Information on Becoming a Remote Drone Pilot for Commercial Work

If you pass a test based on the FAA (or Federal Aviation Administration if you want to go with the full name) Part 107 test and get a certificate to become a remote drone pilot (or RPIC), then you can become a remote drone pilot and do commercial jobs with drones to make money! There is a lot of important information you need to remember even after you get the certification because you passed to Part 107 test, some of which I will go over in this story! After that, you can turn a fun hobby of playing around with drones into something that can make you enough for a living!

You need ATC permission when you fly in Class B, C, D, and E airspace since all of those classes are considered to be controlled airspace. The maximum airspeed you can fly a drone inside of the national airspace system is one hundred miles per hour and as an RPIC, you will need to conduct a preflight inspection before each flight. When you fly, it is good to have a VO - a designated person who assists the drone pilot in avoiding air traffic and objects in the air as well as on the ground.

So what kind of work you can use your drone for? Well, there are a variety of drone jobs that you can do once you get your certification and become a professional drone pilot! You can work to have drones create nighttime displays and artwork/ads in the air for different companies! You can help companies with filmmaking and use drones to get shots for a video or movie that would generally be near impossible to get in real life without using a small aircraft. Small deliveries to remote areas, topographical surveying, helping with precision agriculture, drone photography, racing your drone for money & to entertain others, and monitoring the environment for changes are all things you can do with your drone that people will gladly pay you for - things that can turn into a career for you if you play your cards right.

So with this information, anyone who is interested can potentially look to get a job as a remote drone pilot. It will take a decent amount of time and effort to get certified, but once that is done, you can get a job that is full-time, part-time, or lucrative contract work all with the help of your trusty drone (or the drone they provide you)!

Citations:

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- Ferreira, Edgar; Chandler, Jim; Wackrow, Rene; Shiono, Koji (April 2017). "Automated extraction of free surface topography using SfM-MVS photogrammetry". Flow Measurement and Instrumentation. 54: 243–249. doi:10.1016/j.flowmeasinst.2017.02.001. S2CID 56307390.

- Hirsch, Lauren (1 July 2023). "Fireworks Have a New Competitor: Drones". The New York Times.

- Mademlis, Ioannis; Nikolaidis, Nikos; Tefas, Anastasios; Pitas, Ioannis; Wagner, Tilman; Messina, Alberto (2019). "Autonomous UAV Cinematography: A Tutorial and a Formalized Shot-Type Taxonomy". ACM Computing Surveys. Association for Computing Machinery. 52 (5). doi:10.1145/3347713. S2CID 202676119.

- Murphy, Mike (26 January 2016). "There's now a drone racing league that feels like pod racing from Star Wars". Quartz.

- Perks, Matthew T.; Russell, Andrew J.; Large, Andrew R. G. (5 October 2016). "Technical Note: Advances in flash flood monitoring using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)". Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. 20 (10): 4005–4015. Bibcode:2016HESS...20.4005P. doi:10.5194/hess-20-4005-2016. ISSN 1607-7938.

- Wallace, Emily (28 February 2019). "New Year Drone Show Celebrations". Skymagic.

- Zhang, Chunhua; Kovacs, John M. (December 2012). "The application of small unmanned aerial systems for precision agriculture: a review". Precision Agriculture. 13 (6): 693–712. doi:10.1007/s11119-012-9274-5. ISSN 1385-2256. S2CID 254938502.