27/07/2020
It's been a while since I last posted! It's been very busy and I've not had a chance to get the drone up.
I had one easy shoot turn into a difficult one last week! I was asked to go to a beach to film the year 6 class from St Michael's School as they followed the tradition by running into the sea at Poldhu.
However, this is where the difficulty arose. Poldhu is slap bang in the middle of the Air Traffic Zones of RNAS Culdrose and their training site at Predannack. These are often no-fly zones for drone operators and following occurances you've heard of in the media where drones are flown dangerously close to aircraft, drone manufacturer DJI have a brilliant system built into their software which means their drone users can't fly within these zones without permission and without "unlocking" the zones. That part wasn't the problem - I received permission from the ATC guys at Culdrose (thank you by the way) and was able to unlock the area.
So, I started operating the drone and filming, returned to the launch pad in order to change the battery... I sorted that out within a few seconds and then launched again. Little did I know, the Permission file for the no-fly zone removed itself from the drone and it flew out of the zone and out to sea. It wouldn't let me move the drone - it was now stuck about 200 metres out to see at 100ft and I couldn't control it... The battery burned down and I had 18% left. Now when you get to a certain limit, the controller that I operate the drone from starts beeping like crazy. I just couldn't get the drone to move. I then managed to get it back into the zone by descending and flying at 5ft above the sea!!! I was ready to say goodbye to my £1000 flying camera!!
Thankfully I managed to get it close to the cliff edge so that if it did run out of batter and force itself to land, I could try and salvage it. Luckily for me, I was just able to get it back to the launch site with 2% left of battery power in the tank before it would have forced itself to land!
I was fortunate to see the drone to survive but it really made me lose faith in DJI's geo-locking feature. I'm a fan of it as you do get some extremely reckless drone operators that needlessly put the lives of aircrew and the safety of their aircraft on jeopardy. However, I followed all of the guidelines, laws and policies and it almost bit me in the backside.
Moral of the story - always check whether the geo-unlock is operating correctly before operating your drone, especially over water. I had to keep inputting the unlock code which really hampered my ability to film at times - jolty footage where the drone would try and move out of the Geo zone and restricted movements. Not what you want when you are trying to make a small video for someone!
