Skip to main content

FAA Allows First Real Estate Company To Use Drones For Aerial Photography

Phantom 2 Vision+ | DJI

Douglas Trudeau of Tierra Antigua Realty in Tucson, Ariz., today became the first real estate agent who can legally use a drone for real estate photography. If you have recently looked at the listings in your local MLS (or on Zillow and Redfin), you have likely seen plenty of images that could have only come from a drone. Under the FAA’s strict definition, however, those weren’t taken legally, as the agency still prohibits almost all commercial use of drones.

Trudeau, the FAA today announced, is authorized “to fly a Phantom 2 Vision+ quadcopter to enhance academic community awareness and augment real estate listing videos.” The Vision+ is currently the top-of-the-line model in DJI’s lineup of consumer drones (the $3,400 Inspire 1 doesn’t qualify as a consumer model in my eyes).

In addition, the FAA also granted another exception to Advanced Aviation Solutions in Spokane, Wash., which will use a fixed-wing eBee AG drone from senseFly for monitoring crops.

Tierra Antigua and Advanced Aviation Solutions can’t just take their drones for a spin, however. In addition to the pilot, there also has to be an observer around. The pilot also needs to have “an FAA Private Pilot certificate and a current medical certificate, and the UAS must remain within line of sight at all times.” Obviously, you can’t safely operate a Vision+ if you can’t answer these questions from the FAA’s pilot exam.

Today’s new exemptions bring the total number of companies allowed to commercially operate drones in the U.S. to 13 (there are a total of 14 exceptions for 13 companies now). That’s not a lot by any stretch of the imagination and the FAA actually got some pushback when it gave exemptions to a number of film companies earlier this year. The FAA says it has now received a total of 214 requests for exemptions.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Muhammad HassanDecember 15, 2017 at 1:04 AM

    I love the way you write and share your niche! Very interesting and different! Keep it coming! Dallas real estate aerial photography

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
1 comment
Read more

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th
Post a Comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a
Post a Comment
Read more