Introduction

A remote pilot should know the gear they use to fly and maintain their drone well. I strongly believe this. In fact that’s what I define gear as, a known list of physical items that are used to support your drone flying. For me, this list changes with the weather and the type assignment and the repairs I am willing to take on. As you might suspect this list can be categorized further into essential, non-essential, and non-essential, but performance impacting. For example fingerless gloves in cold conditions really impact the time I can physically spend flying with a smile on my face!

So with no categorization here’s all gear that supports me flying:

• remote pilot licence
• picture id
• drone (1x)
• drone batteries (3x)
• battery chargers
• smart battery for charging drone batteries
• drone controller
• mobile phone (required for drone controller)
• 4x propellers
• backpack/drone bag/dry sacks
• 3x sd cards
• warm clothes (drone flying is largely a standing activity)
• rubber mat (for landing/takeoff)
• vehicle (transportation)
• water bottles for tea and water
• precision screwdriver set
• computer (digital media)
• external hard drives
• aeronautical charts (digital/paper)
• Garmin InReach 2
• mapping software
• imaging software (image stitching)
• 4k projector (image display)
• sd card carrier
• usb sd card reader
• work table for drone inspections and repairs
• 2ft by 3ft cutting mat
• junk drawer (cables and such)
• usb cables

Interactions and Constraints

I found listing all the gear used to fly and maintain my drone to be a useful exercise as it helped illuminate the various interactions between the individual items, drone activities and my flying. There are a number of items that are managed outside of drone activities. These are dual use items that are required for other activities. Examples are a picture id, vehicle, computer and warm clothes.

Other items have their own dependencies. The Garmin InReach does not function without a subscription. Computer upgrades have rendered software useless. Software has been deprecated.

Constraints exist as well and come from different sources. The picture id and drone license are required by regulation. I have personally settled on carrying 3 drone batteries to balance flight time (40 mins approx per battery) with the weight of all the gear I have to transport.

Yet some items are introduced to improve workflows. For example, it turns out the 4k projector is essential for reviewing large format images at size to assess the images quality. The sd card carrier is used to enforce rotation of sd cards used to storage on the drone.

Learning to interact well with some items is transferable to others. Mapping items are a great example of this. The better I understand maps and aeronautical charts the more useful are the mapping applications and software.

Observations

I have been generally pleased at how useful this article has been to me. I am aware that there is a fundamental connection with your drone flying capabilities and the gear provides that functionality and your financial budget. I had not articulated the fact that every item of drone related gear should have a well-defined use case until now. This is easy to identify with mission-critical gear like batteries and your remote pilot’s license, but should equally apply to the rest of your drone gear.

There is a clear relationship between your productivity, and your gear. I touched on this when discussing workspace productivity in a homebase article. For me, one way it manifests is in weak gear usage and fragile workflows. A good example of this are my digital media workflows. I have not settled on post-production image tools and most of the workflows are manual. This means if no automation is introduced to the workflow it will eventually fail and even if it does not replication of results may not be possible.

Conclusion

Thinking about your gear in the generic sense can be a valuable exercise. It is clear each individual piece of gear should have a well-defined rational for it’s use with your drone workloads. It can and does affect the execution of your workloads.

There is insight to be had in understanding the interactions and relationships between your individual items of gear and your own drone workloads. The gear you have and how you use it and maintain very much represent how you roll as a remote pilot!