Switching aircraft part-way through mission

Hi, interesting problem that I'm hoping you can help with: I have a large mission to fly soon. Approx 4km by 3km aerial mapping. I think it's close to 15 batteries. I'm nervous about flying one drone for that long. I have a mavic 2 and mavic 2 zoom so I'm thinking I'll switch between these to prevent overheating. Is there any reason to be concerned about switching between the two drone types throughout the mission? Thanks for any tips/advice.

Bighouse Productions June 09, 2022 19:20

Official comment

Sorry for the delay. Good question.

Overheating is more of an issue with each individual battery so swapping them out after each flight keeps the heat from accumulating. It helps that it is moving and essentially has 4 fans attached to it too...

The issue with switching between those two aircraft would be that your data is then of mixed resolution and won't be able to be reconstructed using most photogrammetry softwares. Another issue is that the flight planning would need to be different since the camera have different fields of view. This would require different flight planning to account for it. If you didn't account for it you would likely have either too much overlap or not enough for one of the cameras.

Such a dataset would not work out very well with Maps Made Easy since there is a requirement to use the same camera and lens throughout the data collection.

I think you would be better off flying

Zane June 10, 2022 14:41

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5 comments

Thanks for the response. Looks like your answer got cut off at the end... could you finish that up for me? Very curious to know your suggestions for such a long flight.

Other option might be to break the big flight into a few smaller ones with some overlap between then, then stitch them all together later... or would that still be an issue in terms of putting together a single accurate geotif later? Thanks!

Bighouse Productions June 10, 2022 22:14 0 votes

Hi Zane... just wondering what you were going to say at the end there... "I think you would be better off flying..." What? Thanks!

Bighouse Productions June 13, 2022 16:50 0 votes

Bah!

You could potentially do a bunch of separate maps using different aircraft and then merge them all together later. But, I think you would be better off flying the same aircraft the whole time.

Zane June 13, 2022 17:12 0 votes

Ok thanks Zane. I think I'll try it all with one but will have a second flight plan as a backup in case the first starts to overhead or just packs it in :-)

Bighouse Productions June 13, 2022 17:14 0 votes