Flying

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:26:44 GMT

Drone training at work today. It's a 1 on 1 (or in this case, on instructor and two students) hands-on component of the whole training process; my colleague who had done half an hour or so before was there, and I had done nothing more than log in, plug in the drone, and update the firmware. We both needed a total of an hour of supervised flying, and I had to do some exercises (my colleague already had them signed off).

The drone is a tiny thing, a DJI mini II, and when it's flying it sounds like a nest of angry bees. It has a ridiculously good camera, it weighs the legal limit of 249g, and it runs for roughly 20 minutes on a battery. I was definitely nervous to start since I'm not great at operating spatially. The teacher was great, though, I got to watch someone else do it first, and the exercises were actually very open-ended: we put the drone a good distance away, the instructor scrambled the facing direction, then I had to orient myself and fly back using 1) only the drone's camera feed 2) only a visual on the drone without the camera feed and 3) only the map view on the controller.

I definitely got disoriented several times switching from one mode of operation to another. You're always supposed to have a visual on the drone, which is not going to happen with a grey drone on a grey sky 400m away, but sometimes looking up to find it threw me off. I also have issues distinguishing between right joystick (forward, back, side-to-side motions) and left joystick (up, down, and spin motions) when I needed to do something. All in all, though, it was more doable than I expected and I think if I can practice at least once a week for a couple weeks I'll be able to keep a sense of it.

It will be very useful for work.

It also brought home that the weather has shifted, and this is not the usual kind of work I do. I dressed what I thought was more warmly than necessary. It was windy and maybe 10C, but here's the thing: we parked the trucks and just stood there for two and a half hours. We didn't hike briskly, climb over stuff, or even walk. We just stood, with our hands out, looking at a screen. So I'm glad to come home to my extremely warm downstairs couch and heat up enough to stop shivering, and then hopefully enough to feel like it's hot down here (which it objectively is, 31C).

Fun day anyhow. I was surprised by how fun and accessible it was, maybe because the teacher was great and didn't micro-manage but let me sort it out for myself.

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Flying