Can a drone and an attorney prove that a walking trail will harm agricultural production?
PILOT REPORT: This mission brought me to farm country in the heart of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Owing to a series of massive floods at the end of the last ice age, which laid down alluvial soil across the Valley’s entire 150-mile length, this is some of the most fertile land on Earth. It is the “Paradise at the End of the Oregon Trail” that prompted a westward migration across North America beginning in the 1830s, exceeding the scale of the California Gold Rush by more than a third.
For a group of modern farmers in Yamhill County, there is a very real danger that it could become a “Paradise Lost.” The county government had purchased an easement for a rail line running right through the middle of their fields. The tracks had been torn up decades ago, and to my untrained eye, it looked like a drainage ditch. The county’s plan was to convert it into a trail for tourists to bicycle and walk through the countryside.
“Everyone loves trails—that is unless it cuts through the heart of commercial farms, significantly interfering with necessary farm practices,” said Wendie Kellington, the attorney who hired me to document the abandoned right-of-way, showing it in the context of the surrounding farmland. One of the farmers was even more direct, saying, “We’re going up against the spandex mafia.”
MISSION PLANNING
Like any commercial drone operation, this mission began not with the whir of propellers but the rustling of papers and tapping on a computer keyboard. Consulting a current sectional chart for the area, I found it is located in Class G airspace—not a huge surprise, given its rural character. I did notice, however, that the nearby countryside is dotted with small private airstrips and a couple of larger fields with fixed-base operators, where I could expect to see a greater density of crewed air traffic.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/ August 2019-Ausgabe von RotorDrone.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/ August 2019-Ausgabe von RotorDrone.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Windracers Mail Delivery
With its partner Windracers Ltd., Royal Mail has become the first UK parcel carrier to deliver mail to a UK island in a 70-mile, beyond-line-of-sight, autonomous flight to the Scilly Isles. Tasked to better connect the islands’ remote communities, a consortium including Royal Mail, Windracers Ltd., DronePrep, University of Southampton, Excalibur Healthcare Services, and Consortiq Limited is funded by UK Research and Innovation.
Counting Penguins
Counting penguins is harder than it sounds. With freezing rain, snow, and chilling winds that limit the flight windows for the surveys, it takes scientists using three full days to map the location of 300,000 nesting pairs of Adélie penguins on Antarctica’s Cape Crozier.
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In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, which established a deadline for the agency: achieve full integration of drones into the airspace by 2015. As the calendar rolls over into 2021, this begs an obvious question: “Are we there yet?”
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This bird-like drone is incredibly agile and efficient