As a drone pilot, there are many irksome things about flying a drone that you can live with.
For instance having birds dive bomb your drone comes with the job, you are in their airspace of course they will attack you.
How about the fact that the wind is messing with the stability of your shot; can’t do much about that because drones are quite lightweight in order to be portable.
Manufacturers such as DJI go out of their way to improve the flying experience for every pilot by improving many tiny details but there always exist that one big thing that every pilot wants improved; battery life.
Drones travel at quite some speed (about 40mph) all the while trying their hardest to resist wind speeds, capture and/or record footage, transmit live feed back to the controller and the smartphone connected to the said controller all the while staying afloat or changing altitude in order to get that shot.
All these tasks will naturally strain the batteries but the average flight time of a drone being 30 minutes means for longer flights you need a lot more batteries and there will be a lot of interrupted flying.
This is a big bummer for many drone pilots until now. Impossible Aerospace, a startup company boasts its new drone Impossible US-1 which is said to be able to fly for 2 hours before requiring a charge.
The CEO of the company Spencer Gore –former Space X and Tesla battery engineer- said that this was possible because the drone uses many tiny power cells comparable to that setup for the Tesla’s battery pack but with a twist.
The tiny power cells come together to form the structure of the drone and this means that the drone is pretty much a flying battery.
The US-1 has a 26-inch frame and flies up to 42 miles per hour with a maximum range of about 46 miles (very impressive).
The company also claims that the drone can be fully recharged within an hour for quick return to flights.
This super powered drone however comes at a great cost. The baseline model of the Impossible US-1 comes at $7500 and that is without the addition of other accessories such as the camera and the like.
Seems like multiple batteries and a 30 minute flight time still sounds like an economically sound idea…for now.
By:WinstonWotse/techvoiceafrica.com
