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Drone Tech & Flight · Module 6 of 8
📱 Shared phone

Plan a Real Mission

A good aerial map is decided before takeoff, in the numbers you choose for height, spacing and overlap.

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A boustrophedon flight path drawn over a field outline, lines running back and forth like ploughing.

🎒 What you need

✋ Do this

  1. Choose a real site and sketch its outline. Measure its rough size by pacing it out and counting your steps — then convert steps to metres.
  2. Understand the core trade: fly low and each photo covers little ground but shows fine detail; fly high and you cover ground fast but see less. The size of ground each pixel represents is called ground sample distance.
  3. Decide your detail requirement first. If you must see individual maize plants, you must fly low, and that decision fixes everything else.
  4. Draw your flight lines back and forth across the site, spaced so that neighbouring strips overlap sideways by roughly 60 to 70 percent, with even more overlap along each line. Generous overlap is what makes stitching work.
  5. Count the photos your plan needs and estimate the flight time. Compare that to a realistic battery endurance of roughly 20 to 30 minutes for a typical small survey drone. If your plan does not fit, split it into two flights — do not shave the overlap.
  6. Add the non-flying columns: takeoff and landing spot, wind direction, who has been informed, and where people will be kept back. A plan without those is not a plan.

💡 Why it works

Insufficient overlap is the classic beginner failure: the software cannot find enough matching points between photos and the map comes out torn or warped. Because coverage, detail and battery all pull against each other, the professional habit is to fix the detail requirement first and let it drive the rest. Planning on paper also forces the safety questions to be answered before anyone is standing in a field with a spinning aircraft.

🔥 Challenge

Plan the same site twice: once for maximum detail and once for minimum flight time. Present both plans with photo counts and time estimates, and recommend one with a reason.

📖 New words

ground sample distancehow much real ground each pixel of the image covers
overlapthe fraction of ground shared between neighbouring photos, needed for stitching
endurancehow long the aircraft can stay airborne on one battery
🗺️
Mission Planner

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