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    Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot
    Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot
    Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot
    Ebook267 pages2 hours

    Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot

    By John Deans

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    About this ebook

    All across America, people are learning to fly. Drones are taking to the skies to help in search-and-rescue, industry, journalism and hobbies. While drones look like toys, they are anything but. They require the discipline of a pilot and the legal support of a license. But how do you get approved to take the controls? John Deans has gone through the paces to get his Federal Aviation Administration license to fly drones, and his updated second edition will help you understand how you can get your drone wings. His step-by-step guide identifies the preparation and practice necessary to earn your license.

    So while there are thousands of drone pilots emerging in this exciting field of technology, photography and security, they're still required to undergo strict and exacting licensing procedures. John Deans provides a comprehensive legal guide to secure your license and safely operate a drone.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSelf-Counsel Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2016
    ISBN9781770404625
    Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot
    Author

    John Deans

    John Deans has been working in the IT industry since the early 1980s. In 1991, he was one of the founding members of Paranet, a Houston-based computer network integration consulting firm that grew to have over 2,000 employees in 23 offices by 1997. After Paranet was sold to Sprint, Deans moved his family to a ranch near Brenham, Texas. In 1999 he founded Deans Consulting, LLC, and he now has a thriving business in the Brazos Valley area in rural Texas—and is loving the lifestyle of a rural computer consultant.

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      Book preview

      Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot - John Deans

      Introduction

      After experiencing the computer boom in the early 1980s, I’m seeing the same initial eruption of a new, advanced industry; one that combines aviation, technology, and photography creating the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market. Also known as drones, these airborne technological wonders have exploded onto both consumer and commercial environments creating opportunities for all. As legal entities such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and state legislatures catch up with the fast-developing industry, marketplace rules will soon be established for a high-flying entrepreneurial race to begin.

      The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive roadmap on how to become a commercial drone pilot and earn a good income creating beautiful aerial videos, 2D photographic mapping, and other UAV-based aerial services. We will focus on the most popular drone platform, the DJI Phantom line, take you through the current FAA UAV licensing processes, and describe in detail how to start and run a UAV-based aerial photography business. The market share for DJI is estimated to hit $1 billion in 2015, so they are the safe bet for the best and smartest UAV available, and they have the capital for good support and future product development in the years to come.

      1. Original, Old-school RC

      The old name for drones and UAVs is Remote Controlled (RC) model airplanes and helicopters. As a kid in the 1970s, I remember many kids with cool dads who had impressive RC planes, which they built and flew as father and son/daughter bonding projects. Back then it took both true piloting skills and a nearly required background in small gas-engine maintenance to get those little motors started and keep them running properly. There were no technical aides like First Person View (FPV), GPS-guided flight, or a return home feature.

      RC pilots back then had no choice but to maintain line of sight with the aircraft and be responsible for all aspects of takeoff, flight pattern, and landing it in one piece without knowing the exact amount of fuel left in the tiny tank. Most of these early RC configurations were put together by hand with off-the-shelf components from a local hobby shop, or ordered from a model plane catalog. Painstaking efforts were made and numerous hours spent carefully assembling the airframe, mounting the wings, and connecting all the airfoil control surfaces. This was followed by testing sessions to verify the RC controller was compatible and reliable with the model plane’s receiver unit.

      After all the workshop labor was completed, it was time to head to the park and try the first test flight. If you were able to finger-start the prop without losing a digit, the time finally came to test your flying skills for real, but while standing on the ground. Remember, this was before computer or Internet-based flight simulators were in the home, so usually only true private pilots or seasoned commercial passenger jet captains were able to smoothly operate their airborne creations.

      Lord help you if the funds were available and you built an RC model helicopter. Those who thought flying a fixed-wing RC plane in a pattern and landing smoothly in a field was difficult never attempted flying an RC helicopter; those who did were likely to crash it the very first day. Even after basic flight maneuvers were learned, any small mistakes at low altitude or strong gusts of wind during landing could make a dangerous accident occur quickly. Life and limb were in jeopardy when a two-foot (or larger) radius RC helicopter rotor broke up during a rough landing.

      A couple of generations ago, flying those RC crafts took patience, skill, and actual aeronautical knowledge. One was always aware of landing zone options, fuel levels, altitudes, wind direction, airspeed, and visibility.

      2. UAVs Are Here

      Fast forward a few decades, and we now have an explosion of high-tech quadcopters that can be removed from the box, flown autonomously to GPS waypoints, and viewed on an iPad within minutes of delivery from Amazon.com. By the way, how long will it be until Amazon delivers your new drone with an Amazon delivery UAV to your home an hour after your online purchase, given they’re considering drone deliveries?

      We now have the low-cost and limited-feature quadcopter drones from Parrot starting at $100 all the way up to the long-range and heavy payload oct-rotor UAVs for $10,000 or more. For ultra-range UAVs, both the consumer and the commercial pilot can opt for fuel-efficient, fixed-wing planes that can fly waypoint courses for tens to hundreds of miles if you are willing to make that investment.

      Again, the drone platform we are going to focus on in this book is the most popular UAV on the market, the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus and Phantom 3 quadcopters. Tens of thousands of DJI Phantoms have been purchased, flown, crashed, and enjoyed in the US over the past couple of years, and this is just the start. It is one thing to take out your new Phantom, get it a couple of hundred feet in the air above your subdivision and start taking pictures. It is another to plot out a strategy on how to utilize this amazing flying camera in a profit-making venture, during the birth of the UAV commercial market in a barely legal environment (barely legal at the moment, because there is currently a ban on commercial droning unless you have an FAA 333 exemption, which we will discuss in Chapter 11).

      This book is a comprehensive guide on how to make money with your DJI Phantom in a robust but legal manner. We will cover all aspects of what it takes to develop your aeronautical skill sets, commercial photography capabilities, small-business marketing techniques, safety procedures, video editing processes, end product deliverables, computer software for aerial mapping, and UAV maintenance practices.

      3. Why Am I the Right Person to Teach You How to Make Money with Drones?

      I was a National Honor Society A student at Bellaire High School in Houston, Texas, but I despised college at the University of Houston. So, before the first week of my freshman semester was over, I was out. Since I was only 18 years old, I had to wait a year before I could apply to the Houston Police Academy to start a career in law enforcement. During that year, my dad found me a job at Control Data Corporation (CDC) as a process control clerk working with computers. This began my 35+ year career in Information Technology (IT), as a fluke; I never joined HPD. The simple reason was I was making more than the cops were when I became a programmer in less than a year.

      During that same year in 1982, I began flight school to get my private pilot’s license flying out of Houston Hobby airport. I was trained on a low-wing Grumman Cheetah, and before the year was over I passed my check ride and became an FAA-licensed private pilot.

      The Author and His Plane

      Those were the simpler days. I worked hard in the computer rooms to earn plane rental money for the weekend. Since there were no digital cameras back in the 1980s and I could not afford a big-dollar SLR camera, I’d fly down the Galveston beach with the plane’s canopy pulled all the way back, while holding my Kodak Instamatic film camera with a dozen exposures trying to get a good aerial shot from only a few hundred feet above the surf. Try to fly that low nowadays and you’d probably have at least the FAA on you when you landed, if not the National Guard out of Ellington military base on the trip back.

      After three years, I left CDC as a systems analyst to migrate oil field reservoir simulation software to every type of super computer available from 1984 to 1987, while working with J. S. Nolen and Associates. During that time I married my first wife and had a son. Aerial anything went to the very back burner. I guess that is what happens when the responsibility of a family hits you when you are young.

      Things got interesting again when I became manager of computer operations at CogniSeis Development and started making some good money in 1988. The downside of those days is my marriage broke up, but the upside was I got to start flying again and spend some good one-on-one time with my growing boy.

      When the first digital cameras came out in the early 1990s, I had to try them out by flying over downtown Houston. Remember, this was pre-9/11, so it was no big deal to fly near buildings at less than 1,000 feet Above Ground Level (AGL). By that time, I was a networking consultant being billed out by Paranet to Fortune 100 companies in Houston like Amoco, British Petroleum, and Compaq Computer. I borrowed the company’s first digital camera, which cost more than $1,000 and only took black and white images.

      My boss wanted to take some aerial pictures of his home in Memorial, so we used the new corporate camera. The neat thing about the digital camera was that I could see my aerial photos as soon as I got home and downloaded them to my Windows 3.1 desktop, for which I paid more than $3,000 back in 1995.

      My first semiprofessional aerial photography shoot was a bust since his house was completely surrounded by trees, and I refused to fly the rented Cheetah at his requested low altitude of 200 feet above the rooftops. That was more than 20 years ago, but I remember thinking how cool it would be if I could mount this bulky digital camera on a model airplane to have a flying camera. I could fly it from the ground to take pictures at very low altitudes with little risk to myself and other people.

      I married my wonderful wife Beth in 1995 and we now have two beautiful teenage daughters. Since their births I have taken thousands of pictures with my Nikon D5000 SLR. Each vacation destination has inspired me to build up my lens variety, try different scene techniques, and constantly learn more about photography. My images got even clearer after I took photography classes and sought photographic tutoring from local professionals.

      After 17 years in the high-stress world of IT while fighting the hellish traffic in Houston on a daily basis, I cashed out my Paranet stock and left the corporate world in 1998. We purchased a 115-acre ranch just west of Brenham, Texas, and I started Deans Consulting in 2000.During my attempted escape from the computer industry, I looked at every agri-business from raising chickens for eggs and meat, goats for meat, sheep for wool, horses for boarding, grapes for wine, and numerous other ventures. None of these panned out and I quickly discovered that I could not make near the same money on my small ranch as I could rejoining the IT world in the business community of a small town.

      Deans Consultant, a.k.a., The Country Computer Consultant, has been highly profitable for more than 16 years, and odds are I’ll have a hand in it for years to come, since I love my clients and it’s relatively easy IT work. My self-employment has only caused a fraction of the stress I felt in the 1990s, since there is no plane travel, minimal traffic, no contracts, and really nice country people to work for here in Washington County.

      However, being in my mid-50s, crawling under desks to find data cabling problems, climbing ladders to mount wireless access points, and having the heavy responsibility of data integrity and security for numerous small companies has been weighing on me over the past few years.

      In 2014, I starting a part-time career as a firearms instructor teaching Concealed Handgun Licensing (CHL) classes at the gun range on our ranch. The next year I developed numerous gun fighting simulation services for law enforcement and CHL clients. I was making money outside of IT, but I was still looking for something else to make a second attempt of finding a new career outside of my 35-year IT identity.

      That same year, a new era of aerial photography started with the availability of the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus. That changed everything for me. After seeing incredible aerial videos and still photos on YouTube and the Internet, I had to purchase one for at least testing purposes. This was the flying camera I dreamed about 20 years earlier, and the possibilities for new business opportunities went off like fireworks in my head.

      From mid-2014 and through 2015 I flew more than 100 test flights at buddies’ ranches and IT clients’ construction sites without charging for the flights or the videos I produced. My goal was to explore these test markets in a hobby mode to see if a real business could be derived from flying drones.

      As it turned out, this was it! This was my ticket out of IT and into a new, booming industry that is exciting, challenging, beautiful, and potentially very profitable. I’m in! I’m all in!

      The Author, John D. Deans

      Chapter 1

      Is Commercial Droning Right for You?

      Flying UAVs in a hobby mode at the park or filming your buddy’s farm

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