Drone Fly Day WA
Mucking about with a bunch of drone junkies
Even for those who fly drones commercially, flying on your off day can be heaps of fun. Darren Smith from Soar recently joined the crew from the DJI & Drone Operators WA for a social flyday in the rural areas surrounding Perth, Western Australia.
The Facebook group formed in 2016 and consists of both seasoned professional drones who chase V8 supercars for a living and casual hobbyists who love to talk about drones. Soar stepped in as the event sponsor and provided drinks and snacks plus marketing schwag for everyone.
The stock standard flying area for Perth is of course the beach but of course one more pic of Perth’s beachies won’t turn any heads. For this trip, the mob ventured to Northam, Western Australia. Our shooting location, the Northam Wheat Silos, which is part of an interesting backstory in itself …
The Northam Wheat Silos are part of an innitiative of FORM. What is FORM?
“We believe creativity can make a difference to quality of life, learning and livelihoods in Western Australia. FORM is an independent, non-profit organisation based in Perth. Through our work we’ve seen how people and places can flourish, confidence can grow, and how governments and businesses can be influenced by what creativity can achieve.” -FORM website
FORM organised silo painting in 2017 at Northam and has lead to the creation of Western Australia’s own Public Silo Trail, a collection of seven publicly viewable artistically painted silos that streatch across the greater southwestern part of WA.
A caravan of 8 vehicles conveened at the El Caballo, Spanish for ‘the horse’, service station enroute and from there headed to Northam’s silos. It happened to be a perfect day for flying with rains clearing just in time for the gruop’s first flights at the silos. Onsite were multiple vintages of DJI drones, including Phantoms, Sparks, Mavics, and Inspires.
Pilots engaged in multiple types of photography including; cinematic video shots, panoramic landscape shots, obliques, top-down/vertical shots, and mapping missions). Everyone came well prepared with some pilots bringing three drones and multiple batteries for each! We hung about getting our fill of flying and gasbagging about drones. As soon as it became apparent that we’d burned up at least half our LiPo power, it was time to truck on towards Meckering, home of WA’s most notorious earthquake.
Meckering lies 130 Km east of Perth and is home to WA’s most significant earthquake which occured in 1968, magnitude 6.5. Having occurred so long ago, there’s little evidence of the quake besides and abandoned and wrecked farmhouse, the second and final location for our flyday. While less dramatic than Northam’s painted silos, the farm site gave pilots a chance to stretch (and test) their wings/rotors in this wide open area. It afforded an excellent opportunity for practicing drone cinematography shots such as point of interest shots, reveals, and flying in proximity to obstacles such as trees and barns.
Thankfully the trip was a smashing success and while nobody was injured a few drones ‘copped it’ one due to a failing rotor at +40m elevation and another drone who lost a battle with a large gum tree followed by a hard landing atop a tin barn, an unintentional slide down the steeply pitched roof, and finally a second hard landing on WA’s terra firma. (The operator seemed to be physically but not emotionally unscathed!)
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