Drones | Drones are coming

Introduction: The mobile Internet trend is sweeping every corner of the world, and the sensitive media industry is the first to bear the brunt. In the past decade, traditional media have fallen deeply into the curse of "no change, no way out", and a large number of traditional media have collapsed one after another. But what is thriving are those emerging media born on the Internet. Their vitality and vitality seem to make people feel that "the future is yours."

robot craze

In April 2015, the poppies bloomed. In a remote mountainous area south of Heyuan City, Guangdong Province, China, a white four-rotor drone took off into the sky. With a "buzz" sound, it quickly jumped to an altitude of 1,000 meters, circling back and forth in the mountain forest within a dozen miles. It is equipped with a high-definition camera and GPS system to covertly detect illegally grown poppy fields in the mountains and forests.

This scene is not from the Hollywood black technology movie "Top Secret Flight", it has actually existed. Several times a year, Lai Changbin, director of the Public Security Bureau of Heyuan City, Guangdong Province, has to spend time in such mountainous areas. He put on a black police training uniform, wore anti-skid boots, and held a black square control screen panel to operate the drone that was out of sight.

At first, Lai Changbin was a little nervous. The trees were narrow and taking off and landing in them was a technical job. The psychological quality of the operator must be very good. If you don't pay attention, the plane will crash. An ordinary model aircraft can be used in a week, but it takes less than half a year to become proficient in such a drone.

At about the same time, more than 1,300 kilometers away in Xiangyang, Hubei Province, a fixed-wing drone used for pesticide spraying was slowly passing over a green wheat field. In order to ensure uniform spraying, the staff of the Hubei Xiangyang aerial defense team must be alert at all times to control the drone to fly in the air about 2 meters away from the top of the wheat ears.

"China has 1.8 billion acres of arable land, and there should be a market for 100,000 agricultural drones." Zhou Guoqiang, chairman of Anyang Quanfeng Aviation Plant Protection Technology Co., Ltd., said: In Japan, which has the longest history of using agricultural drones, 3,000 agricultural drones Humans and machines are covering 80 million acres of cultivated land in Japan.

In the past year, DJI Innovations, a drone company from Shenzhen, has carried almost all the interest in drones. Drones are light and flexible, easy to operate, can record parent-child moments, and are also a powerful assistant for photography enthusiasts. They have even begun to become a fashion. According to the Financial Times, this drone equipped with a small camera became one of the best-selling Christmas gifts in 2014.

It’s hard to tell whether DJI’s charm comes from innovation or a more real need, but it did spark a craze in the entire drone market. According to aviation consulting firm Teal Group, the consumer drone industry will continue to grow over the next 10 years, from US$2.8 billion in 2014 to US$5.6 billion in 2023.

But in the field of drones, a larger invisible market for professional applications is emerging. As Erik Brynjolfsson, author of “The Second Machine Age,” observes, intelligent machines can benefit workers. According to data from the Beijing Haiying Institute of Science and Technology Information, the total value of the global drone market will reach US$70.98 billion in the next 10 years, and global drone sales will soar to US$39.1 billion. "The scope of drone use will gradually expand and become mainstream in the next few years." U.S. stock analyst Cody Willard once wrote.

Over the Pearl River in Guangdong, drones have begun to help the police monitor floods and implement rescue operations; in the forests of Chongqing, the Forestry Bureau is using drones to monitor the direction of forest fires at an altitude of 1,500 meters; at the State Grid Branch in Taiyuan, a A multi-rotor drone approaches the tower to check whether the components on the top of the tower are damaged; at the urban management law enforcement brigade command center somewhere in Shenzhen, staff are controlling the real-time monitoring images from the drone on the big screen... like this Scenarios happen every day, and drones are penetrating into application scenarios in all walks of life. But not all drones can do this. Drones for industrial applications are expensive to build and are designed to be closer to military drones than consumer models for amateurs, and some even require dedicated runways.

Around 2010, with the maturity of quadcopter technology, drones began to be used in many professional fields. Yang Jinming, deputy director of the Shenzhen Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, has been engaged in drone research and development for many years. He believes that modern drones have become part of the robotics industry and can comprehensively drive the development of the overall national economy by exploring different application scenarios.

In the 1980s, British economist C. Freeman visited Japan and proposed that innovative technology and efficiency improvements are more important driving forces for maintaining economic growth. This drone craze is not groundless. It is rooted in a deeper technological innovation - the robot craze. In 2013, as the German government took the lead in elevating Industry 4.0 to a national strategy, the Internet of Things has been widely deployed around the world, and people, machines and products will realize zero-distance communication. According to estimates from the German National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, Industry 4.0 can increase the production efficiency of enterprises by 30%. This is also the background for the rise of the drone industry in China.

As Erik Brynjolfsson observes in Race Against the Machine, the speed and extent of robots' substitution of human skills has far-reaching economic consequences. The emergence of low-cost automation technology heralds the arrival of a huge change on a scale comparable to the agricultural technological revolution of the last century.

market

One morning passed, and the drone had completed the poppy reconnaissance operation in the entire mountainous area. "In the past, in order to arrest drugs, we often had to conduct aimless searches, which could take up to a month at the earliest." Lai Changbin made a helpless expression.

The drone in front of me has smooth lines and weighs only two kilograms. It has the words "HY Air Police No. 1" printed on the fuselage. The model is F50. It is developed and produced by Yidian Technology, a drone company in Shenzhen. On the surface, it doesn’t look much different from ordinary aerial photography drones. But in Lai Changbin's eyes, "This is the difference between BYD and BMW." General aerial photography drones, such as DJI Inspire1, are priced at RMB 17,000, while the price of this F50 is as high as RMB 500,000.

Lai Changbin was once a model airplane fan and used a variety of consumer aerial photography products. But for the police force, ordinary aerial photography drones cannot operate when it encounters wind or rain. A DJI Inspire 1 can originally fly for 25 minutes, but in windy weather it can only fly for 15 minutes to resist the wind. UAVs like the F50 can fly for 45 minutes, which is 2 to 3 times the flight time of ordinary consumer-grade aerial photography drones. They can also perform reconnaissance missions for a long time in harsh environments. In August 2013, a severe flood occurred in Zijin Longwo County, Heyuan City, Guangdong Province. The F50 controlled by Lai Changbin flew over the mountains and transmitted the latest images of the disaster.

Unmanned aerial vehicle is referred to as "unmanned aerial vehicle", and its English abbreviation is "UAV". As a target drone for training, it first appeared in the 1920s. It is hard to imagine that today, a century later, drones have flown to farmland and forests, solving various problems for mankind in different regions and industries. At present, from an international perspective, the drone technology of the United States and Israel is at the cutting-edge level. The "Global Hawk" is the most advanced long-endurance long-range unmanned reconnaissance aircraft of the U.S. Air Force and even the world. It can last up to 42 hours and has a wingspan similar to that of a Boeing 747.

At the fifth China UAV Exhibition held in 2014, 62 domestic UAV companies competed to appear with the latest technologies and models. However, Yang Jinming believes that "the current technical level of Chinese drones still lags behind that of foreign countries."

News about drones has been overwhelming since last year. International giants such as Amazon and DHL have begun to experiment with drone logistics in order to find a faster way to deliver goods to consumers. In early February, Alibaba also announced that its previous drone delivery test could complete the entire process from order placement to receipt of goods within one hour.

Unlike consumer drones that attract attention, the professional drone market has always maintained a sense of mystery. According to Yang Jinming's estimation, the global military and police drone market has reached US$5 billion by 2014, and this number has rarely changed in the past three years. "Professional drones are not driven by investment, but by real demand." Yang Jinming said. Northwestern Polytechnical University, as an important center for aerospace technology research, has more than 50 years of history in the field of UAV research and development. "The research and development idea of drones has always been that drones can be used to complete tasks in places that humans cannot reach and in dangerous areas that cannot be reached." Yang Jinming introduced. Orders for professional drones 80% and above come from military, police and public service agencies. "The DJI craze has opened up the civilian market for drones to a certain extent." Yang Jinming said.

agricultural technological revolution

On March 13, 2015, Hang Wei, Anyang Quanfeng’s agent in Xiangyang, Hubei, ushered in the second day of his drone flight defense activities. This aerial defense activity covers 10,000 acres of wheat fields in Xiangzhou District, Xiangyang City, Hubei Province. The Xiangzhou District Government invested RMB 200,000 to cooperate with Hangwei's drones to spray some farmers' fields in Xiangzhou District for free. pesticide.

Hang Wei, 37, is currently mainly responsible for promoting drone pesticide spraying in the Xiangyang area. Anyang Quanfeng is a company that specializes in manufacturing agricultural drones. Its drones start at 168,000 yuan. According to Zhou Guoqiang, chairman of Anyang Quanfeng, drones face harsh working environments of high temperature, high humidity, and large loads in agriculture, and there are demands for long working hours and short operating cycles, which requires reliability of drones. very high.

Agriculture, as the primary industry, is the foundation of the national economy. As a large agricultural country with a large population, China's promotion of modernization methods is an indispensable part of improving agricultural production efficiency. According to Hang Wei, a total of 4 drones were used in this drone flight prevention activity. One aircraft carried 10 liters to 16 liters of pesticides and flew for more than ten minutes at a time. It can spray more than 1,000 acres of farmland in one day. The efficiency of farmers manually spraying pesticides is about 25 acres a day.

"The atomization effect of drones spraying pesticides is better, and the wind generated by the helicopter's propellers can lift the plants and let the pesticides spray to the roots of the plants." Hang Wei said as he walked into a field on the roadside. This is today In the area that had been sprayed with pesticides in the morning, he pulled out a few wheat seedlings, inspected them carefully and said, "The effect is not bad, the bugs are basically dead."

The area to be sprayed in the afternoon was not on the side of the road. Hang Wei drove around the village for a long time, stopped at the end of the cement road, and then walked across a large field of farmland to reach the location of his drone operation team. The operation team has a total of eight people. They wear conspicuous orange overalls. They operate the aircraft in pairs and observe the surrounding environment to prevent personal hazards.

A staff member of the operation team said that during the busy farming season, they basically travel around the country and have no time to go home. The drone started working, attracting some nearby villagers to watch the fun. Hang Wei also began to help keep the villagers at a safe distance of 5 meters to prevent them from being affected by the dust caused by the propeller.

"Spraying pesticides with drones not only improves efficiency, but is also safer. People spraying pesticides often cause pesticide poisoning, and farmers may even faint in the fields." He has been engaged in agriculture for many years and knows the lives of farmers well. He believes that the market prospects for the application of drones in agriculture are very broad, because China's agricultural market has a vast area unmatched by other markets.

"What we need to improve now is the issue of cost. Agricultural applications are not like power line inspection or oil pipeline applications that require a lot of investment. For farmers, cheapness is the most important." Hang Wei said, "Currently spraying The cost of drones and operation for one acre of farmland is 12 yuan, and the cost of pesticides and other aspects is 5 to 6 yuan. Our current charge is 20 yuan per acre, and we will definitely find ways to reduce costs in the future."

The drones in the fields of Xiangyang have gone through high-tech R&D centers to modern manufacturing factories. The advent of the technological era has allowed people in the countryside to feel the rapid changes of the times. "At present, agricultural drones still need to focus on solving the reliability problem of the aircraft. In the future, agricultural tools must develop in an intelligent direction. We need drones with autonomous flight capabilities."

major

One of the most important tasks of Luo Zhonghui, product director of Shenzhen Yidian Aviation Technology Co., Ltd. every day is to choose test flight subjects. The specialist drone company’s biggest customers are the military, police and public services of various governments. Yidian Technology is also the only enterprise unit that participated in the drafting and formulation of the Ministry of Public Security's police "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System" industry standard. In 2014, the multi-rotor military and police drone F50 accounted for 15% of its sales.

"We test the capabilities of the aircraft to the limit. If any part fails, it may cause the entire aircraft to be destroyed." Luo Zhonghui said while sitting in his office in Shiyan Town, Shenzhen. In a dust-free workroom next door, the F100 that will be used for testing that day is displayed.

The development of this drone took two years, and since the company's drone R&D department was established 6 years ago, this is only the second product developed by this drone manufacturer with a R&D team of 300 people. The price is as high as RMB 1.8 million. Generally, the price of police drones is about 500,000 yuan, and the cheapest ones cost more than 300,000 yuan. Although there is currently no national standard, the service life of this type of drone is 3 to 5 years and can accumulate at least 5,000 hours of flight.

"The production level of the components determines the cost of the components," Luo Zhonghui pushed her glasses and said seriously, "Professional-grade drones require industrial-grade or even military-grade components, which means that even if only one component is needed, I will actually make it 100 and choose one.”

Aircraft crashes are generally caused by component and design problems. There can be no sloppiness in the production of truly professional-level drones. Every part has a complete life record, including when the steel left the factory, who did the quality inspection, etc. And these are all included in the cost. For the same equipment or equipment such as Beidou navigation, the accuracy requirements on drones are also different. For example, drones used by the military and police require very fast GPS satellite searches, Luo Zhonghui said.

Wang Zhixin is the captain of the law enforcement team of the Songgang District Sub-district Office of Shenzhen City. Recently, the phenomenon of illegal construction in Songgang area has been very serious, which has given Wang Zhixin a headache. He is currently forming a drone unit, and hopes to use this unit to coordinate urban inspections from the air on the ground. "At present, our law enforcement team has purchased three small drones and one large drone to carry out inspections in a coordinated manner and take pictures of illegal construction and random trading on the ground." The footage captured by the drone is transmitted to the command and control center in real time for monitoring, and software is used to compare the footage later to discover possible illegal phenomena. On the one hand, this can supplement the perspective of inspections, and on the other hand, it can solve the problem of insufficient personnel in the law enforcement team.

Wang Zhixin said that such drone law enforcement is not common in China. Based on the information he learned, they are the first drone law enforcement team. In his view, this is mainly due to the fact that the policy has not been clearly liberalized and the safety of drones flying in cities needs to be further improved.

In addition to military and police reconnaissance, drones are beginning to be used in a wider range of public areas. Before the Spring Festival this year, Yidian Technology received a formal order from the Chongqing Forestry Bureau. As a mountain city, the forests around Chongqing are prone to fires in summer.

Since last year, the Forestry Bureau has used the F50 to conduct three large-scale drills, and continuously used drone patrols in mountainous areas such as Beibei, Chongqing. One of the F50s was also required to be equipped with infrared night vision function to deal with sudden fires at night. “We only have one requirement, and that is to be quick.” said a staff member of the Chongqing Fire Prevention Office. “In the past, we would take the fire brigade there when there was a fire, but we didn’t know how the fire would spread, especially if there was a tailwind. In a few seconds, the entire building would be covered with fire. The mountain may burn, which is very dangerous." The endurance time and flight height of ordinary aerial photography drones cannot meet the requirements, because the fire will reach more than 1,500 meters. Only professional drones can operate normally under low pressure and strong wind conditions.

"The F100 is made of carbon fiber material, which is stronger than ordinary plastic or metal materials and can withstand strong winds above level 7." Zhu Jiang, marketing director of Yidian Technology, said, pointing to a white quadcopter on display. The new model can fly at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour, fly up to 7,000 meters, and transmit images from 20 kilometers away.

Although these cool technologies are not of great value to ordinary consumers, they mean more advanced technology and higher efficiency in professional fields such as forest fire prevention and power detection. Ordinary aerial photography aircraft have a height limit of 500 meters, a flight diameter of about 1,000 meters, and a maximum endurance of 25 minutes. Once encountering strong winds and low pressure, many controls are prone to failure. Usually, the industry uses battery life, environmental adaptability, flight radius, positioning system accuracy and ground control system as the criteria for measuring the quality of professional drones. Therefore, even if the aircraft is equipped with a camera, Zhu Jiang prefers to call Yidian Technology's drone an information collection system rather than an aerial photography product with a single function.

The reason why this is so qualitative is that professional drones have higher requirements for image collection, including precise capture and positioning. This is particularly important in power line inspection applications, because it is often necessary to check the components on the tower, the smallest of which is only 4 mm.

Zhao Guocheng, chairman of Hubei Ewatt Technology Co., Ltd., once worked in the power industry. When the severe ice and snow disaster occurred in the south in 2008, his company received an order to deliver power supplies to the disaster area. When he rushed to the disaster area with supplies, he found that due to heavy snow and ice, the roads could not be transported normally, and they had no way of knowing the current status of the damage to the electrical equipment in the disaster area.

"If there had been drones at that time, we could have flown to the disaster area to see the damage, and we could have responded and prepared accordingly immediately." Zhao Guocheng saw the market opportunity, and later he acquired several companies that specialized in unmanned aerial vehicles. A small drone company formed its own R&D team and entered the UAV industry.

State Grid and China Southern Power Grid are Ewatt's two largest customers. According to Tian Yuehong, director of the Taiyuan Power Supply and Transportation Center of the State Grid, they began to formally equip drones at the end of 2013 to conduct daily inspections and inspections of transmission lines, as well as accident identification. Since most work is carried out in high mountain areas, the vegetation is usually relatively lush and it is difficult for manpower to carry out the work. The purpose of replacing it with drones is to reduce the burden of manpower to a certain extent.

"At present, we have not calculated specifically how much economic benefits drones like this can bring us, but daily work is indeed much easier." Currently, the Taiyuan center is equipped with three types of drones: medium-sized drones, Fixed wing and multi-rotor. Medium-sized aircraft are oil-powered, with relatively strong endurance and load-carrying capacity, and are mainly used for comprehensive operations; while multi-rotor aircraft, due to their short flight time, are mainly used for inspections of specific towers; fixed-wing aircraft are mainly used for inspections of circuit paths. .

Shenzhen Aite Drone Company has developed a fixed-wing drone with longer endurance that can fly for 4 hours. It can achieve longer flight distances during power line inspection and land surveying and mapping. "In some remote mountainous areas, some power towers may be distributed on different hills. It is very difficult to use manpower to build the cables in the middle. It will be much easier if it is a drone." Meng Wei, general manager of Shenzhen Aite Drone Company, said .

from 0 to 1

In 2010, Yang Jinming and his colleagues at Northwestern Polytechnical University spent an extremely boring summer. The conference room was filled with heat and debate. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the world's first quadcopter "Gyroplane No. 1" took to the sky, but it was not until this year that quadcopter technology became stable and mature. The civilian drone market is beginning to really explode.

"Four years ago, we felt that the market for civilian drones was difficult to develop." Yang Jinming recalled sitting in a large office. Next door is his bionic wing aircraft laboratory in Shenzhen. Regarding the civilian prospects of drones, there have always been two opinions within Northwestern Polytechnical University. One side believes that if everyone could own a drone, the market would be terrifyingly large. The other side believes that it is difficult for the industry to develop when aviation control and governance are not sound.

Yang Jinming is obviously a person who wants to eat crabs. In 2011, he led his team to establish a laboratory in Shenzhen. It also cooperates with laboratories in Singapore, the United States and other places to develop a variety of application drones including bionic wings. In the first three years, the laboratory, like other professional drone companies, focused on some more urgent application scenarios: police use, anti-terrorism, and disaster relief.

Yang Jinming is now starting to plan for a richer application space for drones. "An airplane is a platform. If a drone is equipped with an ordinary camera, it is aerial photography. If it is equipped with a professional camera, it is police reconnaissance. If it is equipped with a bucket of water, it can put out fires. Most of the things that manned aircraft can do now can be done in the future. Give it to the drone." When he said this, Yang Jinming was a little excited. His laboratory is researching a drone for high-altitude detection of the status of steel cables for the Humen Bridge, and the research and development has been going on for half a year.

"Professional drones are an industry with high technical thresholds. There are currently more than 400 drone companies in China, but fewer than 10% have truly mastered the core technology." Yang Jinming said, "Strictly speaking, DJI is not Get a real drone." In his opinion, drones such as DJI are more appropriately defined as aerial photography products. Because it focuses on mass consumers, it cannot compare with drones used in professional fields in terms of battery life, material, flight radius and altitude. Drones in the real professional field seem to be far from the impression of drones in most people's minds. At the same time, Zhou Guoqiang even directly pointed out that "DJI is a toy, and our professional drones are tools. We call drones like DJI model aircraft."

"Many people think that DJI is not a drone in the strict sense. In fact, DJI belongs to the category of robots." Andy Pan, Vice President of DJI Technology Partner Ecosystem, responded that what DJI is doing is putting cameras and gimbals on it. On board the aircraft. "The basis of drones is still an aircraft, but it is a technology that integrates multiple cutting-edge technologies. It is an industry that integrates and accumulates technologies from multiple cutting-edge disciplines." Pan Nongfei believes. In fact, "The Economist" has listed DJI's star product Phantom as one of the "most influential robot products in the world."

"The key word for entrepreneurs of the previous generation may have been model innovation, which was from 1 to N. But this generation is more about going from 0 to 1." This is what Pan Nongfei recently learned from Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1" Get inspired. “The reason why DJI is DJI is because what it did in the beginning was not something that was just needed. This was a completely developed market demand. The previous generation of Internet entrepreneurs all enjoyed China’s demographic dividend and chose different The model has entered a mature red ocean field. And those born in the 1980s are more daring to do things that have never been done before."

In November 2014, DJI opened the SDK (Software Development Kit) development platform for the Phantom drone series products, encouraging and supporting developers to write applications suitable for their respective fields on DJI's flight platform. According to Pan Nongfei, China Merchants New Energy also uses the DJI SDK platform to apply DJI’s drones to the inspection of solar panels. There are also some telecom operation service giants that have begun to use solutions developed based on DJI SDK combined with drones to inspect the antennas of base stations. “UAVs themselves have a strong technical threshold. For startups, if they don’t have core technologies in multiple fields, I don’t think the opportunities are great. If you develop industry applications based on existing UAV platforms, there should be great potential. "Pan Nongfei said.

Not only DJI, some companies that originally positioned consumer drones are also eager to try the professional application market. Zeng Hao, CEO of Shenzhen Zero Degree, said when talking about the new actions of Zero Degree UAV: "We have designed a hook, and users can use their imagination to realize the drone's transportation of things or other functions." And another drone manufacturer Xiong Yifang, founder of Shangyihang Technology, is also full of confidence in the future of the professional application market. "We have developed a product for the professional market - the six-axis UAV Skyway, which will be put on the market soon. It can support up to 5 kilograms The load capacity and 30-minute battery life can meet the needs of industry users," he said.

In some professional application fields, the popularity of drones is not very high due to the low cost. For the police, drones only exist as a temporary equipment and are used for special purposes. According to Lai Changbin, each municipal bureau in Guangdong Province has at most one drone. The greater market potential lies in more frequently used application scenarios such as traffic supervision, crowd control, and oil leakage inspection. These not only require relevant regulations to be improved as soon as possible, but also impose requirements on the cost of drones.

Supervision

Also driven by drones is the drone training system. Ewatt was one of only three companies to obtain the "Temporary Certificate for Civilian Unmanned Aircraft System Pilot Training Institution" issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China in 2014. The remaining two companies are Anyang Quanfeng and Hunan Sunward Technology. Ewatt's flight school was established in August 2014. In the first training class held in 2014, there were a total of 20 students and 8 instructors. The final exam pass rate was 80%.

According to Ke Yubao, executive secretary of the China General Aviation AOPA Association (China Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association), which has audit qualifications, as of December 31, 2014, the association had audited 28 training institutions and approved 18. Several important criteria for review include whether there is a dedicated training base, whether there are legally used airports and airspace, and whether there are corresponding training syllabuses and manuals, etc.

In fact, relevant policies and regulations have been promulgated. The Civil Aviation Administration of China issued the "Civil UAV Air Traffic Management Measures" on June 26, 2009, which stipulates that "units and individuals who organize and implement civil UAV activities shall follow the " "General Aviation Flight Control Regulations" and other provisions apply for the establishment and use of airspace, and accept flight activity management and air traffic services." The "Interim Regulations on Pilot Management of Civilian Unmanned Aircraft Systems" issued in 2013 pointed out that the flight range of micro-UAVs weighing less than or equal to 7 kilograms is within a radius of 500 meters within the visual line of sight and a relative height of less than 120 meters. , no license management is required. Drivers of drones whose weight and other indicators are higher than the above standards and fly into complex airspace must be subject to the supervision of industry associations or even the Civil Aviation Administration.

Wang Xiazheng, deputy director of the Drone Management Office of the China Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, pointed out in an interview with the China National Broadcasting Station's "Voice of China" that Taobao and other companies' attempts to test drone delivery are not in compliance with the regulations. Under current regulations, although qualified drone operators do not need a qualification review, drone flight activities must be declared.

At the same time, according to Xinhua News Agency, the State Council and the Air Traffic Control Commission of the Central Military Commission (referred to as the National Air Traffic Control Commission) proposed at the National Low-altitude Airspace Management Reform Work Conference held in November 2014 that my country is currently operating flight control zones in Shenyang, Guangzhou, Chongqing Ten flight control zones including Hangzhou and Hangzhou are piloting the reform of airspace management below 1,000 meters, while the opening of low-altitude airspace still awaits the next step of policy progress.

Ke Yubao's schedule has been very full in recent months, and the booming drone market has made him and the AOPA Association busy. The AOPA Association was established on August 17, 2004. It is a national industry association under the jurisdiction of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. It is also a national member of the International Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (IAOPA) and one of its members in China (including Taiwan and Hong Kong). , Macau) the only legal representative.

“Due to the rapid development of drones in the past two years, there were no specific control measures for this type of drones at the regulatory level before. Now the National Air Traffic Control Commission, the Air Force, Civil Aviation and other relevant departments believe that drones cannot be used in such a disorderly manner. Continue to develop." Ke Yubao told "Business Weekly/Chinese Edition". Since 2013, the Civil Aviation Administration of China has issued relevant regulations, stipulating the definition of drones, what kind of licenses different drones should have, and what procedures need to be followed to obtain licenses.

The current policy stipulates that drones cannot be used within the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. Before purchasing a drone, a certificate must be issued at the police station and a flight plan must be declared before each flight. This is indeed true for drone companies that prefer the mass market. It's a big impact. "These companies also admit that this has caused very heavy losses to them, but if they had actively communicated with relevant departments in advance, it would not be like this." Ke Yubao said.

Yang Jinming believes that these drone companies are ahead of the curve, but in fact the law lags behind. If the drone industry wants to truly develop, the air must first be regulated in an orderly manner. In this regard, Pan Nongfei believes that DJI hopes that the relevant policies of the industry will be as clear as possible. Especially in a market that is becoming increasingly red ocean, with many small start-up companies, without supervision, risks will become greater and greater.

However, this does not seem to be a problem for professional drone companies. Zhou Guoqiang’s agricultural drones basically fly within 10 meters above the ground, and are almost not affected by policies. The promotion of modern agriculture is strongly supported by the government. Zhu Jiang believes that there are no policy issues in the professional field. "Usage in professional fields, such as police use and mission execution, will be declared in advance. When emergencies such as earthquake relief and disaster relief occur, the use of drones also complies with relevant regulations."

On March 15, it started to rain in Xiangyang. Because rain will wash away pesticides on the surface of plants, the fly control work in the morning can only be suspended. When the weather cleared up after noon, Hang Wei and his aerial defense team stepped up their work and completed pesticide spraying on more than 800 acres of fields, basically ensuring the stable progress of the work. Lai Changbin was relieved that no illegally grown poppies were found during his mountainous operations. Tian Yuehong's drone team once again completed an equipment upgrade, and now their ground receivers can see the status of the tower more clearly. April is coming and the weather is getting warmer. The staff of the Chongqing Fire Prevention Office will usher in the busiest period of the year. However, what is different from previous years is that the F50 drone is also waiting for them.

[WeChat public account search: itc_group]

Information Consulting Group, 60 seconds a day, 1 picture and text every day, you are the wonderful one.