Drone Pilots’ Pay is Dropping
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
People who can not differentiate their goods or services in quality or price will find themselves in a mighty rut, and that's a good thing. Why should we expect the price of drone piloting to stagnate rather than decrease?
But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.
You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel.
Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
There is a lot of Excel and Microsoft project at the higher levels (resource loading, financial tracking), with more specific software tooling for the lower down/more specialized work (think material and labor estimates, load calculations, environmental modeling, other engineering calculations).
It's true, a firm building residential track housing may be working off really simple project management tools, but that may be all you need. Start building things like powerplants, bridges, skyscrapers and you'll see a whole new tool set.
[1] responsible for $100m+ civil entering and construction projects annually
Each truckload of concrete gets cylinders made. soil/gravel gets sent to labs for testing. Landfill liner welds get field tested and sent to labs to be strength tested for every X ft of welding...
I'm not sure how you would use a drone to help this.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/iris-automation-raises-1-5...
Iris Automation has raised money to bring (...) truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks.
Competitors to Iris in the drone industry specifically include SRI spin-out Area 17 (also known as a17), Intel RealSense Technology, Parrot’s SLAMdunk systems and DJI’s Guidance systems.
What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or other aircraft (e.g. VFR). The future is not everyone flying drones with proprietary AI collision avoidance. One existing product in this space is FLARM which is used by a lot of glider pilots and light aircraft, they also make a UAV variant: https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/
Autonomous drones themselves exist, are inexpensive, and can be set to fly a survey pattern based on a number of pre-selected GPS waypoints. Ardupilot will do this. The data is used for mapping at a much higher level of data than online maps. Think agri, ecology, general site surveying, etc.
That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale mapping. The flight time is poor. An aircraft modified for surveying can cover hundreds of square kilometres a day. A consumer drone with an hour's flight time (good luck) is going to struggle to compete.
Collision avoidance at the local level (e.g. are you going to hit a wall) is a different issue, and that can be solved by standard depth sensors.
You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes. A quick google search tells me you can pick up a drone with over an hour of flight-time for 3.5k-ish (I don't know much about drone pricing so someone may have better options)
Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
You can purchase 10 drones for the price of one airplane. Which I can't imagine an airplane could out map/survey 10 drones working together. I don't know much about drones or planes though so there are probably other restrictions.
On the other end, it's probably not just any plane for mapping, so cost could be higher. Plus the gimbal and sensor cost is going to be non negligible.
Airplanes have to fly higher though, and thus at lower resolutions. The newest satellites are also getting closer to what they do, and they obviously have better coverage, so the market is shrinking.
Sure, because the OP called out Google maps and that's how Google maps (at high resolution) is created. Drone mapping does tend to be much higher quality because you get a higher image cadence at a lower altitude.
Fixed wing drones tend to be better in terms of flight time, that's certainly true. And you can get gliders which will last even longer if you manually thermal them.
> Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to 40k (reasonable)
Add on at least another 20k for survey quality cameras (up to hundreds of k) and more for getting your plane modified (hole in the fuselage) and re-certified. Pilots are expensive, fuel is expensive and getting your annual COA (Certificate of Airworthiness, in the UK), insurance etc is not cheap. Google's surveying aircraft have at least five cameras so they can use photogrammetry (structure from motion) to create their 3D maps. As soon as you introduce surveying LIDAR into the equation, add a zero or two onto the cost estimate.
I don't disagree that you could fly a drone fleet instead of an aircraft, but for country-scale mapping, aircraft make a lot of sense.
The flip side of this unhappy mapping equation is that if you're happy with lower resolution remote sensing data the government satellite programmes are mostly free and libre.
Flarm and Adsb (mostly in for now, out is more difficult/heavy but there are a few prototypes) are seeing some use. Companies are also trying to standardise around existing aeronautical standards, or to create new ones where needed. But it's a free market and it's not clear which solution will win in the end. The regulators are also closely following.
Collision avoidance when in visual conditions is "see and avoid", which is all aircraft's responsibility. CFR 14-91.113.b [0]
There is no solely electronic negotiation of airspace permitted (at least not currently). It is unlikely that the FAA would change the law to require all aircraft to be so equipped and, even if they did, it would be close to two decades before any such deadline would come to be. Look at the slow adoption of ADS-B, which is only required in a select minority of airspace starting in 2020.
Before that happens, a good first step is to require all drones to transmit an ID linked to a person. I suspect that just that step would help to curb the worst excesses of amateur drone pilots.
I also saw an article here on HN about the seniority pyramid scheme (which I can't find now).
http://www.askthepilot.com/pilot-shortage/
Salaries have traditionally started out as low as $20,000 a year (in some cases even lower), and have topped out at under six figures.
Hilarious. How much did Greenspun make as CEO of his startup? Enough that he could retire and become a dilettante pilot, how much did his workers make?
A drone license costs $150 to take a multiple choice test with 60 questions, and you only have to pass 70% of them.
Which a commercial requires 150 total hours. And that is the bare minimum. You're still considered a baby pilot in the industry with that few amount of hours.
> A drone license costs $150
And is less than most hourly rates for a plane. That's without an instructor too.
Depends. If you work out of Los Angeles, it’s critical, if your drone business helps the farmers in Kansas or Iowa, there’s not that much airspace variation.
$2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can do.
In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.
Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level "emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a 50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000 developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute)
(I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)
To parent’s point, very specialized and experienced engineering consultants can make a lot. Even something like an expert witness report can be $4-5K per day.
But to repeat these tend to be gigs where this sort of click is running for a very small portion on 200 days per year. It’s not at all like regular contract work.
> “It’s apparent that a lot of this industry is a race to the bottom,” said Trench,
Bloomberg didn't say this, so can it really be a click bait headline?
basic economics
If the current drone pilots want to keep the high salaries, they should add more barriers to entry. This would keep out the hobbyists from picking up side jobs and eroding the market and will also raise the cost of entry, aside from the hardware purchase.
Or, instead of the noncompetitive approach, they should differentiate themselves from the competition, and offer added value the hobbysts can't.
Most drone pilots aren't acting within the law. Bad news for them in a commercial situation is that mishaps will be a personal liability issue.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/
Section 107 compliance doesn't add much to the cost of operation and so anyone who really wants drone footage and already has people on location (for example a construction company), can just buy a drone, get an employee licensed and shoot their own footage. The risks are less because insurance is simplified, the schedule more flexible, and nobody has to waste time soliciting bids, negotiating terms, and processing invoices.