The view from Coptercam, an aerial photography company in Perth, Australia, that uses customized small unmanned systems to take pictures from a different point of view. This photo is of the South Perth foreshore. Photo courtesy Coptercam.
Helo beautiful Minicopters take the art of photography to the skies By Danielle Lucey
C
optercam officially opened for business 26 April. In four days, they had 20 film shoots. The Australian company’s founder, Hai Tran, thought using unmanned aerial vehicles for still and video photography would be merely a side job, but now with the company’s instant popularity, he says may have to rethink that. “We were expecting doing two jobs a week initially,” he says. The only thing currently holding the company
back is Perth’s rainy season, which lasts the winter through September.
platform for taking photos to gain a different perspective in his pictures.
“My two passions in life have always been flying and photos,” says Tran, who is an aviator by hobby.
“It didn’t seem like a feasible business, because any person from a
A year or two ago he had an idea to start using model aircraft as a mobile
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Aerial Photography — continued from Page 29
Coptercam on a photo shoot, scoping out houses for sale in Perth, Australia. Photo courtesy Coptercam.
model helicopter club, for example, or a model plane club, for example, could potentially put a camera on their aircraft and call themselves an aerial photography business.” Then about 11 months ago he found out the Civil Aviation and Safety Authority had mandated regulations about the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles, requiring a license to fly, like most manned aviation businesses. This change in policy made Tran warm to the idea 30
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of monetizing on his hobbies.
Making the airframe
“Well, now that there’s a regulation, … you can’t have the hobbyists strapping cameras to model helicopters and planes and doing it for … fun, so that gave me the business side of it [that it] actually was a potential feasible business to get into,” he says.
Going professional required a professional platform. Most pre-made air vehicles Tran encountered cost around $30,000, he says. “Very expensive, and unfortunately I don’t have that kind of money flying around for a business that may or may not succeed.”
He spent the past nine months prepping the company, creating his own platforms, securing the proper licensing and now flying much more than he initially bargained for.
After a lot of research, Tran bought a few airframes and control boards, likely spending about $20,000 on his
own trial and error process — “You name it, I’ve tried it,” he says. From there Tran devised his own mix of sensors and platform. He uses a carbon fiber multicopter frame from Droidworx, a New Zealand company, paired with a Mikrokopter flight control board from Germany and an AV 200 camera gimbal. To ensure the copter wouldn’t lose stability if a motor went out, Tran opted for an octocopter instead of a more traditional quadcopter. He uses a digital SLR camera to shoot his footage.
model. And it was a long one despite the fact that he is already certified as a manned aircraft pilot. In Australia you have to train on a specific UAV and demonstrate you have flown a certain number of hours safely with that aircraft, says Tran. To be approved for commercial use, he had to submit a full risk assessment, an operations manual
and other documentation to prove he had a “competent business,” he says. Finally, CASA needed to witness his flight protocol and he had to demonstrate a safe mission. “[It’s] Pretty much the same process a normal aviation business would go through to get certified,” he says. That whole process took about nine months.
“It was a lot of mistakes along the way,” he says. “There were a lot of things I had to learn in terms of because I wasn’t getting an off-theshelf system.” As far as he knows he’s the first Droidworx platform operator in the world that can fly with air authority approval. Coptercam currently owns a fleet of three aircraft, a bonus both because it helps the company keep up with demand, but also the cost of creating the three was similar to purchasing one aircraft off the shelf, says Tran. Out of a request by a number of people, he’s started selling these assembled platforms as a side business function of Coptercam and has sold two or three, he estimates. His most recent sale is to a company in Jakarta, Indonesia, where there is an open skies policy on flying commercially.
Passing with flying colors To get certified by CASA, Tran says it was a two-part process of certifying both the pilots and the business
The Coptercam platform has eight motors to add redundancy and reliability. Photo courtesy Coptercam.
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Aerial Photography — continued from Page 31 Coptercam had its final CASA assessment assessment in April.
onstrated communications between the pilot and the cameraman.
The company currently employs two pilots, Tran as a part-timer and his employee Jason Glatzer, who both have UAV controller certificates. Jason also had a pilot’s license prior to Coptercam.
“We don’t have to operate a twoman crew, but having one guy fly the aircraft while the other guy concentrates on pointing the camera and getting the right shot means that we can ensure at all times that the pilot is eyeing the helicopter … and that any low-flying helicopters or power lines are not going to interfere with the operations of the copter.”
“I guess that helped us comply with a lot of requirements,” Tran says. “We also have a better appreciation of the nervousness, I guess, of the civil aviation authority letting model aircraft work commercially.” Coptercam submitted about 200 pages of documentation to CASA, detailing the company’s operations, maintenance and general procedures. CASA only responded with one suggestion, and Coptercam never had to resubmit its paperwork. Not getting certified on the first attempt is an expensive failure in Australia, with each application fee costing 5,500 Australian dollars ($5,375). The actual assessment occurred on a day with 25-knot winds, a scenario that made Tran nervous, he says, despite that he’s flown in similar wind before. The process is detailed, he says, and operational protocol can be as exacting as to say when in the process the camera is turned on. “I guess because Jason and I were real pilots, it was pretty much like normal,” he says of the minutiae. The assessment went very smoothly, he says. In addition to demoing their preflight procedures, the crew identified possible areas that required obstacle avoidance, and they dem-
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They also had to demonstrate how the multicopter could return to base and land itself in the event of a communications hiccup. Through CASA’s approval, Tran is also certified to train others to become UAV pilots on his platforms, yet another portion of Coptercam’s business. Now that Coptercam is an authorized UAV business, Tran says there’s no limit to the other kinds of commercial use ideas he’s been approached with. “Everyone I speak to reckons that this is fantastic idea, and they’ve always got suggestions on what we can do,” he says. “I’ve had people say you can use it for shark patrol.”
And once when a local news crew interviewed Tran, they made a deal that if they ever needed an aerial shot, Coptercam could shoot footage for them. Though there are many uses for the system outside of the photography business, Coptercam still has to battle a number of illegal fliers that are giving the commercial photography UAV business a bad name in the area, he says. “I approached a number of photography companies in West Australia that had a very good reputation for delivering real estate photos. … When I first approached them the real estate companies they said to me, ‘Yeah, we really haven’t been very happy with this in the past.’ And I asked them, well why? And they said, ‘Well, we had about four people before you offer us aerial photography using model aircraft, and the photos are terrible.’” Sometimes these illegal companies would fail to take a photo of the correct house, says Tran. Additionally, they would charge up to around $500 per job, which Tran says is “on the premium side.”
Australia has another zoological issue. Some want Tran to use his copters to monitor local foxes, an invasive species in the area.
“There’s a lot of cowboys out there, and the problem is that there’s people out there who are worried about privacy and safety already, and the last thing this new industry needs is cowboys who are willing to essentially lie to their customers. They basically still treat their model aircraft as toys and put the aircraft in dangerous situations.”
Others have suggested he take agriculture or mine photos to get a 3-D map from elevation.
Faced with initial local opposition, Tran offered businesses free demos of Coptercam’s work, photographing
At the moment, Perth uses manned aircraft to spot great white sharks — a pressing matter since the city has had four attacks in the area in the last 12 months.
houses on a hillside that would be difficult to shoot without aerial photography. “We showed it to them, and they said, ‘Fantastic. We love it. When can you start?’” he says.
Getting a shot Stateside, aerial photography companies are still patiently awaiting approval to tap into this booming business opportunity. HeliMalibu got its start a year and a half ago, initially operating in Peru, where company founder Daniel Garate is from. Both he and HeliMailbu’s operations manager, Giancarlo Ushella, have worked in film before, Garate as a videographer and cinematographer and Ushella as a production assistant and cameraman. Garate had seen some online videos of people experimenting with aerial UAV photography and was intrigued to try it himself. Ushella helped him
start up the company and focused on the business and marketing end. HeliMalibu got the idea to work on California real estate by perusing magazines and finding there were few aerial photos of houses in the area. “You see these tremendous, $8, 9, 10 million homes, and you don’t see any real great photographs from the air,” say Ushella. “Most of the magazines, only one out of 100 homes were being shot form the air. And we knew those guys were using big helicopters that were expensive, so we thought it would be a great market to approach that would work really well with the technology.” The pair contacted a Malibu Realtor they knew, asking if he knew of any great homes in need of bird’s eye shots. “He was more than happy to let us be his guinea pig,” he says.
However, in January, the Los Angeles Police Department issued a warning to photography and videography companies using UAVs to take photos of real estate. “The LAPD has never spoken to us directly,” says Ushella. “They did send out a warning to all the Realtors not to use companies like ours.” With the U.S. market on hold, the company has focused its efforts in South America and Mexico, often doing much more than real estate photography. “Music videos, short clips for independent movies, car chase scenes or what not. … Actually the projects that pay the most are the ones in the movie industry,” says Ushella. Many of the company’s clips have appeared on Spanish-speaking television channels, though the company’s copter was used for a dance scene in the movie “Moves” and for a clip in a Red Bull commercial.
A sample of HeliMalibu’s aerial photography work. Photo courtesy HeliMalibu.
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Aerial Photography — continued from Page 33 The platforms employed by HeliMalibu, like Coptercam, are a collection of parts the company calibrated until the blend was right. HeliMalibu’s main platform is a Cinestar Hexacopter frame. They use a three-axis gyroscope to get a steady shot with their cameras. Typically the company uses its own cameras, but if there is a larger film shoot, they adapt the camera mount to the project, up to a maximum of 6 pounds for now.
looking to enter the aerial photography business, he has a warning for newcomers.
the Federal Aviation Administration allowing small commercial UAV flights.
“It’s a lot harder than it looks,” says Ushella. “I know a lot of people contact us not wanting us to work for them but wanting to purchase the helicopter, and I always tell them the same thing. Unless you know how to take it apart and put it back together, it’s not really a viable option to just purchase one all ready to fly.”
“We hope they don’t drag their feet on coming out with these regulations and allowing the business to move forward,” he says. “We don’t have any problem with them regulating it. We just want it to be done quickly and for it to be reasonable and fair.”
Though Ushella knows a lot of companies are starting to offer these ready-to-fly helicopters for people
Although HeliMalibu is keeping busy outside of the United States, Ushella says the company looks forward to
Danielle Lucey is managing editor of Mission Critical.
HeliMalibu’s Cinestar Hexacopter platform in flight. The company hopes to resume commercial stateside work after FAA authorization. Photo courtesy HeliMalibu.
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