Fly like a bird

Рет қаралды 7,945

10 ай бұрын

Crop duster shots! How it was done.
I first like to state: This took a lots of planning to complete this mission / shoot.
I designed a site survey complete with AGL’s for both the drone and the crop duster, hazards, flight patterns etc.
We did a preflight meeting, again go over the mission. As we had no radio contact. We could use text though. The pilot has been crop dusting for over 18 years, he was very confident in the mission. I have my advanced certificate with over 2000 hours of flight as so was I too.
As all crop dusters do they fly at about 10 feet AGL above the crop then a rapid ascend at the end of the fields to avoid trees and wires usually about 60 feet AGL then banks and comes back around. We shot in an open field approx. 1800 feet long. The drone was positioned at half the distance of the field (900 feet). The drone flew vertically in the position from 60 feet AGL to 120 feet AGL. Which kept the drone out of the flight path of the crop duster.
As for the approach footage the drone was held in place ½ way up within in the tree line and hydro lines which the duster had to ascend to miss.
The footage from under the belly was with a GoPro attached to the spray pipe. It held rock solid. On a crop duster aggressive pull up it would add approx. 2.5Gs.
The footage also was shot at 60FPS which is a cropped file. This gave the appearance the plane was closer than it really was.
The pilot flew over the same strip so we could capture several passes without me moving the drone. He had a full tank of water only. As this was just for show.
He then did a few circles around the drone at about 70 feet AGL.
We shot this on an evening where the winds were nil and the sun was lower in the sky. As we wanted to show the spray of water. We were flying in Class G airspace. The only other thing we always had to watch for is other planes. None ever did show in our area. But besides when they see a crop duster plane, they generally keep out of the way knowing the type of flight patterns.
Shot Norfolk County, Ontario. Canada. With DJI Air2S.