The Day I Fell in Love with Drones
I fell in love with small unmanned aircraft systems, more plainly known as “drones”, on April 11, 2016.
My buddy was gifted a Phantom 3 Standard by one of his suppliers and it was collecting dust in a corner of his workshop when, on that that fateful day, I swung by serendipitously. I only heard about drones briefly before that day, occasionally eyeing articles in the news blogs about them being used to drop drugs into UK jails or police using freakin’ eagles to catch drones in mid-air. This was all before I drank the cool-aid.
Anyway, returning back to that fateful Monday afternoon. I was truly intrigued by the prospect of finally seeing a drone in person. I immediately shifted the conversation with my buddy to what he had ingeniously packed in cardboard within a milk crate box.
Upon seeing this not-so-shiny new toy, I immediately proceeded to badger him to fly the damn thing. I love new technology and there’s not much better than gleefully getting your hands on it (or in this case, just seeing it in action) after your interest is piqued by reading about it online. Now, sometimes it disappoints (cough, Coin, cough, cough). But this time it didn’t.
We couldn’t fly it at his Burlingame warehouse since it was way too close to SFO, so we drove up to the other side of 280 and he let the bird fly. And even though all the pictures my buddy took were totally washed out, the experience left me wanted for more. Much more.
The two killer points about this experience that made it game-changing for me were: 1) the drone stays perfectly “still” in the sky when flying with GPS enabled, and 2) you get a direct live feed to your smart device of choice to see exactly what the drone’s camera sees. This was freakin’ amazing! Regardless of the then 500ft limit (this was pre-Part 107), it was like flying through the air without the associated personal risk of your parachute not opening. And I don’t even want to talk about the low cost of entry into the space, or the camera & gimbal innovations that have occurred in recent years.
I honestly fell in love with drones right then and there. You can probably tell from the grin on my face in the pic below from that fateful first experience.
