Armed with a remote-controlled helicopter nicknamed the "scientific predator", CSIRO scientists are circumnavigating Australia, documenting the tonnes of litter left or washed up on the nation's beaches and calculating the impact on marine life.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/eye-in-sky-filming-our-rubbish-shame/story-e6frfro0-1226280052411#ixzz1nJTfV0mf
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The interestng thing about fixed wing for me, is when I first got in to flying stuff I started with a used Trex 450 to learn one. Then after a year I tried a plane. The plane freaked me out for the first little while because I kept wanting to put it into a hover whenever I felt uneasy. Eventually I became okay with it.
@Rober Lefebvre,
That's awesome to hear. I hope we don't follow suit with the US then. But from my understanding, one would need to get a licence from Transport Canada to fly a UAV for commercial endeavors where money is to trade hands. I knew a guy who wanted to make this into a business and found that the licenses were something like $1500. a year. The guy who I'm thinking of was using a Trex 700 kitted out with DSLRs. Legal, but expensive.
Anyways, I'm always disapointed when we Canada's follow US rules to closely.
By the Robert, where in Canada do you live, I live in Eastern Ontario.
@William, and here in Canada, it's possible to do this legally as well. It seems to be only the US which is way behind?
I didn't read carefully enough to see that they were in Australia. I realize other places exist other than the US as I live in Canada, and have lived (paid taxes) in a total of 4 different countries.
Here in Canada we are sometime affected by US rules as many of our aeronautical laws and rules follow US rules.
But thanks for the smart comment Gary.
Because places other than America exist, UK, Australia and several mainland European countries have laws in place that allow flight. Both for research and commercial in the NAS, that's why those countries are pulling ahead.
They're in Australia, different rules apply.
So why isn't the FAA chasing these guys down? I university or college is still a business enterprise.
@Mike, Daniel, I agree, it was probably largely because they had to justify their budget.
But never underestimate non-RC-pilot lack of confidence in any kind of take-off or landing with a FW. Heck, even myself, a decent FW RC pilot look at the FW drones and I have trouble with the idea of using one. It seems to me that "auto-landing" a foamie (without landing gear!) on an unprepared surface is little better than a controlled crash.
Maybe it's just the memory of back in the day, I spent 100 hours scratch building a 36" 0.10 nitro powered balsa Mustang... it was beautiful! But on the first attempt at the belly landing, it completely disintigrated. :(
Yes Mike, this is why every blog post is scrubbed so that it has a picture or video on top, before it gets approved. As a matter of fact we will move multimedia of a blog up to the top, if it's not already there, and send back any blogs with just links and no embedded media.
What an incredibly worthy use of a quadcopter! It makes me want to vomit. I'm sure there's a bunch of Australians lapping this up though!
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