UAV News Talk – Drone News, eVTOLs, UAS Policy & Air Mobility

Airfield design guidelines for large UAS, a guidebook for UAS threats at airports, first free flight of Airbus naval UAS, studying sea turtles and saving baby deer, fully charging drone batteries in 5 minutes, and drones fly over a nuclear power plant.

The guidelines are primarily intended for airport managers, planners, engineers, UAS operators, and other stakeholders. If manned and unmanned aircraft are going to operate in the same airspace, airports will want to know the impacts. That includes the facility needs of large UAS and if they would use the same infrastructure. The contract with Woolpert is under the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP), which is managed by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine and sponsored by the FAA.

The guidebook is intended to help airports plan for and respond to UAS threats. The National Safe Skies Alliance is a non-profit organization funded by the FAA. It works with airports, government, and industry to maintain a safe and effective aviation security system. Woolpert will develop strategies and consider detection systems. Guidebook production is already underway with completion planned for 2021.

The relatively compact and stealthy Airbus Helicopters VSR700 is a multi-mission naval UAS designed to operate alongside other shipborne naval assets. It seeks to provide commanders with a tactical picture. The VSR700 flew for 10 minutes within visual line of sight. It had previously flown tethered. Powered by a Continental CD-155 four-cylinder, FADEC-controlled turbodiesel running on Jet A, VSR sea trials are planned for late 2021.

The Turtle Tech project teams Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Northrop Grumman with the Brevard Zoo in Florida. It’s a drone-based surveillance effort to better understand the behavior of sea turtles. The computer visioning systems can identify individual sea turtles, as well as their species, gender, and unique markings. Funded with a Northrop Grumman Foundation grant, Embry-Riddle researchers plan to use the Applied Aeronautics fixed-wing Albatross VTOL and the DJI Matrice 210.

A wildlife and outfield manager in Norway has been saving injured baby deer using a thermal camera equipped drone. Flights are conducted every morning between 2 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. looking for injured baby deer in grasslands. The DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual is equipped with both a thermal camera and visual camera.

StoreDot is a battery developer that specializes in ultra-fast charging (UFC) technology. The company is applying UFC technology to the drone industry and they have demonstrated fully-charging a commercial drone in five minutes. StoreDot says their Li-ion batteries are “based on novel nanostructured materials combined with proprietary organic binders and enhanced electrolytes.”

On two successive evenings in September 2019, a swarm of drones flew over the Palo Verde Nuclear Generation Station in Arizona, America’s most powerful nuclear plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) called it a “drone-a-palooza.” Documents obtained from the NRC through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that four to six drones were involved. They were estimated to be over 2 feet in diameter with flashing lights.

Avian biomimicry, stadium sanitizing with a drone, a Galileo competition, a new HALE flies, drones and electromagnetic pulses, wildfire data from drones, new standards from EASA, an F-15 with a loyal wingman under its wing.

Netherlands-based The Drone Bird Co. knows something about biomimicry. The company has used flapping drones masquerading peregrine falcons to disburse populations of pest birds. Now the company has a non-flapping series called Aves (“aves” being Latin for “birds.”) CEO Jan-Willem van den Eijkel: “The AVES series is basically a very big fixed-wing bird whether it’s a gull, a hawk or an eagle. You can make any shape, but the gull was the most ambitious because of the wing shape. If you look at the gull, you’ll see there is no tail or stabilizer, so to make it look like the gull and fly stably, we had to test and develop a lot.”

Aeras Fog Company says their drone can sanitize an entire stadium in three hours. The 50-pound MG1S drone can spray disinfectant up to 20 acres-an-hour. People can occupy the sanitized space within three minutes. The drone is similar to those used for fertilizing crop fields.

The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has launched the MyGalileoDrone competition. “The aim of the contest is to design, develop, test, and prepare for commercial launch a drone-based application and/or service able to provide a position and/or time fix by using a Galileo-enabled receiver.” Galileo can be used on the drone, smartphone app, payload, or in any other device supporting the Galileo drone application. Initial ideas should be submitted by Aug. 31, 2020.

Swift Engineering‘s high altitude long endurance (HALE) UAS completed its maiden flight at New Mexico’s Spaceport America. The Swift HALE UAS is designed to operate unmanned at 70,000 feet and offers 24-hour persistent and stable upper atmosphere operations for commercial and military surveillance, monitoring, communications, and security applications. The 72-foot solar-powered air vehicle weighs less than 180 pounds and can safely carry up to 15-pound payloads for missions.

Northrop Grumman will use the Leonidas electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon system from Epirus. Leonidas uses solid-state commercial semiconductor technology for C-UAS defense and when fired, it creates an EMP that can be directed for precision targeting. It can “sanitise a volume of terrain or sky, creating a force field effect.” This will become part of the Northrop Grumman Counter-Unmanned Aerial System (C-UAS) systems-of-systems solution offering.

Plymouth Rock Technologies Inc. (PRT) develops threat detection technologies while Hummingbird Drones deals with wildfire analysis from drones. The companies are working together to mount sensors on drones and provide software that allows live actionable data for wildfire analysis.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has proposed Special Condition Light UAS standards in a 31-page draft document. The standards are applicable to unmanned aircraft under 600 Kg with no occupants. EASA is defining risk-based certification requirements. The proposal is open for public comments until September 30, 2020.

An F-15C was photographed in a hangar with a loyal wingman drone attached to its left underwing pylon. The modified UTAP-22 Mako is from Kratos Defense and Security Solutions. The UTAP-22 reportedly has a price of between $2 and $3 million, can carry up 350 pounds of stores or other payloads, plus an additional 500 pounds of stores externally on underwing pylons and wingtip pods.

360° video – The NRC’s Aerial Robotics Laboratory

The National Research Council of Canada’s Aerial Robotics Laboratory is an indoor drone testing environment designed for the development of contact-based drone applications on elevated structures.

Video: The aerial robotics laboratory

Hacking drones as a target and as a weapon, military drone flight over San Diego, a State-by-State drone report card, a milestone in India for civilian drones, the EHang 216 goes sightseeing, and those drone sightings in the U.S. midwest, revisited.

A 96-page report titled How to Analyze the Cyber Threat from Drones [PDF] has been published by the Rand Corporation. The report summarizes 26 specific instances of hacking drones. The most common cyberattacks reviewed were denial of service and spoofing attacks against an active drone. The Rand Corporation recommends:

• DHS must continue to work with senior policymakers, cybersecurity experts, and other government and law enforcement agencies to move towards a coherent UAS cyber strategy.
• DHS should also prioritize the most critical vulnerabilities and find ways to close attack vectors and protect attack surfaces.
• DHS will need to monitor UAS adoption and anticipate the implications of widespread UAS diffusion.

The press reported that a new version of the Predator drone (the SkyGuardian) would be flying over San Diego. The General Atomics SkyGuardian has an advanced detect-and-avoid system with a Due Regard Radar to detect other aircraft, TCAS (Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System) for detecting nearby aircraft transponders, and ADSB (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) which broadcasts the drone’s location.

The authors argue that states should take the lead by creating drone highways that mirror the paths of the public roads beneath them. The “Fifty-State Report Card” ranks states on their readiness to get new drone technology into the skies. The ranking considers airspace lease law, law vesting air rights with landowners, and navigation easement law, as well as having an aviation advisory committee and the estimate for drone jobs. North Dakota ranks #1 and #50 falls to South Carolina. This is from the Mercatus Center, associated with George Mason University.

India’s first No-Permission No-Takeoff (NPNT) compliant drone flight was successfully completed. India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation banned civilian use of UAVs in 2014, but in 2018, a new policy became effective. UAVs had to comply with stringent manufacturing standards and also be compliant with the new No-Permission No-Takeoff (NPNT) architecture requiring a Unique Identification Number (UIN), an Unmanned Aircraft Operator Permit (UAOP), online permission for every flight, and compliance workflow through a fully digital “Digital Sky” portal. This Digital Sky platform was demonstrated with an A200 Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS)

EHang released a video showing an EHang 216 autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) conducting aerial sightseeing trial flights in Yantai, a coastal city in East China. Passengers flew around Yantai’s Fisherman’s Wharf in trials that are part of a “world flight tour.” EHang founder and CEO said, “As the world’s first provider of passenger-grade AAVs, we are honored to prove this game-changing air mobility solution by demonstrating flights to regulators, customers, partners and the general public. The positive support and feedback have strengthened our determination in our quest to bring this new style of mobility to the people.” 

Video: Self-flying EHang 216 Showcases Aerial Sightseeing Trips Over the Sea in East China

In December 2019 and January 2020, law enforcement agencies reported seeing drones flying at night in formations in parts of Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The sightings made national news, but we never got a really good idea what (or who) was behind this. Now a volunteer researcher with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain hundreds of pages of emails and other documents from the FAA and other federal agencies. Hundreds of other documents are still being processed by the FAA and some documents are being withheld by the FAA. The agency says they are exempt from FOIA.

Kespry announced the appointment of Krishnan Hariharan as Vice-President of Engineering overseeing Kespry’s Aerial Intelligence platform development and evolution. Hariharan was Vice-President, Engineering and Product Management for PrecisionHawk. Before that, he held a number of leadership roles at SAVO, Sabre, and OpenText. He also founded River North Labs, a technology consulting company.

Mike Winn is a co-founder and the CEO of DroneDeploy. The company was founded in 2013, originally to combat poaching. DroneDeploy is now a leading cloud software platform for commercial drones. Industry sectors they serve include agriculture, construction, mining, energy, forestry, and others. DroneDeploy customers get professional-grade imagery and analysis, 3D modeling, and more. Customers have mapped and analyzed over 100 million acres in over 180 countries.

Mike explains how drones have progressed from a novelty to an integral part of many business operations. Drones are increasingly becoming the future of work as they help industrial professionals remotely work, collaborate, and improve the safety of their job sites.

We talk about outsourcing drone operations versus using internal resources, and how they have become a simple to use tool that doesn’t require a specialist. Mike talks about the ease of data capture and analysis, and how the free Flight app can be used for flight planning and data collection that uploads images to an analytical engine for translation into a 3D model and map.

DroneDeploy finds that even though they support many different industries, a surprising amount of the technology is horizontal (cross-industry) rather than industry-specific.

DroneDeploy also operates DroneDeploy.org where they give free or subsidized licenses to organizations using drones for good.

Find DroneDeploy on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

George Mathew is the chairman and CEO of Kespry, a leading drone-based aerial intelligence solution provider. The company delivers fully integrated solutions from drone data capture to industry-specific analytics. Kespry serves customers across North America, Europe, and Australia.

George talks about “drone-based aerial intelligence” and Kespry’s success with “touchless inspections.” We consider the evolution from a hardware-based drone industry to one that is software-based and how Kespry successfully navigated that pivot. 

George explains the growing need for autonomy in certain use cases such as repeatable flight control. Also, how Kespry accommodates customer objectives that range from fully outsourcing the service to operating with internal resources. George also offers some thoughts on the current regulatory landscape and the waiver process, as well as on sensor data acquisition and analysis beyond drone-based platforms.

Kespry just announced their Summer 2020 Aerial Intelligence Platform Release which includes DJI Phantom 4 RTK support, seamless third-party drone operator support, a new haul roads feature, and enhanced hail detection for insurance inspections.

George has 20 years of experience developing high-growth technology startups and before joining Kespry he held senior leadership positions at Alteryx, salesforce.com, and SAP. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology from Cornell University and a Masters in Business Administration from Duke University, 

Activists used a drone to hang a Pride flag on Ukraine’s version of the Statue of Liberty

Ukrainian LGBTQ activists used a drone to hoist a giant rainbow flag and attach it to the “Motherland” statue in Kyiv. The sculpture is venerated in the country and stands slightly higher than the Statue of Liberty. “Drone flights were carried out under the current legislation and according to the rules of the State Service,” according to Dronarium Ukraine, the company that arranged the flight.

AI-powered drones perform extreme aerobatics, the U.S. administration intends to allow the export of armed drones, how to test swarming drones, the Royal Canadian Navy uses a drone to find drug smugglers, a hybrid drone rescues a stranded motorist – in a demonstration, and the 5th Annual FAA UAS Symposium goes virtual.

UAV News

Researchers at Intel, the University of Zurich, and ETH Zurich developed an AI system that allows autonomous drones to perform acrobatics using only onboard sensing and computation. The vision-based drone can perform barrel rolls, loops, and flips. Training is accomplished entirely in simulation, which is fast, inexpensive, safe, and free from physical crashes.

The Trump administration plans to reinterpret the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in a way that would open up the sale of armed U.S. drones to other countries. This would allow General Atomics and Northrop Grumman Corp sell into new markets that are currently serviced by China and Israel, which do not participate in the MTCR.

The U.S. Army and PhaseSpace have created an outdoor system for testing swarming drones. It uses a new motion-capture capability where LED marker strobes are attached to the UAS. 96 cameras on 16 tracking pods around the perimeter track the LED markers. It has a capacity of more than 1,500 times the volume of a typical testing facility and the testing system is transportable and can be scaled up or down and even change shape. 

The Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) has been testing Puma-model fixed-wing unmanned aircraft for about two years. They’ve been used to help locate potential drug smuggling ships. The Pumas can sweep an extended area while the ship stays below the horizon. One team monitors the Puma real-time streaming video and another team manages the operation of the aircraft. Instead of the ship weaving around hunting smugglers, the drone does the weaving. The patrolling ship sails in a straight path saving fuel and increasing operational time.

Video: Road breakdown? no problem. HYBRiX drone to the rescue!

The HYBRiX 2.1 is a hybrid fuel/electric multirotor with up to 2-4 hours of operational flight time and a 25 kg MTOW. It uses a 2-stroke gas (or petrol) engine and LiPo 6S batteries.

The FAA is hosting the 5th Annual FAA UAS Symposium virtually instead of in-person in Baltimore. The Symposium will take the form of several virtual events or “Episodes.”

Episode I — July 8-9, 2020 will focus on UTM and international UAS integration.

Episode II — August 18-19, 2020 will focus on updates to the Integration Pilot Program (IPP) and public safety operations.

The sessions will be re-run later in the day for international attendees.

A cockroach-inspired microbot, a manned vs. unmanned fighter fly off, autonomous deliveries from CVS, a Predator over Minneapolis protests, a police helicopter collides with a police drone, piloting a UAS from an airborne C-130J Hercules, and library books delivered by Wing.

Researchers at Harvard created the tiny, cockroach-inspired Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot, or HAMR. The HAMR-JR is a ½ scale microbot allowing researchers to test scaled robot performance. It can trot, jump, pronk, and bound gait.

Video: HAMR-Jr: small and dextrous. Presented at ICRA 2020

A July 2021 fly-off is planned between an AI-controlled drone and a human pilot. The “Big Moonshot” was conceived by the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. 

Autonomous vehicle maker Nuro is partnering with CVS Pharmacy to deliver prescriptions and essentials to three Houston zip codes. Nuro says “We see this moment as an important stepping stone toward delivering all kinds of goods, beyond food and groceries.” Initial deliveries will be made by autonomous Prius vehicles. In the future, Nuro’s custom-built R2 delivery bot will be used to make deliveries. 

A Predator drone from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) was flown over recent protests in Minneapolis. Now a U.S. House of Representatives committee wants to know why. The DroneLife Op-Ed says the use of Predator drones over a city will not help ease the way for commercial drones. The CBP says that the drone was not used for surveillance purposes.

A Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) AS350 B3 helicopter and an RCMP Aeryon SkyRanger R60 surveillance quadcopter collided during a joint mission in British Columbia. Canada’s Transportation Safety Board rated it a five on a seriousness scale of one to six. It was classified as a “mid-air collision” that resulted in a “forced landing.” The helicopter and drone met at about 300 feet AGL. The drone was destroyed and the helicopter made a precautionary landing on a road.

A trial at RAAF Edinburgh was performed to test the feasibility of operating a UAS through the aircraft’s onboard Satellite Communications (SATCOM) link. The test demonstrated operating a UAS from anywhere in the world and uploading live imagery from offboard sensor systems.

The Montgomery County Public Schools in Virginia is the first school system to offer a library book drone delivery service. Blacksburg Middle School librarian Kelly Passek thought that drones could deliver books while the library was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The service is being provided by Wing, in conjunction with the Montgomery public schools.

The researchers counting endangered female green turtles at the world’s largest sea turtle nesting site off the Northern tip of Australia have significantly underestimated their numbers. Drone footage shows the actual number is about twice that originally thought.

Video: Great Barrier Reef: drone footage allows researchers to count 64,000 green sea turtles

A major test of last-mile drone delivery, direct-seeding rice with a drone, a drone-centric kiosk you can build yourself, and a webinar to learn the BVLOS regulatory landscape.

DroneUp partnered with Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) and UPS on a project to quickly evaluate the concept of last-mile drone delivery. They wanted to see how unmanned aerial systems could assist with critical delivery during times of crisis.

On the vacant campus of St. Paul’s College, in Lawrenceville, Virginia, a group of pilots flew over 200 flights under a scripted plan, operating under part 107 rules, with industry-standard drones. The flights simulated the delivery of 1.275-pound payloads of medical and other critical supplies in city-like conditions. Data was collected with respect to operational capacities, airspace deconfliction, operator safety, processes, policies, and training.

Tom Walker, DroneUp’s CEO, said, “DroneUp’s drone delivery exercise was aimed at learning what is possible to do safely and effectively today while gathering data to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in the near future.” 

For more, see the 56-page report, DroneUp Resources Operation Last-Mile: Critical Drone Delivery Report.

XAG is a Chinese company focused on agricultural technology. In April 2020, they organized a rice direct-seeding demonstration where two workers spread 5kg of rice seeds through a muddy rice paddy. Following that, a XAG drone repeated the same task. The difference in planing time was significant.

A project from Sky Horse Tech uses a Raspberry Pi to power a custom drone-centric kiosk. The kiosk pulls in local weather data and FAA advisories through AirMap and MapBox. The data cycles every 30 seconds and is refreshed every 5 minutes. The kiosk uses a 32” display, a $35 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or newer, some free software, and weather and FAA advisory APIs.

This free AUVSI webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 03:00 PM TO 04:00 PM (EDT). You’ll learn about the regulations affecting Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone flight and the factors involved in successfully navigating the regulatory environment to achieve a waiver. 

Iris Automation director of airspace integration Trever Linn will explain what operators should expect before applying for a waiver, and the key components such as risk mitigation measures and CONOPS documentation necessary for approvals. Attendees will learn about current regulatory challenges, readily available solutions, and the path forward for BVLOS drone operations.

Skyborg design competition for USAF loyal wingman UAVs, catapulting a drone from a helicopter, FAA is investigating a Blue Angels close encounter, a drone that launches grenades and sprays crops, flying over Singapore and keeping an eye on people, and a drone crash caused by electric interference.

Skyborg is the artificially intelligent software that would control a fleet of loyal wingman unmanned air vehicles, and the Air Force has now launched a design competition. A request for proposals was released on May 15 that could award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts worth $400 million per awardee.

The U.S. Army wanted to test if a drone launched from a helicopter was possible. The question was if the drone could survive the launch and the helicopter downwash, so the Army conducted a series of tests with an Area-I air-launched, tube-integrated unmanned system (or ALTIUS 600). It was catapaulted forward from a UH-60 Black Hawk side-mounted tube, escaped the rotor downwash undamaged, and was able to fly its intelligence-gathering mission

A spokesperson for the FAA confirmed they are aware of the incident and that it’s under investigation. A set of guidelines for recreational drone usage is posted on the FAA’s website that includes, “Give way to and do not interfere with manned aircraft” and “Do not operate your drone in a careless or reckless manner.”

Vinveli Unmanned Systems, Inc. is an international technology company that is primarily involved in energy systems, electric vehicle systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles. The “Vero” quadcopter can be outfitted with a launcher firing 38mm or 40mm grenades. As an industrial drone it can perform inspection missions, but it can also operate as an automated agriculture spray drone that covers 1,000 acres in less than 30 hours.

Video: Agriculture Drone | Pesticide Spraying UAV | Vinveli

The Home Team Science & Technology Agency (HTX) of Singapore is using Airobotics drones to identify congregations of people. The automated drones broadcast real-time data to the Singapore Police Force.

An Aerialtronics Altura Zenith ATX8 commercial drone crashed next to a railway line in October 2019. The flight only lasted 13 seconds and it crashed after flying over an electrified railway line. Aerialtronics investigated and found that the quadcopter’s onboard magnetic compass reading “had varied through about 60° within a couple of seconds of takeoff.” The next day, the operator performed an RF spectrum analysis and checked for magnetic interference with a handheld compass. He found deviations of up to 140°. The railway’s overhead high-voltage wires were the cause.

Studio Drift created a three-dimensional image of a red beating heart in the sky above Rotterdam. It was part of the Franchise Freedom drone performance dedicated to healthcare workers. Franchise Freedom uses 300 illuminated Intel Shooting Star drones that are programmed to mimic the behavior of a flock of starlings in the sky.

Video: Studio Drift uses drones to create beating heart above Rotterdam | VDF | Dezeen

A passenger drone hotel, a pub drone for beer delivery, UFOs that might be drones, distance-learning UAS education, flying creatures make drones better, measuring whales from above, and a close encounter with the Blue Angels.

EHang plans to create a passenger drone hotel in China. Hotel guests could travel to and from the hotel via EHang’s passenger drones and they could take sightseeing tours of the area with the drones. The first passenger drone hotel will be in a Guangzhou coastal district. EHang and the Chinese government have an agreement to establish Guangzhou as “China’s first and the world’s leading UAM smart city.”

Video: EHang Joins Hands with LN Holdings in Building the World’s First “UAM” Theme Hotel

The doors of McKeever’s Bar and Lounge outside Dublin are closed during the pandemic. But thirsty customers have an option since McKeever’s is now using a drone to fly beer and wine to patrons.

Videos of US Navy F/A-18 fighters encountering “unidentified aerial phenomena” have been circulating for some time, and the Pentagon has officially declassified and released the videos. Now the Navy has publically released incident reports that describe many of the unidentified aircraft as “Unmanned Aerial Systems.”

• In June 2013, the encountered “aircraft was white in color and approximately the size and shape of a drone or missile.”
• In November 2013, the aircraft was described as having a 5-foot wingspan. “…the aircraft was determined to be a UAS.”
• From a March 2014 incident: “The unknown aircraft appeared to be small in size, approximately the size of a suitcase, and silver in color.”

The Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide Campus offers distance-learning for some of their drone programs. Christian Janke, the Program Chair for the Bachelor of Science in Unmanned Systems Applications program offered by ERAU, was interviewed by Jeremiah Karpowicz for Commercial UAV News. The ERAU Worldwide Campus offers distance-learning.

“…biomimicry draws inspiration from natural inventions to design and improve upon our current technologies.” The hummingbird offers large wing muscles to continuously flap their wings, a long chest bone for the surface area needed for those muscles, and a figure-8 wing-beating pattern. The AeroVironment’s Nano Hummingbird prototype for DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) draws on these qualities.

Video: Stunning Slo-Mo Footage of Hummingbirds Hovering in Air

Video: AeroVironment’s Nano Hummingbird – 360 degree Lateral Flip

Meanwhile, the owl employs silent tactics, despite it’s huge wings. Owl wing feathers have leading-edge serrations that break up the turbulence that causes noise. Also, fringes at the end of the feathers further disburse turbulence and reduce noise. Similar turbulence-disrupting structures can reduce the noise produced by wind turbines and fans.

Video: Experiment! How Does An Owl Fly So Silently? | Super Powered Owls | BBC

Many whales and dolphins spend little time at the surface of the water, so they are hard to find and difficult to study. A Southern Cross University PhD candidate and scientist plans to use drones to find and measure the length and width of whales. Using photogrammetry techniques, video will be recorded of humpback and pygmy blue whales in Australian waters. With the measurements taken, the size and volume of a whale can be calculated. This provides an indication of its health.

Video: See Blue Whales Lunge For Dinner in Beautiful Drone Footage | National Geographic

The name Giovanni Lucia has been associated with a drone video of the Navy Blue Angels America Strong flyover in Detroit, Michigan on May 12, 2020. At one point, the Blue Angels fly past the drone at an apparently very close range. The video is currently on the Moss Photography YouTube channel, copied from Lucia’s FB page before he took it down.