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Drone Pilots’ Pay is Dropping
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoIt’s not a race to the bottom. It’s business. Faster, better, cheaper.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y agoWell it's both. Business is a race to the bottom.
- baron816 8y agoClick bait title coming from Bloomberg. They know what free market competition is.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoBut it's a quote from the article: > “It’s apparent that a lot of this industry is a race to the bottom,” said Trench, Bloomberg didn't say this, so can it really be a click bait headline?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dang 8y agoWe've changed the title to a non-baity subset.
- IncRnd 8y agoWhat you stated is the definition of a race to the bottom, because there are so many players that have recently gone into that market.
- jbob2000 8y agoIt's relatively low skill to be a drone pilot; No certifications, no education requirements, no professional organization with yearly fees, etc. You literally just need to buy a drone, get a bit of practice, and start advertising your services. If the current drone pilots want to keep the high salaries, they should add more barriers to entry. This would keep out the hobbyists from picking up side jobs and eroding the market and will also raise the cost of entry, aside from the hardware purchase.
- bassman9000 8y agoadd barriers Or, instead of the noncompetitive approach, they should differentiate themselves from the competition, and offer added value the hobbysts can't.
- emodendroket 8y agoSuch as?
- bassman9000 8y agoIf I knew I'd be flying drones.
- gadders 8y agoIn the UK, you need to get "permission" to fly a drone commercially: http://www.caa.co.uk/Commercial-industry/Aircraft/Unmanned-aircraft/Small-drones/Permissions-and-exemptions-for-commercial-work-involving-small-drones/ http://www.caa.co.uk/Commercial-industry/Aircraft/Unmanned-a...
- Spooky23 8y agoNot really true. You need an FAA certificate. Most drone pilots aren't acting within the law. Bad news for them in a commercial situation is that mishaps will be a personal liability issue.
- danaliv 8y agoFor commercial drone ops you need to be certified by the FAA. It’s a quick multiple choice test, so not exactly onerous, but you can’t just buy a drone and start flying for money.
- microcolonel 8y agoBreaking news: relatively unhindered free markets tend to encourage prices for commodity goods and services to decrease when supply is limited primarily by other scalable commodities. People who can not differentiate their goods or services in quality or price will find themselves in a mighty rut, and that's a good thing. Why should we expect the price of drone piloting to stagnate rather than decrease?
- WillReplyfFood 8y agoBecause he is a professional and has a drone-flying license?
- bassman9000 8y ago> what is competition basic economics
- sykh 8y agoI think AI flown drones is a much more realistic goal now than AI driven cars. It’d certainly make it cheaper and easier for Google and Apple to update maps. Is there anyone working in this space?
- krasin 8y agohttps://www.skydio.com/ https://www.skydio.com/
- sykh 8y agoThat is cool. If they can pull it off that’d be awesome. Thanks for the link.
- olex 8y agoSkydio R1 is actually on sale and has some seriously impressive tracking and sense-and-avoid functionality going on. FliteTest (a well known RC Youtube channel) has several videos where they test it with several interesting use cases, including high speeds, running between trees, going indoors and otherwise attempting to trick it, and it performs very well, not crashing once. If the next version is a little quieter and smoother on the video tracking, it'll be a serious competitor to manually-flown drones for various sports and "outdoor activity" types of videos.
- ballenf 8y agoKind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site. But I've probably got it kind of backwards. Manufacturing is where unit tests probably come from and we have been slowly adopting them into programming as we realized their value.
- hobofan 8y ago> Kind of a cool concept to think about construction having unit tests. Autonomous drones that check your work continuously. Prevents a problem from being undetected until after the responsible crew has moved on to the next room/floor/site. You have an optimistic view of the digitalization of construction project management. I attended a talk not too long ago from one of the bigger project management solution players in the field and they reported that the status quo for most construction projects is progress tracking via Excel. Structured data in a form that could be used together with autonomous drones is still a few long steps away.
- IshKebab 8y agoMore like a race to market value. $2k to fly a drone for a day is pretty clearly insane given the minimal skills involved.
- bhhaskin 8y agoexcept that you pretty much need a pilots license to do it
- tengbretson 8y agoEven if that were true, it's hard to justify them making 5X more per year than actual pilots.
- learc83 8y agoIt's not anywhere near as difficult, time intensive, or expensive as a pilot's license.
- saalweachter 8y agoAnd not nearly so hazardous, for the pilot, the customers, or the public.
- matte_black 8y agoNo you don't. I got a commercial drone pilot license a year or two ago and all I needed to do was take a test. Anyone can do this.
- true_religion 8y agoRight and pilots of commercial aircraft do not make 2000 per day.
- jonknee 8y agoNor do they supply the aircraft and fund their own travel.
- 8y ago
- brudgers 8y agoRelated, drone rules in the US, https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/ https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/
- stretchwithme 8y agoMore like a race to a more appropriate level. $2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can do.
- Retric 8y agoThat assumes you can get a full year into it. Wedding photographers are fairly well compensated in part because of how weddings mostly clump up on a few days of thew week and months of the year.
- ghaff 8y agoOf corse it’s ultimately what the market will bear. But a lot of gig jobs of this type might be 100 days per year and often a lot less. And they need backup equipment, marketing, etc. In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.
- exikyut 8y agoI'm really curious what could demand $10k per day :) not at all because I don't believe it, but because that sounds very very nice... Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level "emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a 50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000 developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute) (I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)
- stretchwithme 8y agoProbably advising senior executives.
- 8y ago
- gregatragenet3 8y agoJust pointing out that this article features a drone pilot complaining that this is a race to the bottom when his 2k/day drone business is displacing a vastly more expensive helecopter-based video/inspection industry.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- draw_down 8y agoIt's bad when other people do it, you know.
- wmeredith 8y agoI also found this quite humorous.
- Trundle 8y agoI didn't see a complaint.
- WillReplyfFood 8y agoReminds me off the day all those property by plane photographers got dropped like a rock by google-maps. My brother worked with a cartography company - and it must have quite shocked the boss, that somebody could release sattelite imagery - " for free".
- slededit 8y agoFor the 2k/day pilot he was operating outside the bounds of the FAA - so essentially he was being paid black market prices. The legal competitors all had to fly real aircraft so he only had to undercut those inflated prices. Its not surprising the costs come down when legal avenues are opened.