photohikedive
Guest
Wow, your grasp of simple concepts is amazing!
There was about ten seconds in the video that the plane flew.
The rest of the time I was attempting to describe the backpack design idea for the airplane.
Yes, it has practical uses other than me taking the plane out on hikes for fun.
Part of my job is working with both controlled burns, as well as wild fires.
It is very expensive to have a full sized airplane fly over an area to inspect the progress and track of a burn/fire. To be able to carry something like this on a burn, toss it in the air from any small fire lane, fly it up over the area you want to inspect, and get it back in your hand to download the video in near real time would be beneficial to the burn coordinators. During controlled burns, it would be good to see from the air any potential problems like sections that didn't burn, or areas that fire jumped to that were not intended. Similar for wildfires. Being able to scout from the air without leaving the ground, to see what the fire is doing would help coordinate the fire suppression crews.
Or jobs that might require search and recovery over a wide, fairly open area. To be able to aerial surveys where they are trying to exclude human interference. (For example, bird breeding colonies, or fragile ground habitats like our dune systems, where just walking in there will damage the restoration progress.)
The plane that I am tossing into the air costs well under a hundred dollars, and that's with the camera. You couldn't reserve a full size plane for that cost. You can't fly nearly as low, and there's no (ok, little, this 12 oz plane might put your eye out if you don't catch it right
) risk to human safety. There are video systems out there that could go on a slightly larger version of this plane, that would transmit live video while in flight. One of the benefits is that even if something happened to the plane in flight, you would still have the visual data on hand. You could try to retrieve the plane at a later date.
