RotorDrone Magazine Archives

Put Your Drone To Work

What recommendations would you give to an aspiring drone operator who has a Part 107 certification and is looking for commercial work? Answer: Having the certification is a good starting point, but there is a lot more to becoming a competent commercial drone pilot. Prospective pilots must have additional training in the various platforms, payloads, […]

How to Pass the Part 107 Exemption Exam

This article will cover the ways I studied for the test and some tricks to successfully pass any test. The first piece of advice—and this may seem obvious—is that you must know the material. This means you need to understand the material, not just be aware of it. Knowing that there is a difference, for example, between Class B and […]

Getting Great Aerial Shots Over Water

Very early on, I became fascinated with the possibility of using drones to create island-wide panoramas and unique perspectives of the beautiful Hawaiian Islands. I learned some hard lessons about how to research and prepare for each flight, when I would fly my drone into the very unforgiving environment of breaking waves, high winds, and […]

Charging several battery packs at once

Lithium battery chemistry is volatile. If one battery can catch fire and cause a lot of damage because of improper charging, imagine what several batteries hooked together and charging in close proximity to one another can do if anything goes wrong. Parallel charging might sound like a convenient way to charge multiple batteries at the same time, but it can […]

Make Money in Real Estate

We are often asked, “How can I make money flying a drone?” While there are many different ways to cash in using your aircraft, one that is available to new pilots in almost every city is real-estate photography/videography. Because getting started can be a challenge, we asked our good friend Joe McBride, owner of Discovery […]

Rho-Lens: Prescription lenses for FPV

Today’s FPV goggles offer amazing resolution for a truly immersive flying experience. Unfortunately, fliers with less-than-perfect distance vision may not get the most out of these outstanding headsets. While there are diopter-lens sets available to provide a measure of distance-vision correction, these can’t take the place of genuine prescription lenses. RHO-Lens fills this need by […]

Fly Safely with a 3-Person Crew

When working as a commercial drone pilot shooting footage for TV commercials and movies, pilots have to be able to fly their multirotors in a wide array of circumstances. This includes flying indoors and outside under various weather and lighting conditions. Needless to say, this can create a stressful environment for pilots, who can have […]

Multirotors give Agriculture a boost

Precision agriculture gets a boost from multirotors Here at the Roswell Flight Test Crew, we typically focus on the “sexy” applications for rotor drones: flying a First-Person View (FPV) machine over a burning building to support firefighters battling the blaze on the ground below, or using an aerial cinema rig to capture a dynamic shot […]

Eco-Friendly Multirotors — Keeping watch over endangered Alaskan sea otters

The beach was clear of ice and snow, and the gray rocks and gravel were drying in the warm sun. Nearby grass was showing hints of green, early for this Alaska spring. Drifting on its back in Kachemak Bay, near the town of Homer, Alaska, a sea otter ate morsels of food that it had […]

Drone Search and Rescue- Mission Ready – Part Two

The rain was so heavy that, in no time, we were all completely drenched. We didn’t have time to put on our rain gear. Luckily, I had decided to pack the drone in a dry bag inside the backpack. So at least I knew that the Phantom 4 would stay dry. The conditions got worse […]