OutbackUAV

The advice was originally given to Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin in The Graduate but whereas Benjamin immediately took to the bottom of the family swimming pool in his new scuba gear to escape his parents’ frightful friends it looks like Chad Kapper has taken the advice onboard.

Perusing my YouTube subscription feed there was a new one from FT, always welcome and perhaps less frequent than I would like.

They’re busy people.

They have FliteFest coming up.  As well there’s their road trip to the South of France sponsored by ImmersionRC.  (As a mad Francophile and ‘RCophile’ so it’s agonising that I can’t go - even if I’ll only be not far away in Greece at the time.

When I watched the video it was all business, just Josh and Chad and no planes.. ominous... then Josh said “you need to listen up” so I put down my coffee and sat up straight.  When Josh says “jump!” I say “how high?”.

The news was that FliteTest and StoneKap Productions have been sold to a group called Lauren International (LI).  LI’s web site proclaims themselves as… oh sorry I went to sleep reading what looks like copy written by one of those buzzword generators.  I even slept through the audio that started up when I hit the home page.  Audio on web pages - the blink tag of the new millenium!

LI seems to make plastic extrusions and tubing, lighting, pet products and NaviGate™ some sort of regulation compliance web app.

I knew the comments on the video would be special with plenty of prophecies about the sky falling.

I read a few then commented that I thought that LI didn’t buy FT because they wanted in on the cheap foamboard kit market (hardly a path to riches I would think) but because they wanted FT/StoneKap’s savvy in video and social media.  To my great surprise FliteTest even replied to my comment, and it’s in the ‘Top Comments’ section.  FT’s reply essentially confirmed my suspicion.

It remains to be seen how this pans out - the main risk to the avid FLiteTest viewership would probably be FT losing the skills of people like Chad because he’s got a big job ahead of him: Nurtured Pets have a link to a non-existent channel on their home page, Lauren Manufacturing seem to make about one video a year.. this is a big win for LI, hopefully it will be for FT too.
 

A video report from the Guardian Australia has some interviews worth watching for anyone interested in the current state of play in Australia.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/may/28/keeping-up-with-the-dronses-part-1-video

Local UAV merchants UAS International, David Vaile from the CyberSpace Law and Policy Centre, Mark Pearson from Animal Liberation NSW and others talk about where the industry is going.

What interests me is the concern about what "drones" do such as kill people, invade privacy, kill kittens etc. but there's very little concern for the same actions by manned aircraft.  Are errant factory farmers worried about a Cessna flying overhead at 500ft?  Where are the demonstrations about attacks from manned military aircraft?  I guess manned aviation is just too old-hat to be news.  The media like to infer that "drones" don't have pilots, that they kill people all by themselves - this is probably due more to ignorance than deliberate (I work for a news organisation and believe me journalism ain't what it used to be).

There will be a Part 2 to the video which will be posted here once it appears.

Edit: Part 2 has now gone live.