Recent content by colinjfischer

Does anyone have a good place to get high-vis clothing? Ideally, I would like to have some velcro on the vest or jacket for a nametag, along with company info.

I tend to agree - transponders on drones have a lot of benefits to include tracking with ADS-B equipped aircraft, and the ability for ATC to 'see' them and track their progress. Transponders have even become pretty darn small over the last few years. The one issue with transponders is that...

Just signed up! Hope we can do some business together!

Unfortunately that's true of any large group of people. Occasionally, I have to give a flight review to someone and they are appalling pilots and I don't sign them off. Even going through the crucible of the FAA examiner fails to weed them out, although the great part about the industry is...

I brief my students to treat Drone-strikes and Bird Strikes the same way. I tell them that the pilot-flying (usually them) keeps flying until I want to take the controls, and that we will initiate a climb (if we can) or if we are on final in a position land, continue the landing. I don't know...

No need to apologize, this is great. I want to focus on the statement "We can't see the pole top from the ground". Could a contractor with a drone fly a series of geo-referenced photos taking images of the tops of the pole and provide an analysis? Would that be potentially valuable?

How often do you do that? Is it scheduled, or just as-needed?

Do you have a copy of this checklist that you don't mind sharing?

I don't fill out flight plans, but here is my pre-flight checklist that I do for mission planning. I use the same one for manned and unmanned flying so some of it doesn't apply. It still forces me to check everything though.

Yeah, I definetly do a 'walk-around' before each flight. I also do the IMSAFE checklist (Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue and Emotion or Eating). Also - I found these mx forms that I made up a while ago. There are programs and apps for that now, but they might be useful to some.

I was doing LiDAR at NASA in the early 2010s, but the tech has come a long way since then. We were using Reigl tech. www.reiglusa.com The one we were using was discontinued about 2012; their new drone lidar is supposed to be pretty good. Also - I know of a company called Phoenix LiDAR...

To kick this off I thought I would post about Manned Aircraft maintenance cycles. I think I saw that there is an A&P here so they can tell you more than I as a pilot can. Basically, commercial general aviation aircraft (part 91) have the following maintenance cycles 100 hour inspection -...

I think a maintenance section would be awesome!

Awesome Idea! What aircraft are in your fleet? 2x 3DR Solos and 1x DJI Mavic (plus 2x Syma X80s, but I generally don't count them) What do you like/dislike about your current fleet? The Solos are customizable, so that has opened up my business to Research and Development money and that is...

Thanks! I didn't even know about the commonwealth club until this post - that looks interesting. I am also planning on attending the meetings of my airport's board. Having some friends in Aviation is probably not a bad idea.