
Startup Idea:  Collaborative flying of real model planes with video cameras onboard - amichail

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staunch
I'm not sure it'd be a great business, but a fun site that would get dugg for
sure. I tend to doubt there's much staying power in audiences viewing great
fliers. The big draw would be actually controlling the plane (hard to scale)
and viewing pilot POV to a lesser extent.

The live stream is mostly easy since you can just use wireless cameras and
relay the stream from a computer on the ground. Do you know anything about
making the remote computer-based control actually work and also not crash? I
haven't flown RC airplanes in some years, have things advanced this far? The
military remote computer controlled stuff required some pretty fancy
engineering.

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amichail
One possibility is to not have a computer-based control at all.

Instead, the plane's owner would be responsible for taking over whenever
necessary to keep the plane from crashing.

As for scalability, I think collaborative control might be fun, particularly
if your influence varies based on your skill level.

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yubrew
that's a really interesting idea. the biggest questions i have are.... 1\. how
much will it cost? for equipment, sensors, etc? 2\. is anyone willing to pay
for it?

If you don't want to ask anyone in particular, you can ask yourself other
feasibility questions like: -how heavy will it be? will it affect the flight
of the plane? -how much do current planes cost? how does that compare to the
cost of adding a camera device? -how many people fly planes? how many planes
do they have? -how often do people crash planes, and why do they crash? how
expensive is it to fix? how does this cost compare to a camera that could
prevent a crash?

my initial guess is that there is no feasible business model there, but what
if you twist your idea around a bit? such as sharing videos of airplane
flights? and modifying video equipment so that it could be installed on model
airplanes? that could potentially be useful.

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amichail
If the onboard camera is a problem, then I could just have a camera on the
ground.

The idea here is to allow people to profit from their hobby by letting
thousands of people fly their planes.

And those people can do so from the comfort of their homes at their computers.

You might have a free service where people fly a plane together in a
collaborative way. If you want more control over the plane, then you will need
to pay. You might be able to fly for free if you can demonstrate that your
flying skills will draw a large audience.

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amichail
Has anyone tried a startup like that?

A computer would take over whenever the flight inputs become
unreasonable/unsafe.

You could reward people with reasonable flight inputs by giving them more
control over flight inputs.

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amichail
Thinking about it some more, you could have a revenue sharing system where
people who build model planes can let others fly them (perhaps
collaboratively) through this service. They would get a share of the profits.

Moreover, the owners of such planes can take over flight inputs whenever they
are not safe. It's their planes after all.

