Say you’ve got a property, a building, a home or an office building and you’re suspect. Maybe something doesn’t sound right, maybe you’ve had a tip off that something needs attention or maybe it’s just general maintenance. But how do you inspect something that’s high up and dangerous to either reach or get to safely. What are your options? Luckily we live in a time where everything that we’ve ever needed to know, use or think about has been created for us – and building inspection has had a recent jump into the 21st century – bringing us into 2019 with a bang. With drone technology, you can create 3D airborne images from the comfort of your office on the ground with either a trained drone pilot or a controller of your own providing the investment to cash in on drone technology is adopted. That’s right – with drone power you can inspect a full building visually without having to move at all. No ladders, no scaffolding and no harnesses. Just fire it up and take off.

Just fire a camera in the air

Simple enough right? If you’re struggling to gain access to certain building features, whether it’s the roof of your home or the 42nd floor of an office building – drone photography can be the way forward to investigate property inspection. That’s a completely hands off approach that we’re a massive fan of, promoting views from otherwise unseen angles and a huge health and safety benefit. Health and Safety issues are completely minimal with not a single person lifted into the air – that’s a huge headache avoided with drone power and a massive weight off your shoulders to get the quality surveyance that you need. Although licenses and permits may be required, for the majority of tasks – there’s very little to go wrong, especially with an experienced drone pilot from an inspection company at the controls. With the ability to create 3D captures and detailed images of any specific area required, you can control the drone from to ground and view live images to inspect any area. Whether it’s brickwork, stonework, lightning conductors, restoration, chimneys, roof tiles, roof valleys, lead work and anything else that you may need – air powered inspection is the way forward.

How to do it?

There’s plenty of different ways to use aerial photography for building inspection and depending on the size of your organisation, the best methods may differ. We’d often suggest that hiring a professional with high quality imaging drone and experienced pilot would be the best plan of attack for most companies looking to explore using drones for building inspections.

Hello and welcome to this (somewhat very brief) beginners guide to flying drones and what better way than to kick right off with the four main definitions that you’ll come to love with flying:

Throttle

Throttle makes the quad ascend or descend. It’s the control that changes the height of the drone so you can get really low or really high shots depending on your preference.

Yaw

Yaw, like jaw but with a ‘y’, is concerned with the rotation of the quadcopter in the clockwise or the counter-clockwise directions.

Roll

Roll is what we talk about when we tilt the quadcopter left or right.

Pitch

Finally pitch is concerned with the tilting of the quadcopter backwards or forwards. To make things a little more confusing, these controls can also be referred to by aileron (roll), elevator (pitch) and rudder (yaw). Got that? Good.

How to fly?

We’ll keep this nice and simple and we’d prefer not to give and specific instructions when it comes to learning to fly a drone as with many tedious and difficult tasks to master – they will take time. We’ve found that throwing new pilots in at the deep end to be very successful in terms of learning to fly.

Find a good open space

  Rather than a specific set of instructions we’d prefer you to go and find a wide open space – preferably a field or sandy beach where there are minimal obstructions and people that can be, well, hit. Next you’re going to need to check the wind speed, there are fancy ways of doing this – but we’re just going to recommend judging it by feel. If the wind speed is more than roughly 15mph – it might be best to come back to practice another day – there’s nothing worse than learning to fly against the elements.

Have a play

The next step is simple. Have a play around with your drone and see what you can do. The design of the controller, for most companies anyway, is fairly intuitive and with playing and figuring out the controls tentatively by yourself, you’ll make much more progress than by following bland tutorials. First off you should start with the very basics. How do I hover? Practice holding the throttle and moving in such a way that it looks great on the preview screen. Once you’ve mastered the art of the hover and feel like you can add more movement, have a play with the controls by moving each one a little in the directions they allow. You’ll soon get a feel for what does what and how it makes it go where. You should note that crashes are however inevitable and they happen to even the most experienced of drone pilots. It’s an idea to practice cutting the throttle when you’re stuck in sticky situations. That can be the difference between losing your drone in a tree, smashing it into a bridge or just coming by to pick it up off the ground. Have fun, practice and stay safe and you’ll build your confidence and skill in equal parts. Happy pilotting!

Want to sell your property? There’s no better way than the use of a drone. The only thing that you’ve really got when trying to sell your property is the use of images, video and the written word and if you’re really wanting to put some effort in – you’re going to want to maximise all three. That’s maximising photography skills and ensuring the best angles to highlight the areas of your property, creating an accurate and inviting written description and finally using well planned and created video to give further detail that images just can’t capture. The latter should be done with the use of a high quality, stabilised camera – or if you’re really wanting to make something of it – a drone for a comprehensive view of the property.

A birds eye view

There’s something about aerial photography that captures an area so well to give a true reflection of the surroundings and what the area immediate of a property feels like. Honestly is always the best policy when it comes to the sale of a property and with video is general it is very hard to fake. Most people will trust the eye of a video camera much more than a still shot that could be easily edited or cleverly positioned to make small spaces look larger – I’m sure we’ve all seen some pretty horrendous examples in the past when looking at properties. But the eye in the sky, a birds eye view of your property in video form with show everything, including the angles that other sellers won’t be able to see. With an inspection-like procedure, potential buyers will be able to see the condition of the brickwork, the roof, the chimney – and depending on the size of the property – maybe even a flyby of the inside of the building. With warts and all shown, everyone knows exactly what they’re selling and what they’re buying – so there’s no need to hit roadblocks further down the line when it comes to buying.

How to get aerial images

Aerial images are becoming more and more popular and by default, easier and easier to capture with the increase in availability. If you’re wanting to take some aerial shots to go with your property, we suggest heading out for a professional so that you won’t have to lay down some heavy investment costs in purchasing your own photography drone and learning to fly. By all means if aerial photography may be a hobby or interest, there’s nothing stopping you. But for a one-off one-time purchase, a professional with a drone may be the best plan of action.