Episode 1 | Drone Decisions: Tips for Golf Courses in Aerial Tech
Look, if you’re bringing a drone into your company, whether that is search and rescue, public safety, real estate, golf person, whatever, what you really need to understand, and this part here really helps you with everything else past this, what you really need to understand is that you just started was an aviation department.
Hello and welcome to episode one, of Precision Drone Mapping’s podcast. I’m Kendall Marquardt, host of the podcast, founder, pilot, and innovator of Precision Drone Mapping. My vision is addressing challenges specific in the golf course and landscape management world by utilizing drone technology. I draw upon 40 years working in the industry, always looking for creative solutions to challenges in the business.
In this episode, I talk with KMorris of the FAA about important considerations if you want to fly a drone in connection with managing a golf course.
Finally, make sure to subscribe and follow PDM for the next installment of our conversation, in which we talk about using drones to spray, spread and seed. Let’s explore the possibilities!
Kendall: Yeah, this is interesting. You know, What would it be for Superintendents to have a drone on the shelf and to be able to use it and I'm like, okay, that's kind of a, I mean, that's a plausible question, but from a licensing and regulation standpoint I mean what do you see as possible problems besides the first thing that comes to my mind is, Ok, where is your golf course located? What are the airspace issues that you may have to deal with? And then you know licensing for sure, so that's another hurdle to clear are there any other things from, you know, a regulatory standpoint of a superintendent, you know, getting out his drone and flying, you know, and checking the course every day for example or something like that that you can see would be an issue or something that Superintendents would have to know about.
Kevin: Well I think you hit some of the big ones right out the gate. Initially, I try not to give business advice not because I think I'm a bad businessman, it’s just that I wouldn’t want to be held accountable in case some information and stuff. Not considering this business advice, but I do tell people, look, if you’re bringing a drone into your company, whether that is search and rescue, public safety, real estate, golf person, whatever, what you really need to understand, and this part here really helps you with everything else past this, what you really need to understand is that you just started was an aviation department. In your company, right and I think that is the biggest hurdle for people to get over, because it’s challenging, you see a drone you don’t think of it as an airplane. It’s a drone, I connect it to my iPhone, and I can fly the thing. It’s not an aircraft, but of course, that's not how the FAA sees it. So, to bridge that gap. Between what you think you just bought and how the FAA regulates what you just bought to bridge that gap, the best piece of advice that I can give is look, you just added an aviation department to your business. You wanna purchase an aircraft that aircraft happens to be unmanned. We call it a drone. You’re adding that to your company's inventory of assets.
Kendall: And liability.
Kevin: Right! Now think of it in terms, you just bought an aircraft. Now we're starting to think, ok well, I’m probably going to need insurance on it. I probably have to register that. That aircraft is going to have to be operated by a pilot, and that pilot is going to need to be certificated by the FAA, so then it’s kind of like if you understand that first concept, everything else I’m about to say is going to make a lot more sense. Which you kind of already touched on. So, we just got an aircraft. What type of aircraft you buy is probably almost as critical as everything else the FAA is going to regulate with that aircraft. Because there are so many different drones out there with so many different capabilities. It really depends on your needs, so after you narrow that down, this is the aircraft I want, this is the drone I want, then you get into you’re going to need to have that drone registered with the FAA. These are some of the first steps, that drone registration is going to cost you, $5 it’s going to be valid for three years and then you’ll have to update it everything three years with an updated registration. Because it’s not going to be operated for recreational purposes, you’re going to need to operate that drone under part 107, and I’m assuming you well understand part 107 at this point.
Kendall: Yes sir.
Kevin: Yeah, so you’ll need to operate that drone under part 107 which means, you’re going to need a remote pilot certificate to operate that drone. And that remote pilot certificate will have to be current for the regulation. Every couple of years, you need to make your currency on that.
Kendall: Yeah, I just redid my recert in March. My recurrent.
Kevin: How did you like the online version vs. going to a testing center and paying money?
Kendall: That was awesome! Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you!
Kevin: So now, we talked about registration, we talked about commercial remote pilot certification, I should say. And I’m going to deviate a little off the FAA side right now and say, so many states have - and Minnesota is one, that’s where I live, have enacted their own set of registration requirements is the easiest way to put it, for drones. For example in the state of Minnesota, if you have a drone that you are operating commercially, they will consider that a commercial aircraft and there is a commercial aircraft registration that you have to do with the state whether it’s a King Air or Mavic Minii. You have to register that aircraft with the state and the state can require you to carry insurance on that commercial aircraft. So after you kinda got the initial, I’ve got the drone, I’ve got it registered with the FAA. I’ve got my remote pilot standing next to me. My best piece of advice would be to check with the state, what is the state going to require for you to operate that drone commercially. These are all things before we even turn on the battery, sync it, and fire up the motors.
Kendall: Right
Kevin: We haven’t even flown the drone yet, right? So check with the state because they may have additional requirements for registration and insurance that you’ll need to carry. Now I’m gonna jump off of that and back into the FAA side. So once you’ve got all that paperwork done on your brand new aviation department and your brand new craft, and you’ve got your pilot, and you’re ready to go, when you get into the operational side, where are we flying? What airspace am I about to go into? Are there any restrictions on that particular airspace? Do I need to be aware of certain weather conditions, where are people are on the course, how I’m going to maintain a visual line of sight of my drone at all times? Those types of things are a lot more operationally and a lot more fluid, you know, depending you know where the golf course is. It might be in an area where you’re going to need an airspace authorization.
However, If the president has come to town, you may not go at all that particular day that you want to fly because there may be a temporary flight restriction sitting right over your golf course. So understanding that piece is super critical, too. And then, in terms of flying the drone. You're always looking at the weather. What type of weather conditions are out there? Is it a good day to fly? How many people are on the course? How many employees? Should I bring in visual observers to help me manage what I need to do? It’s always a little more operational in terms of when and where flying that drone. But I think if you walk through that whole process, I just laid out there, you’re going to go from not having a drone and not doing what you want to probably having a drone and doing what you want.
But those steps in between are very, very crucial for your safety for, obviously, the safety of other people and then, of course, the safety of our national airspace and stuff. I golf as often as I can, which is not as much as I want. But there's a golf course relatively close by here that actually sits underneath the departure corridor from Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport, and aircraft cross over the top of it, pretty regularly maybe 5000, 4-5000 feet up on the departure run and it would be really easy to think there's no way my drone, is going be anywhere near those aircraft. It’s you know, I’m going to be below treetop level it’s if there's an aircraft flying where my drone is flying. My drones are the least of that aircraft's problems. That’s the mentality a lot of people have but what they don’t realize is that things can go wrong. There are things called flyaways. (in audible)
The command control link goes down or something of that nature.. I’ll just say that most drones you can buy off the shelf are capable of flying much higher than the FAA-limited 400 feet. Thousands and thousands of feet. So it's entirely possible you could have a situation where that drone goes out of control and it sails up there, right? So it’s one of those things where once you start operating, you start to think more like a pilot, you start to make risk-based decision making and aeronautical decision-making in terms of there probably countless stories where people took their drones out and flew over the beach out over the ocean and it was really cool but didn’t plan one bit to the fact that there was an offshore breeze that I had to fly into a headwind to get back and they flew their batteries down to 20% and now their drones at the bottom of the sea because they didn’t calculate the wind. All those things kind of factor into it, but again, if you hit those steps along the way, then you’re gonna be pretty well situated for what you want to do, whether that is golf course data collection or mapping.
Kendall: Yeah, and knowing the wind and stuff like that, reminded me of that, so.
Kevin: Yeah, it’s a great example because that’s been the shift over the last 10 years with unmanned aircraft. Unmanned aircraft have been around forever whether you call them drones or not they’ve been around longer than I’ve been alive, and I was born in 1974. So they've been around a long time. They really didn’t catch their stride until the late 70s, and early 80s when the RC model airplanes community really started to get going. And people were building them in their garage, building them in their basement. And generally speaking 6 wing color-driven aircraft. Usually replicas, Military trainers.
This is what really got people interested in them. And if you didn’t understand aerodynamics and weather, lift, thrust wind, drag wind, crosswind, density altitude, and things like that, you typically didn’t have too many flights before you were picking up the pieces of your RC, right, and you had a lot of time, and your math teacher had a lot of time invested in building that thing. They didn’t come out of a box. They came in pieces, and you had to cut out the wood and then use a hot air gun to get the fabric coating. You didn’t want to crash them. Compare that now, you walk into a store and walk out.
Open the box, in the parking lot, sync to your phone, and you’re flying a drone. You don’t know the first thing about wind, crosswind, weather, density altitude, lift thrust, and weight vocation you don’t know anything about that; you just know that it syncs to my iPhone, and I touch here, and it goes there, right?
There's this generation of pilots that were trying to educate were not trying to make Chuck Yeager out of these folks were just trying to get them to understand, look if the wind is at your back and you fly your drone a half mile away from you, its going to take a long time for that drone to get back so maybe consider the wind, you’re operating you’re flying a drone and the wind is blowing left or right and you’ve got a big crowd to the right, but you're flying your drown off to your left realize that if you have a failure, that drones not coming straight down its going to go with the wind right into the crowd to your right.
Those types of things we all package out and put a little bow on it and call it aeronautical decision-making that’s the real challenge we have with this sort of new generation of drone pilots. They’re not bad pilots in fact, some of them are just absolutely amazing at what they can do with their drones and (in audible) a chance to operate in that way but getting them to understand you’re flying an aircraft, you’re flying it in the national airspace you’re sharing that airspace with those jets that are flying 5000 feet overhead and you do have some responsibility and you gotta think a little bit about what you’re doing. That’s been the challenge.
Hey, thanks for listening in. I hope you found a nugget of value in today’s topic. If you did, then please like, comment, and subscribe for more content like this. We’ve got some interesting stuff coming up about drones and the world of golf course management.
