Room With a View

[2nckayakers]

This is the second in my series of Fire Lookout Towers. I flew this one while on a day trip out to Morganton. This one was really fun to do as my actual altitude for the Mavic was 3,340 msl. It was my first time flying up the side of mountains. Most would say it is boring just doing fire tower videos, but the scenery is always different, no matter what the focus of the video. The biggest thing though is it gets me out to put in some stick time flying over different terrains, and having to be very carful and conscious of my surroundings. Situational awareness is always the name of the game and where better to improve upon that than flying around a tall structure. After seeing someone else post last week about their 30 second video challenge, I made it a point to try and make a short video. It was extremely difficult as I had a lot of great looking footage to choose from. I wasn't able to make it down to 30 seconds, but I did bring it in under 90!

 

[Crocket1158]

Wow Great job...do you fly from fire tower or to it?

 

[BrooklynFlyer]

Very nice

 

[2nckayakers]

Wow Great job...do you fly from fire tower or to it?

I flew to the tower. Most of them you can't drive right up to anyway. This one I parked about half a mile down the road from it in a little parking lot near an old church. You can actually see where I was in the last few frames of the video before it fades to black. Usually anything I do, I fly to it rather than from it, I just try not to get myself or my car in the video if I can, I like everything to be really clean. But I do check it out and do a ground inspection around it (when I can) before I fly there to make sure there aren't any power lines or antennas or something else in the area that could be a hazard. I use Google Earth a lot to do pre planning for a flight and then once I get on site I will check out any of the potential hazards that I saw from the Sat views. If I can't physically walk up to the site, I will do a high flyover/hover of the site and scan the whole area with the Mavic first before I start my pre planned filming. Sometimes during that site survey I get some of the better video too that I had not planned on. Case in point was the looking down view that I had. My original plan was to fly down to ground level and then do a rise to the top but after I got there and couldn't walk right up to the site, I decided to do a look down to survey for any hazards. I had a transmitter shack on one side and a pump house on the other side of the tower and I could not tell if there was an overhead power line run to either of them from the tower so I elected not to fly down below the height of the Cab of the tower. Better safe than sorry.