Radio-control flight-from hobby to career

Model Airplane News, Jun 2003 by Reid, John

Many of us would like to earn a living flying RC planes, and Mike Morgan of San Diego, CA, has found a way to do just that! Mike has been able to incorporate his passion for flying remote-control planes into his work as a land surveyor. he uses a 1/4-scale The World Models Piper Cub to take aerial photos-all by remote control. The highly modified Cub weighs 15 pounds without the camera equipment and 22 pounds all decked out and ready for work. Powered by a Kohler Actro 40-5 brushless motor with a 30-cell, 2600mAh NiMH battery, the Cub can stay aloft for 10 minutes-long enough to photograph one square mile of land.

The Cub's payload includes a Pentax 645 medium-format camera for high-quality prints with a 35mm wide-angle lens mounted on the bottom. This means that the Cub can photograph a large area of land at an altitude of 400 to 1,000 feet. Mike also mounted two video cameras in the plane that send real-time telemetry to a Sony digital recorder with a 5-inch LCD screen. One of the video cameras is pointed out the front window, and this enables Mike to fly the plane by just looking at the screen. The other video camera is attached to the Pentax's viewfinder and shows what the camera sees. Switching back and forth between the video cameras requires only a flip of a switch on the transmitter. Stuffed in between all of the camera equipment is a Garmin GPS receiver that gives an overlay readout on the video screen, showing the current latitude, longitude, airspeed and altitude (in meters)-extremely important information needed for land surveying. A stout roll bar in the cowl protects all of this equipment from rough landings-a nice feature because many of the fields haven't yet been graded when aerial photos are needed.

A typical assignment goes like this: Mike straps on his backpack containing the equipment that receives all of the video telemetry from the plane. After he checks to make sure that everything works properly, the plane takes off. When the plane reaches an altitude of about 1,000 feet, Mike hands the video screen to the client, who cansee the view through the Pentax camera. The client then tells Mike in which direction to fly so that the property to be surveyed can be lined up in the viewfinder. When the plane is directly over the area, Mike flips the switch to the forward video view and then back to the viewfinder video camera. This does two things: the Pentax camera snaps a photo, and the telemetry from the GPS receiver is recorded on the video continuously. When the video view is changed from the front to the viewfinder camera, the GPS information on the screen shows the plane's precise location at the time of the photo. The latitude, longitude, airspeed and altitude (in meters) are later transferred for the client onto the finished aerial photo to give him all the pertinent information.

Mike turned his love of flying radio-control aircraft into a successful career; I wonder which other professions would benefit from the advantages of RC flight!