So we'd like to do kite aerial photography during our trip through the Outback. Of course, the wind is fickle, and at least several times we've been reduced to dragging the kite through the air with our 4x4 or Lincoln Continental. What if there was a better way? Not only could we get well-framed, sharp 35mm photos of ground subjects, but we could do live recon of the areas we were exploring? It sounds like our expedition has a serious aerial platform requirement!
One thought is always the trusty RC airplane. They come available in less-messy electric engine versions now, and of course people have fitted them with cameras. Plenty of people have investigated this technique. I would say, however, even with the simpler planes, they seem terribly difficult to fly in-general, let alone with purpose -- like flying as navigational outriders for our 4x4 convoy. What you really want is a big, slow, stable brute that can loiter over targets while you photograph or send back live video.
A really slow, stable platform is, of course, a helicopter. [ed: of course there are RC Airships as well. But don't bother the author because he is a very busy man.] Now if you thought flying an RC plane was hard, how about an RC helicopter? I knew a guy in university who had one. From what I could tell, flying the thing is basically impossible. I saw him once or twice "fly" it about 18 inches off the ground and then bounce back down. It didn't destroy itself only because there were enormous supplemental landing bars that prevented it from careening onto its side. It looked like a huge, expensive, frustrating pile of shit. At all other times it looked quite smart as a bookshelf trophy. But be clear... it never, ever flew.
Well, almost ten years later the New York Times talked about a new breed of helicopter machines that used sophisicated gyroscopes to make flying helicopters enormously easier.
The base model, the Draganflyer III, is a simple gyro-stablized indoor-outdoor helicopter. Reading about the $750USD machine almost immediately disqualifies it from field service. Flight time is 5minutes. It can't fly in wind > 5mph. It "generally" can lift the weight of a 2.4ghz wireless camera system (which is a trivial weight and trivial quality). The crash kits of blades and carbon rods are $150 and their wireless video system is another 200$. Definitely not suitable for hauling around a 35mm Yashica T5.
But Draganflyer offers what they promise to be the solution to your 'aerial platform requirements,' the Draganflyer Xpro. This monster is designed to carry one pound worth of video/camera gear. It's still strangled to about 5 minutes of flying time, which might be ok for a bit of Aerial Photography, but this will never be our drone outrider. One other problem is that the thing costs five-thousand dollars. Yes, $5,000. That is far beyond any fathomable impulse depth for me, especially since the thing isn't even ideal. Figure $5000USD = $9000 Australian. I think I could buy an awful lot of bush-pilot time for 9000$ in the Outback and probably get some very stunning photos, as one obvious alternative.
So, basically, I dunno. It appears that having a menagerie of kites for various wind conditions, and maybe spending some more resources miniaturizing the KAP Rig itself would be money much better spent in an effort to get good, sharp aerial photographs of the outback. Unless Draganflyer wants to donate me one of their monster machines, it's a dead option hovering. I think dirigibles are doomed by physics. The last option is to look into getting an rc plane outfitted with some gear. I think this is easily an order of magnitude more feasible than the helicopter, but probably still an awful lot of work. It's one more avenue to investigate, though.
Posted by Nils Blutig at October 27, 2002 08:27 PM | TrackBack