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I spoke with some aerial applicators a few years back that I used to work with when I was in the fertilizer business. Asked them if they were worried about dro
by rmason 2y ago
I spoke with some aerial applicators a few years back that I used to work with when I was in the fertilizer business. Asked them if they were worried about drones possibly taking part of their business and they just laughed. They told me the payload on the drones would never make them serious competition.
Then a couple of years later they admitted they'd lost some of their business to drones but they weren't worried it would ever be all that much. I told them that there was one way to make sure it never would hurt them and that was to get into drone spraying themselves.
A large majority of farmers will want someone else to do it for them. I said you know the customer, you know their fields and are well versed with the chemicals. They said I don't know, but you could see they were thinking hard. These guys were second generation aerial applicators and if their kids wanted to enter the business they sure needed to consider it. One of them has a son in college who is already a pilot.
- carlosjobim 2y ago> They told me the payload on the drones would never make them serious competition. Why can't drones be as big as a crop duster airplane and run on gas instead of batteries?
- rmason 2y agoThey could except for regulations. It is the same as driverless cars only much more disastrous potentially. You wouldn't want them crashing into other planes or flying into buildings. I saw a drone demonstrated by a startup in 2005-2006 that could leave the airport in the morning and do aerial infrared photography all day and return at dusk. The FAA would never give them permission to fly and the company failed. Saw another company around 2015 show me the exact same thing except they had a chip that let them avoid aircraft and geofenced them from entering space around all airports. The FAA let them do a preliminary test which they passed but never let them have permanent permission so they ran out of capital and failed.
- tristanb 2y agoI fly ultralights / gliders. We don't have a way to deal with these yet and a system like that could be lethal to us. There is a reason they didn't get permission.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThanks for the explanation! Then I don't see much future for drone dusting. They need to be big to bring a lot of payload.
- banish-m4 2y agoThere's absolutely no reason to run on gas whatsoever. A huge octocopter and hot-swappable batteries would have plenty of endurance, range limited only by the number of battery packs, cheaper to run, and far cleaner.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThen why don't normal crop dusting airplanes run on batteries?
- MaxikCZ 2y agoBecause normal crop dusting airplanes: are big and heavy, forcing big batteries. Hotswapping 10kg battery pack is much more feasible than hotswapping 100kg one. You can work whole day using 3 batteries regardless of size, but having to swap 10kg battery every 5 minute is more feasible than swapping 100kg battery every 30 minutes. Those planes cant land right at fields edge, so big chunk of energy in its battery would be needed to fly to and from nearest airstrip.
- banish-m4 2y agoThese things have to be trailered with a pickup truck and trailer, so there's only positive value in making it takeoff, land, and refill on the trailer and making it quick to swap batteries and refill the tank.
- silvestrov 2y agoGasoline motors are much less reliable than electric motors and require a lot more maintenance. Drones are small and cheap, so for the same amount of money you can have a lot of drones. So you should not compare load capacity for a single drone to an airplane, but instead compare load per dollar. Being big is not always an advantage. Multirotor drones have the advantage compared to planes that they drop straight down when failing, so less risk of continuing a long distance and crash in a town. Crashed drones also makes less of a mess when they do crash. FAA should adjust policy (for farming drones) due to this different risk profile.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThanks for a thoughtful response!