Hiring A Drone Pilot for Real Estate Photography

Hiring a Drone Pilot for New Real Listing is not as easy as you think. 

This the first Post of many on how to Hire a drone pilot and what to look for.

So lets begin.

You normally just call your guy that does it on the side for a few extra bucks.

There are  a few thing you should do to prior to hiring your guy. The first thing you should do it check to see if he or she is a Faa Part 107 certified commercial drone operator. www.faa.gov/uas/

If they are certified, your pilot can easily give you a copy of their certification or at least show you their card. 

So you think it is no big deal to hire a non licensed drone operator. (Right..) no one will find out. Or if they do I will tell them I just didn’t know.

Well the Faa takes a dim look at this. Just recently at the 2019 Super Bowl the Faa caught several drone operators not following the law. They fined them 25k per incident.

So If you hire a non licensed drone pilot than guess who is handing over the 25k bag of money to the FAA. That would be you and the company you work for. The Faa can shut your office down during the investigation. Can you and the company you work for be shut down for few months while the investigation unfolds? Maybe? 

So I will get off my legal soap box.

The next thing you should make sure of is pretty straight forward. Make sure they are insured. This will give you peace of mind. Things happen beyond our control and Insurance will protect all parties involved.

The next item on your check list is how many hour does this pilot have? The minimum your Pilot should have is 50 hours, however they should have a round 100 hours they should be able to show this in there flight log. Why does the pilot need that may hour to take on a job? The more experince they have flying the safer they are and be able to deal with problems that may arise during the flight.

On my next post I will blog about safety, property requirements and Metadata.