John Deans - Become a U.S. Commercial Drone Pilot

The old name for drones and UAVs is Remote Controlled (RC) model airplanes and helicopters. As a kid in the 1970s, I remember many kids with cool dads who had impressive RC planes, which they built and flew as father and son/daughter bonding projects. Back then it took both true piloting skills and a nearly required background in small gas-engine maintenance to get those little motors started and keep them running properly. There were no technical aides like First Person View (FPV), GPS-guided flight, or a return home feature.

RC pilots back then had no choice but to maintain line of sight with the aircraft and be responsible for all aspects of takeoff, flight pattern, and landing it in one piece without knowing the exact amount of fuel left in the tiny tank. Most of these early RC configurations were put together by hand with off-the-shelf components from a local hobby shop, or ordered from a model plane catalog. Painstaking efforts were made and numerous hours spent carefully assembling the airframe, mounting the wings, and connecting all the airfoil control surfaces. This was followed by testing sessions to verify the RC controller was compatible and reliable with the model planes receiver unit.

After all the workshop labor was completed, it was time to head to the park and try the first test flight. If you were able to finger-start the prop without losing a digit, the time finally came to test your flying skills for real, but while standing on the ground. Remember, this was before computer or Internet-based flight simulators were in the home, so usually only true private pilots or seasoned commercial passenger jet captains were able to smoothly operate their airborne creations.

Lord help you if the funds were available and you built an RC model helicopter. Those who thought flying a fixed-wing RC plane in a pattern and landing smoothly in a field was difficult never attempted flying an RC helicopter; those who did were likely to crash it the very first day. Even after basic flight maneuvers were learned, any small mistakes at low altitude or strong gusts of wind during landing could make a dangerous accident occur quickly. Life and limb were in jeopardy when a two-foot (or larger) radius RC helicopter rotor broke up during a rough landing.

A couple of generations ago, flying those RC crafts took patience, skill, and actual aeronautical knowledge. One was always aware of landing zone options, fuel levels, altitudes, wind direction, airspeed, and visibility.

2. UAVs Are Here

Fast forward a few decades, and we now have an explosion of high-tech quadcopters that can be removed from the box, flown autonomously to GPS waypoints, and viewed on an iPad within minutes of delivery from Amazon.com. By the way, how long will it be until Amazon delivers your new drone with an Amazon delivery UAV to your home an hour after your online purchase, given theyre considering drone deliveries?

We now have the low-cost and limited-feature quadcopter drones from Parrot starting at $100 all the way up to the long-range and heavy payload oct-rotor UAVs for $10,000 or more. For ultra-range UAVs, both the consumer and the commercial pilot can opt for fuel-efficient, fixed-wing planes that can fly waypoint courses for tens to hundreds of miles if you are willing to make that investment.

Again, the drone platform we are going to focus on in this book is the most popular UAV on the market, the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus and Phantom 3 quadcopters. Tens of thousands of DJI Phantoms have been purchased, flown, crashed, and enjoyed in the US over the past couple of years, and this is just the start. It is one thing to take out your new Phantom, get it a couple of hundred feet in the air above your subdivision and start taking pictures. It is another to plot out a strategy on how to utilize this amazing flying camera in a profit-making venture, during the birth of the UAV commercial market in a barely legal environment.

This book is a comprehensive guide on how to make money with your DJI Phantom in a robust but legal manner. We will cover all aspects of what it takes to develop your aeronautical skill sets, commercial photography capabilities, small-business marketing techniques, safety procedures, video editing processes, end product deliverables, computer software for aerial mapping, and UAV maintenance practices.

3. Why Am I the Right Person to Teach You How to Make Money with Drones?

I was a National Honor Society A student at Bellaire High School in Houston, Texas, but I despised college at the University of Houston. So, before the first week of my freshman semester was over, I was out. Since I was only 18 years old, I had to wait a year before I could apply to the Houston Police Academy to start a career in law enforcement. During that year, my dad found me a job at Control Data Corporation (CDC) as a process control clerk working with computers. This began my 35+ year career in Information Technology (IT), as a fluke; I never joined HPD. The simple reason was I was making more than the cops were when I became a programmer in less than a year.

During that same year in 1982, I began flight school to get my private pilots license flying out of Houston Hobby airport. I was trained on a low-wing Grumman Cheetah, and before the year was over I passed my check ride and became an FAA-licensed private pilot.

The Author and His Plane

Those were the simpler days. I worked hard in the computer rooms to earn plane rental money for the weekend. Since there were no digital cameras back in the 1980s and I could not afford a big-dollar SLR camera, Id fly down the Galveston beach with the planes canopy pulled all the way back, while holding my Kodak Instamatic film camera with a dozen exposures trying to get a good aerial shot from only a few hundred feet above the surf. Try to fly that low nowadays and youd probably have at least the FAA on you when you landed, if not the National Guard out of Ellington military base on the trip back.