This is a question coming from a nervous and relatively new flier. I fly for a construction site and we have just reached the point of having cranes on the job. I would usually fly at 74m altitude but the cranes exceed this and I need to still fly for progress reports.
I don’t want to fly higher as it will lose quality/ for safety. We have an M3E and Obstacle Avoidance is on, but I still worry about colliding with the cranes.
Does anyone have any experience with this type of situation and what would you recommend?
We have 6 cranes on a 60 acre site ranging from 130ft to to 340ft AGL. You really don’t have a choice but to fly higher for safe operations but if you are not so concerned with Survey-grade you can fly lower oblique flights looking at key areas of interest that do need more detail. If you are flying an M3E you are not going to lose much accuracy, more so resolutions which I think is what you may be more concerned with and those lower obliques will help. Make sure that you are facing as perpendicular to the subject as possible and use tripod mode at around 4m/s with a 1-2 second interval to make sure you are capturing quality data.
Are you using RTK/PPK?
Don’t forget that side OA is not that great so if you are crab-walking make sure you look down the line first and utilize the OA cameras during the traverse. Even if you have to stop to take a look and then restart.
Thank you for the response Michael!
Good to know we won’t be losing too much even if we flew higher. It’s my first job operating a Drone taking over for someone else, so I have been very cautious about how to safely navigate the issue.
We currently fly using one main map to capture the whole site and implement a couple of panoramas and photos as well for progress. I’ll try to go and adjust the settings now to higher altitude, lower the gimbal, check the sides and lower the speed for when we fly the map plan.
We use RTK here if that helps!
Thank you so much for the advice, I really appreciate it.
RTK should be mandatory at this point IMO. Just to clarify the high flight should be nadir and then run some facade-like patterns in tripod mode with a 45-65d gimbal. Same to you!
