? Radio information. If you want to listen to the radio, they don't really want drone pilots talking to them is calling and saying, Hey, I'm a drone pilot, like stay off the radio for the most part. You really know what you're doing, but this is where you can, if you have a radio, you can listen to the different frequencies and different things gives you information about elevations and whether there's fuel there or how long runway is stuff that again, don't really need it. But if you want to listen in lots of radio information there. Elevation creator peak here is at 11 thousand feet. Good to know for fine over that. And the US chart supplement, this gives you information about airports. So if you're flying around an airport, it's good to pull this thing out, have it with you when you fly there again, shows you, shows that you know what you're doing and your planned out the mission. So you'll have the phone number on there. Layout of the airport, what it looks like. If you're in class. There are airports, small airports within class G airspace, so you can fly the next the next property over. There may be low airplanes, so be aware you are going to get to know what you're doing. But having their phone numbers, probably the most important part. So here's Nantucket airport. And it kinda gives you all the information you ever wanted to know. But on there you'll find the phone number, right? The Airport Manager at 50832, five fifty, three hundred. If you want to give him a call. And chart supplements are found online. You can search them by the airport code. You can search him by state. They update them periodically, but go online and you can find them at that address. Radio frequencies. So they have whether frequencies, they have control tower or listened to what the towers are saying to the airplanes and you got another one coming in and sometimes you have automated messages. So it's just a loop of what's going on in the updated every hour or so. Clear skies, clouds at 4 thousand feet, blah, blah, blah. Again, not really that relevant, where so low that it's Furman pilots, but good to know. There's different types. Here are the different types of channels. So the CTF pilots use that to announce when they enter the airspace. There's the weather broadcasts, automatic, repeated info. That can be like, Oh yeah, the light bulb is out there. There's a pothole on the runway or there's birds report or we hear things like that. Again, I'm not a man pilots, so I don't deal with this much, but you can dial in to each of the frequencies and get information as you're if you want to from the ground. Fcc, Federal Communications Commission, Communication Commission, 2.4 gigahertz and 5.8 gigahertz, or the bandwidths that we've drones operate on and the frequencies that we use to communicate. So they, they are involved in that bandwidth and regulating all of that stuff. So just be aware of that. They are, they can be involved in drawing things as well, as well as the national telecom and information administration. This is when you get into privacy issues. So if someone says someone says, Hey, you know, what do you know? You've got a drone and he's been fine in my backyard. Taking pictures. Find out my window taken pictures like call the FAA. The FAA would say, Yeah, that's none of our business. We just care about crashes. Like what people do with their drones is if it's not a safety issue, we're not interested, call the NTIA. You also might have state and local laws that apply depending where you're at. So let privacy issues think NTIA FAA is more just thinking about keeping everyone safe up there and avoiding crashes and minimizing risk. All right. 31. Airport Weather Notices (METARs & TAFs): Alright, whether how does it relate to us drone pilots understanding the weather? Weather is different for drone pilots than it is for men Pilots. Man pilot's usually going from a to b. Whether can certainly be different from where they take off, from, where they're going to be, hundreds of miles. And they need to plan out whether a little bit more when we're flying drones, we're in kind of a little bit of a bubble and half-mile usually circle. Not even usually it's around a house or something. So we can just use our eyes and ears and understand the weather. We can also use an app that tells us right where we're at, where the weather is. So the FAA wants you to understand whether stuff, it's really more for man pilots. And even to the extent that they do not ask you about whether on the recurrent test, they're really just want you to understand this. If you're going to take the first test and get your license, you got to know this a little bit. It's really not that important, honestly, not that important. You've got to worry about the weather, but it's a different game. Withdrawn pilots. So frankly, understanding this stuff and learning if you want to take the test. Yeah, sure. You're gonna have to learn this stuff, but I've never really paid much attention to this weather information. When I'm flying, I just use my weather app. It's much more accurate. So that's what I'm going to use. So I'll run through it real quick. A METAR is it's a French acronym. Not even sure what it means, but basically tells you the weather at an airport. And it's this long string of, of letters here. If you want to take the exam, you've got to have to translate that. And I could probably translate it, but it's saying at JFK Airport, on this date, at this time there's eight knot wind coming out of the South. Well, there's ten statute miles visibility, there's broken clouds at 2700 feet, it's overcast, it 15 thousand feet, like I need to know that. Then there's the dew-point in the humidity. So if you're worried about fogging and moisture on your windshield and stuff, That's it. That's what you got to worry about and that's what Anyways, it's a weather statement for a particular airport. And this code, this is the translation if you really wanted to go through it. So I won't bore you with that. But anyways, it's a weather statement. Here's another one and another one for Nantucket. If you wanted to figure it out. If you want to, you can pause it and figure it all out if you so choose. So there are some definite, some acronyms or code here. We have C means overcast, became means broken again. Wouldn't worry too much about it. If you take the test, they will, it will ask you to translate one of these be one question of the 70 questions. A TAF, a terminal eardrum forecasts is basically the same thing as METAR, except it adds forecasts information. So you've got your METAR on the first line here and then it saying from this time to this time, you're going to have this clouds in. Four hours from now, clouds are going to roll in and then four hours later it's going to start to rain. And so you can kind of get a forecast, not just the current weather plus a forecast. Anyways, my weather applicant to do a better job of it. So that's the translation. We don't need to go with that if you want to pause it and take a look and figure it out good for you, but those are your weather information. 32. Load and Balance Considerations: Alright, here's our final section. In section nine, loading and performance run through this quickly. In terms of things you need to know. The FAA wants you to know. Alright? So aerodynamics matter with flight. That will affect how the drone flies and some things you need to think about when you put these drones up in the air. The physics of flight. There are lots of different forces that are acting. There's, there's when there's weight, there's no gravity, right? Lift, drag gravity and thrust the four forces of flight. And understanding them. It's good, good physics project, but also important to understand as drone pilot, what you've got up there on the, up in the air. We're going to kind of keep in mind the center of gravity, that invisible point whereby the drone will balance and remains still have held up. So if I put a certain point, if I could get that certain center of gravity on a drone or any object, it would balance there. Then it will be loaded. All the weight would be equal all the way around it and it wouldn't tilt over. This matters, right? If the drone is unstable, if you put a big weight on one arm of the drone, that it's going to have to compensate. It's going to use a lot more energy. It's going to cut down your flight time. So they're really worried about here. What the FAA is worried about is people putting things on their drones and understanding that the energy costs, they have to fly and high winds and the wind is pushing around, your battery is going to drain a lot faster than if it's a nice still day or if you're just doing nice, easy flying, your battery is going to last longer. Alright, so you've got to have it certain awareness of the physics that are going on up there. So there's that center of gravity is in every object, right? So when you're talking about aerodynamics, you're talking about jets or planes. Like if you have a center of gravity, it's got a higher stalls, be able to slower cruise speed. It's more stable. And ath center of gravity go faster but it's less stable. This is getting into the weeds a little bit with aerodynamics and we don't really need to know about this, but know this. If you put a weight on your drone, it's going to mess up the balance and it's going to mess up your flight and it's gonna be starting to get dangerous. You may hit a certain stall speed if you're not going fast enough, the prompts aren't moving fast enough. If you're taking a hard banking turn with something some kind of weight on there, it may not be able to handle it and the aircraft will start to drop. And you need to understand that you need to get a feel for your aircraft and how it flies. Critical angle of attack of attack is again, aerodynamics where the air, the air aircraft will lose flight effectiveness and won't really fly anymore. You know, more relevant to fixed wing regular airplanes then quadcopters, which are just kinda more stable. But you still need to understand it a little bit. Another thing to understand is that the density altitude. So low density altitude, thin air. When you fly higher, your, your drone is going to fly. Not as well. It's going to have trouble spinning, getting enough air to keep it up is going to have to work harder. The air is thinner the higher you go, the more altitude you go. So when density altitude goes up, performance goes down. You try to make a turn and it's, there's less air for it to work with the push against. So understand that things like altitude I just mentioned, temperature, humidity can both affect your flight. That's a real dry day in winter or a real muggy day. The air is different. Those spinning blades need that, need to hit the air and the water molecules. And the thicker the air, the more it's going to fly, but it will have impacts on your, your energy, your battery power. You've got to worry about things like buildings or mountains where there's an, a windy day. If you're say you're walking in the city and you, sometimes you feel much wind and you go around a corner and then all of a sudden you get hit by a big blast of wind, right? So you got to think about that with your drone as well, Right? There could be updrafts and downdrafts and you might get sucked into a building if it's windy day. And the weight that you're flying with, do you have a heavy drone or light drone? You got to worry about that. So as we weight increases, the flight time is reduced. Crime rate is reduced, your performance decreases. Stability is reduced. Acceleration There's reduced, maximum altitude is reduced. Then if you add when to that, you've got a lot pushing on your drone and burning up a lot of power just to keep it still. This is increasing your or your load factors. Did you put something on there that you're carrying? So we're, we're imposing forces on these, these, these drones. And it affects your performance, including your turns. And this is a load factor chart so you could plug in your bank angles. If I, if I do a 90 degree bank angle all the way sideways, it's going to greatly increased my g's, the amount of gravity. You're on a car or on a corner in a car fast, you start to get pushed down a little bit more, right? So understand that there's a lot more force pushing on that drone. That's when things are going to break. That's what a prompt is going to break. That's what a motor is going to say. I'm done, I'm burnt out. So these bank turns, this is how you measure that. So we're going to take a 60 degree bank turn. You're doubling, you're going up to, to your G units, your gravity. So there's twice as much gravity pushing down on that thing. So that's a load factor chart. Payload. Is there anything is strapped to your drone? Understand that? We talked about weights, boy, back in the first section. You still that payload is part of the weight of that drone. So if you have a £50 drawing, you add £10 underneath it. Now you're £60 drone. Now you got, you got a different set of regulations to deal with, so you're not allowed to drop it. And if you carry something, you gotta write it down and say what it is and don't carry hazardous materials. So that's it. So that's it. So that's everything. In short, nutshell, what you as a drone pilot, if you're safe drone pilot, what kind of what the FAA wants you to know? More of the legalistic laws you need to follow. But it's all part of being a safe drone pilot. It's all part of preparing well and understanding what you're doing. There's the first part of the course we talked about sticks and how to, how to fly and different ways to plan your flight. The FAA, they don't care about that. They expect you to figure that out on your own. So it's almost like two different skill sets. You need to be a good pilot, so I hope that's useful and good luck. 33. Thank You!: Thank you for watching these videos and allowing me to be your instructor. I really appreciate your time and I hope you got a lot out of it. I've got some other courses on Skillshare later to drones if you're interested, and invite you to check those out if you like my style. And I have some other videos on geographic information systems or QGIS, open-source, Open-source, digital mapping GIS, stuff that I, that I think you might like. So again, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing some of your drone shots in the project section. And if you have any questions, reach out and I will get back to you with some answers. Alright, Thanks.