Aerial Work

[Dafydd Llewellyn]

Aerial work using piloted aircraft, no matter how economical, will be a thing of the past within 10 years. By then, the use of small UAV's carrying a GoPro mk15, will be so widespread that GA, RAAus, etc will be history insofar as offering a platform. Aerial photography, firespotting, crop inspection, shark patrol,pipeline inspection, powerline inspection,all sorts of remote sensing, will soon be done by UAV. Many of these will be illegal, and so will the operators - but CASA will have no hope of controlling it. It will all come down to who can do the best job at the lowest price. Looks like we'll all need some retraining!happy days,

That's off-topic, and highly debatable. Take a look at

 

the hardware involved costs about half a million dollars ( almost 2/3 again as much as the aeroplane) and nobody is going to take the risk of putting that sort of capital investment into an overgrown model plane. By the time a UAV gets to the same reliability as a MAV (manned airborne vehicle) it costs a lot more to operate, and is still likely to be restricted about operating over high-density areas.