
Drone Pilots’ Pay is Dropping - joeyespo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/drone-pilots-2-000-paydays-drop-90-in-race-to-the-bottom
======
gregatragenet3
Just pointing out that this article features a drone pilot complaining that
this is a race to the bottom when his 2k/day drone business is displacing a
vastly more expensive helecopter-based video/inspection industry.

~~~
wmeredith
I also found this quite humorous.

------
microcolonel
Breaking news: relatively unhindered free markets tend to encourage prices for
commodity goods and services to decrease when supply is limited primarily by
other scalable commodities.

People who can not differentiate their goods or services in quality or price
will find themselves in a mighty rut, and that's a good thing. Why should we
expect the price of drone piloting to stagnate rather than decrease?

------
slededit
For the 2k/day pilot he was operating outside the bounds of the FAA - so
essentially he was being paid black market prices. The legal competitors all
had to fly real aircraft so he only had to undercut those inflated prices. Its
not surprising the costs come down when legal avenues are opened.

------
brudgers
Related, drone rules in the US,
[https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/](https://www.faa.gov/uas/getting_started/)

------
sykh
I think AI flown drones is a much more realistic goal now than AI driven cars.
It’d certainly make it cheaper and easier for Google and Apple to update maps.
Is there anyone working in this space?

~~~
joshvm
Depends what you mean by "AI". Autonomy in aviation is far ahead of what you
can get in ground vehicles. Autopilots are commonplace, even in light
aircraft. There are established systems like TCAS for traffic avoidance.
Aviation remains incredibly safe, despite huge levels of autonomy, because of
the regulation involved.

What (I think) we need is a regulated system where every drone uses a standard
transponder and negotiates airspace either with a controller (e.g. IFR) or
other aircraft (e.g. VFR). The future is not everyone flying drones with
proprietary AI collision avoidance. One existing product in this space is
FLARM which is used by a lot of glider pilots and light aircraft, they also
make a UAV variant:
[https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/](https://flarm.com/products/powerflarm/uav/)

Autonomous drones themselves exist, are inexpensive, and can be set to fly a
survey pattern based on a number of pre-selected GPS waypoints. Ardupilot will
do this. The data is used for mapping at a much higher level of data than
online maps. Think agri, ecology, general site surveying, etc.

That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale
mapping. The flight time is poor. An aircraft modified for surveying can cover
hundreds of square kilometres a day. A consumer drone with an hour's flight
time (good luck) is going to struggle to compete.

Collision avoidance at the local level (e.g. are you going to hit a wall) is a
different issue, and that can be solved by standard depth sensors.

~~~
figgis
>That said, drones are not ideal for replacing aircraft in the large scale
mapping.

You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes. A quick google search tells me
you can pick up a drone with over an hour of flight-time for 3.5k-ish (I don't
know much about drone pricing so someone may have better options)

Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to
40k (reasonable)

You can purchase 10 drones for the price of one airplane. Which I can't
imagine an airplane could out map/survey 10 drones working together. I don't
know much about drones or planes though so there are probably other
restrictions.

~~~
joshvm
> You are comparing consumer drones to airplanes.

Sure, because the OP called out Google maps and that's how Google maps (at
high resolution) is created. Drone mapping does tend to be much higher quality
because you get a higher image cadence at a lower altitude.

Fixed wing drones tend to be better in terms of flight time, that's certainly
true. And you can get gliders which will last even longer if you manually
thermal them.

> Another quick google search tells me cheaper planes go from 25k (crappy) to
> 40k (reasonable)

Add on at least another 20k for survey quality cameras (up to hundreds of k)
and more for getting your plane modified (hole in the fuselage) and re-
certified. Pilots are expensive, fuel is expensive and getting your annual COA
(Certificate of Airworthiness, in the UK), insurance etc is not cheap.
Google's surveying aircraft have at least five cameras so they can use
photogrammetry (structure from motion) to create their 3D maps. As soon as you
introduce surveying LIDAR into the equation, add a zero or two onto the cost
estimate.

I don't disagree that you could fly a drone fleet instead of an aircraft, but
for country-scale mapping, aircraft make a lot of sense.

------
IshKebab
More like a race to market value. $2k to fly a drone for a day is pretty
clearly insane given the minimal skills involved.

~~~
bhhaskin
except that you pretty much need a pilots license to do it

~~~
mediaman
It takes 40-60 hours of instruction time and airplane rental time to earn a
pilot's license. Total cost is typically $8-12,000. Once all the requirements
have been satisfied, you have to go through a 4-6 hour long oral and in-flight
examination. That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you
to conduct any commercial operations.

A drone license costs $150 to take a multiple choice test with 60 questions,
and you only have to pass 70% of them.

~~~
godelski
> That's just for a private pilot license, which does not allow you to conduct
> any commercial operations.

Which a commercial requires 150 total hours. And that is the bare minimum.
You're still considered a baby pilot in the industry with that few amount of
hours.

> A drone license costs $150

And is less than most hourly rates for a plane. That's without an instructor
too.

------
stretchwithme
More like a race to a more appropriate level.

$2K a day is $500K a year. For something that apparently a lot of people can
do.

~~~
Retric
That assumes you can get a full year into it. Wedding photographers are fairly
well compensated in part because of how weddings mostly clump up on a few days
of thew week and months of the year.

~~~
ghaff
Of corse it’s ultimately what the market will bear. But a lot of gig jobs of
this type _might_ be 100 days per year and often a lot less. And they need
backup equipment, marketing, etc.

In a previous role, I could bill out for up to $10k per day but that didn’t
include travel time and were very intermittent types of jobs that I had to do
a lot of free/lower rate work to be in a position to land.

~~~
exikyut
I'm _really_ curious what could demand $10k per day :) not at all because I
don't believe it, but because that sounds very very nice...

Vaguely speaking, the impression I get is maybe you were doing senior-level
"emergency fix the unfixable" type work, like recovering a petabyte-sized
Oracle database that had chewed itself, or PMing an 11th-hour restructure of a
50% finished 10M-LOC project due in 4 hours. (I recall an uncitable story I
read/heard somewhere about a bank that nearly missed a deadline and had 1000
developers working simultaneously to get the work done at the last minute)

(I can't figure out/guess what the lower-rate work might have been.)

~~~
stretchwithme
Probably advising senior executives.

~~~
ghaff
That’s correct. Product strategy and messaging from a team that also has a
significant technical background. Also giving industry landscape/perspectives
at customer and sales events.

To parent’s point, very specialized and experienced engineering consultants
can make a lot. Even something like an expert witness report can be $4-5K per
day.

But to repeat these tend to be gigs where this sort of click is running for a
very small portion on 200 days per year. It’s not at all like regular contract
work.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
It’s not a race to the bottom. It’s business. Faster, better, cheaper.

~~~
baron816
Click bait title coming from Bloomberg. They know what free market competition
is.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
But it's a quote from the article:

> “It’s apparent that a lot of this industry is a race to the bottom,” said
> Trench,

Bloomberg didn't say this, so can it _really_ be a click bait headline?

------
bassman9000
> what is competition

basic economics

------
jbob2000
It's relatively low skill to be a drone pilot; No certifications, no education
requirements, no professional organization with yearly fees, etc. You
literally just need to buy a drone, get a bit of practice, and start
advertising your services.

If the current drone pilots want to keep the high salaries, they should add
more barriers to entry. This would keep out the hobbyists from picking up side
jobs and eroding the market and will also raise the cost of entry, aside from
the hardware purchase.

~~~
bassman9000
_add barriers_

Or, instead of the noncompetitive approach, they should differentiate
themselves from the competition, and offer added value the hobbysts can't.

~~~
emodendroket
Such as?

~~~
bassman9000
If I knew I'd be flying drones.

