own trial and error process — “You name it, I’ve tried it,” he says. From there Tran devised his own mix of sensors and platform. He uses a carbon fiber multicopter frame from Droidworx, a New Zealand company, paired with a Mikrokopter flight control board from Germany and an AV 200 camera gimbal. To ensure the copter wouldn’t lose stability if a motor went out, Tran opted for an octocopter instead of a more traditional quadcopter. He uses a digital SLR camera to shoot his footage.
model. And it was a long one despite the fact that he is already certified as a manned aircraft pilot. In Australia you have to train on a specific UAV and demonstrate you have flown a certain number of hours safely with that aircraft, says Tran. To be approved for commercial use, he had to submit a full risk assessment, an operations manual
and other documentation to prove he had a “competent business,” he says. Finally, CASA needed to witness his flight protocol and he had to demonstrate a safe mission. “[It’s] Pretty much the same process a normal aviation business would go through to get certified,” he says. That whole process took about nine months.
“It was a lot of mistakes along the way,” he says. “There were a lot of things I had to learn in terms of because I wasn’t getting an off-theshelf system.” As far as he knows he’s the first Droidworx platform operator in the world that can fly with air authority approval. Coptercam currently owns a fleet of three aircraft, a bonus both because it helps the company keep up with demand, but also the cost of creating the three was similar to purchasing one aircraft off the shelf, says Tran. Out of a request by a number of people, he’s started selling these assembled platforms as a side business function of Coptercam and has sold two or three, he estimates. His most recent sale is to a company in Jakarta, Indonesia, where there is an open skies policy on flying commercially.
Passing with flying colors To get certified by CASA, Tran says it was a two-part process of certifying both the pilots and the business
The Coptercam platform has eight motors to add redundancy and reliability. Photo courtesy Coptercam.
Mission Critical
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Summer 2012
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