Five Questions: Robert Schoepflin
Drone Pilot
Robert Schoepflin is a contract pilot for Measure, a drone service company that provides equipment and expertise to clients wanting to utilize drone technology without purchasing their own drone. A private pilot, Schoepflin combines his aviation knowledge, his background in agriculture, and his training from Measure to fly a Sensefly eBee Ag drone over farm fields around his home in Washington, near the Idaho border. The drone he uses is fixed-wing and looks more like a bird than the traditional quadcopter; it has a camera in its base that sends photos of crops, crop damage, and other crop assessments to a computer, then Schoepflin processes the data. It typically takes him about four hours flying a field of 500 acres and about one and a half hours to process the data.
What are the challenges flying a drone?
The weather, the wind, the battery life, and the amount of data collected. Flying a drone over large fields, I can gather up to 40 gigabytes of data, which is a challenge to transfer but possible. It just takes time.
What is a typical flight?
Most of my flying is with local farmers in my area, about a 50-mile radius. But I have been as far as 305 nautical miles from my home airport. I mostly fly over wheat, winter wheat, and lentils. My day starts with downloading files from Measure headquarters and then uploading them to my flight software for field locations. I travel to the job site, either by truck or my airplane; set up in a high scouting area; check the wind direction; and fly the field. Then I transfer the data from the drone camera to the computer for uploading to Measure.
What aircraft do you fly?
My grandfather was a flying farmer and he bought his 1966 Cessna 172 brand-new. It was then passed on to my father and when he passed, to my sister and me. It has its original interior and paint with about 2,200 hours total time, and we upgraded the engine to a 180-horsepower Lycoming, making it a great-performing four-place airplane. The drone I fly is an eBee Ag built by Sensefly.
How do people react to your drone flying?
Farmers are curious about cost savings on their fields, but some are still skeptical. Everyone thinks it’s really amazing how far the technology has come; I can program a small flying machine from a laptop, throw it in the air, and it does all the rest of the work, including self landing.
Your future in drones?
I hope to expand to multi-rotor drones for cell tower inspection, [and] video gathering for local media. I hope someday to be able to use a drone with my local fire department; I volunteer for them for search and rescue missions.
