Depends on how you look at it. I was there for about 3 hrs; 11am to 1pm. It was a breezy day, almost 50kph gust. I never been to one before, but it seemed that there weren’t that many people. The FPV racing area is where most of the action is, 4 drones racing every 15 minutes or so. There weren’t many spectators.
Most of the other drones are DJI, hexacopters and larger fixed with aircrafts. For those flying in GPS, unless you have a RePL, you need to test your drone and your proficiency in a 3mx3m netted cage. It was windy, but my mavic held out pretty well. There were a few regular mavic pros, and mine is the only alpine white. No one else have seem an alpine white one before, so mine stands out a bit. You can have up to 4 flyers, in a rather small area to fly. Most of the time there were only 2. You are restricted to 60m height, in an area the size of a footy field. On one corner is the border of a NFZ of a tiny airfield. When there’s more than 1 drone in the air, you need to stay at least 10m vertical distance of the other drones, so announce to the other pilots if you want to change height.
There was 1 DJI rep (which have never seen a white mavic, and has no idea about whether it’s possible to buy white batteries and props. Then there’s Ted’s (DJI authorised reseller), offering 10% discount of all their products. They made a few sales on Mavic Air. They aren’t that cheap I think. A pair of low noise props selling for $29 before discount. But DJI website selling them for $17.
There was a CASA rep. I missed most of his talk,and only heard the last bit. It’s interesting that they have no jurisdiction when it comes to wildlife, ie how close you can get to them. It’s under environmental entity or something. You just have to call up and ask for permission. He said in WA, you could get permission to fly within 5m of a whale.
