The beauty about flying is that there are a variety of career options to choose from, considering that not everyone aspires to be an airline pilot. Regardless of the path that one decides to take, the adventure and perks are still there and are unique to each field the pilot ventures into.
Options range from hot air balloon piloting, humanitarian flying, crop dusting, aerobatics and many more.
One of these well known alternatives is aerial surveillance (also known as aerial reconnaissance, aerial surveying or aerial photography) and from what I have gathered, it does seem to be an interesting yet very involving field especially because it requires a lot of precision flying (and here's where those straight and level exercises done in PPL come in handy :P)
Backstory
Aerial surveying is a practice that has been carried out since the late 19th century and basically involves capturing images of the ground below from on board an aircraft.
Actually, the first aerial image that was taken was of a small French village and the man who pioneered this was a photographer by the name Gaspar Felix Toumachon, who patented this concept of using aerial images to compile maps.
Ground surveys were originally carried out for map compilation, however, Gaspar's method of capturing aerial images proved to be more time saving and it became the preferred means of capturing data.
With time, diverse uses of aerial photography such as in archaeological studies, vegetation mapping, conservation work etc were introduced.
Digital Elevation model I created in QGIS of Mt.Kenya region
Just so you know........
Aerial photographs are taken in two ways. There are oblique photographs and vertical photographs and each of these methods have their own merits and demerits, however, I shall not look at these in depth.
Oblique photographs are those taken at an angle, usually 45 degrees and can be captured manually just so long as the angle at which the shot is taken gives the best view of the landscape or feature.
The main drawback of images produced from this type of photography is perspective, whereby distant objects appear smaller than they actually are in real life while nearby objects appear larger.
As a result, this method has limited uses and might not be the best for certain types of analyses.
For vertical photographs, the camera is pointed straight down and eliminates perspective issues as experienced in oblique photographs, however, this method too has demerits in that one cannot tell the elevation differences between points.
The images above are examples of how data can be represented after a successful surveillance. Created in QGIS.
Aircraft used in aerial survey
Fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, and more recently drones are used in aerial survey.
At Wilson airport, I have come across the Cessna 208BCaravan, Partenavia P-68 and Cessna 172/182's which are used in data collection.
In Kenya, the Department of Remote Sensing and Resource Surveys (DRSRS) is responsible for carrying out aerial surveys, however many other companies such as GeoMaps, Ramani Geosystems, Nature Surf, Azimath Company Limited etc are among those that are involved in this field as well.
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