Drone News: 128MP Survey Camera, Aloft Expanding to AAM, New Waivers Course, and Black Friday Sale!

Welcome to your weekly news update, we have 3 stories for you this week, Phase One releases 128 MP survey camera, Aloft expanding to AAM, new waivers course and our Black Friday sale is now live!

Phase One has released the P5 Survey Payload, coming in at 700 grams. The P5 has an electronic global shutter capable of capturing four frames per second at 128MP. The P5 also comes with a 1G ethernet connection port, 14 pin JST-ZE, and MAVLink/Auterion connections. Two lens options are available, with a 35mm and an 80mm lens. With the 35mm lens, the ground sampling distance at 394 feet (120m) is 1.16cm, or 0.45 inches. Using this information and working backwards through a GSD calculator, we estimate this means with the 80mm lens, from 120m would be 0.51cm. Pretty awesome new camera for those in the surveying field! Next up this week is Aloft, who is combining low altitude monitoring of UAS and AAM. The Project, called the North Texas Airspace Awareness Project, hopes to basically create a dashboard of low altitude aircraft operations specifically around UAS and AAM. This dashboard will allow local municipalities to publish and disseminate localized safety advisories for certain types of users such as governmental users, commercial, and recreational. Additionally, this will allow a direct connection between operators of both AAM and UAS and the local governments to share information such as local rules. If you’re unfamiliar with Aloft, they are the largest UAS Service Supplier of LAANC and the current maintainer of the FAA’s B4UFLY. Aloft provides 80% of all UAS airspace authorizations in the US. We’ll keep you updated if we see more about this project. Last up this week is our Black Friday Sale, which is now live! All of our catalog of courses is currently on sale for up to 50% off! This is our largest sale of the year and as usual, all of our courses are on sale for the lowest price of the year! We also JUST released a new paid course for drones on how to apply for waivers! The course includes information on the process, supporting documents, what the FAA wants to know, where to submit, and what to do after you get your waiver! That’s it! Have a great week and we’ll see you on Monday for the live event! https://dronexl.co/2023/11/15/phase-one-p5-survey-payload-drone-camera/ https://www.nctcog.org/getmedia/63742e52-4c0e-40c2-97c8-3ec7bb63a28c/North-Texas-Airspace-Awareness-Pilot-Program.pdf https://www.aloft.ai/blog/aloft-selected-for-pioneering-north-texas-airspace-awareness-project-leading-the-way-in-advanced-air-mobility/