Things are looking up & moving along. After being greenlighted by substantial unanimity with a vote taken at last November’s general membership meeting, the ‘NACK drone’ has moved from a mere board meeting proposal to becoming a rock-solid (in up to 15mph winds so far) reality.

Definitely a quantum leap ahead of that camera-on-a-pool-skimmer-pole ‘drone simulator’ we played with on Paul’s Gilgo trip last April 30th! Our new ‘DJI Mavic Pro’ landed stateside in early February & shortly thereafter was christened @Sunken Meadow on the 11th of that month with its inaugural flight.

A week later on the 18th Chris K, Chris F & I returned there for a nice paddle up the Nissequoge followed by our first drone filming of an actual kayak.

We’ve made some substantial progress I feel, starting out as raw, absolute beginners & steadily have built up to the point where we now have one pilot (not me) who is comfortable enough behind the controller to fly out over open water.

Nice work Chris. Hopefully as the season progresses we can flesh out the piloting ranks with some more interested folk.

 

 

 

 

I just want to extend thanks here on behalf of our club to the many members who generously contributed to & topped off our ‘drone fund’ in record time. A few were extraordinarily generous & that extra boost bought us some invaluable pre-season time to navigate the intricacies of quadcoptering. There are a LOT of features to absorb. The blurry focus issues from 2 weeks ago in the screenshot examples above have been decidedly improved as can be seen in the latest video below.  

credits here to our Drone pilot/4K Camera control -Chris K., with opening handheld video footage provided by Ron S. 

 

Should be a very exciting 2017 season for NACK.   Let’s Paddle !