Greetings from Venice Beach!

[Jay Smith]

Hello everyone. I'm Jay. I'm a part of Phantom Aerial Productions. (http://PhantomAerialProductions.com) I'm the pilot, mechanic, and lead editor for our crew. We currently only fly the Inspire 1, but started with an FC40, put the H3-3D gimbal on it with my Hero3+ Black edition camera. Paired it with a black pearl monitor, and a set of nice cloverleaf antennas. We were sponsored by Yuneec aviation for a little bit, they ended up giving us the Typhoon Q500 4K multirotor.

We shoot mainly music festivals at the moment, but were currently getting ready to put together a team for real estate shoots.

I'll be posting our videos, and photos in the aproprioate sections of this forum for everyone to view and comment on.

Hope see a few of you fellow pilots in the skys!

 

[John Doecliff]

Interesting, has anyone ever tried to knock your phantom out of the air when you were flying over? I saw a few slow pull backs from over a crowd on your site. I would be nervous someone would toss up a tee shirt or something just to be a smartass.

 

[Jay Smith]

We have had 1 scare at a festival. Some drunk fool tossed an empty glass whisky bottle at it. He was also on mushrooms at the time. The event coordinators, founder, and my entire team came down on him. So did all of his friends. When people are let in to the event, they are told about the drone, and to not interfere with it. Or they get booted from the multi-day festival, and loose what ever they paid for. Were also covered under the events insurance. So if for some reason the AC did go down, they would back what ever claims came their way.

We don't fly a phantom any longer. Only a hand full of early videos were composed with a phantom. Typhoon Q500 4K, or mainly the Inspire 1 setup with dual operators.

 

[John Doecliff]

Just so you know, There are some members here that will disapprove of your methods (flying over crowds). I'm not one of them but I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it for my own reasons. But that's just me. Those are some cool shots on your site. I hope you never have a crash and have to use that insurance. I have often thought that using a drone at festivals etc. could be pulled off safely if you had an area that was limited to drone use only. If it fell no one would be under it, problem is they don't always fall straight down.

 

[Jay Smith]

Yeah, were getting away from those kinds of shots. Mainly the festival planners, or media team captains are asking for these kinds of views. We are now telling them that we will not be providing shot's like that in the future, until we acquire a hex or octo. With something like that we can have flameouts and still be able to keep the AC under control and land it safely in our designated landing zones.

Thanks for the heads up about the other members. We expect some people to point their fingers at us and give us the 3rd degree. That's their prerogative. I don't let people like that bother me.

I'm aware that we could just tell them "No, we cant safely get those shots" and that's that. But we assessed the situation, our gear, the weather and made a call. There have been a few cases we said we couldn't get a particular shot due to it being unsafe, but these were not those cases. I'm not saying it was right or wrong, just that we are aware of what could happen, like hardware failure, or even unforeseen events (something being thrown at it..). We have faith in our ability, our gear our team and our judgment.

 

[John Doecliff]

Looking forward to seeing more Jay!