Months of planning, training, re-design, and fabrication finally paid off for DroneJournalism.org developers, as we successfully launched a journalism drone for the first time on Sunday, June 3, in the small Illinois town of Tuscola.
Eventually the drone will be equipped with an Arduino-based autopilot (APM 2.0) and cameras to collect aerial photography and aerial photomaps for use in journalism investigations. JournoDrone 2 is the successor to JournoDrone One, which was meant to be a "Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) for journalists that is powerful, durable, transportable, affordable, upgradeable and supported by a community of experts."
JournoDrone One was smashed to pieces during testing in two months ago. Since then, I had been applying the lessons learned from the first drone to make a drone for journalism that was stronger and more capable.
The June 3 flight was a basic shakedown of the airframe, without autopilot or sensors, to prove the airworthiness of the drone. While the airframe proved slightly heavy and unpredictable at times, our indication is with some modification it will be a competent flyer for our purposes.
JournoDrone 2 is based on the "FPV Raptor" radio controlled airplane with some important modifications, the most important of which is carbon fiber-reinforced fuselage. The airplane had a fairly good track record as a First Person Video drone, so we didn't feel that we needed to change the layout of the craft. Yet we needed to have an extra layer of security to make it more of a "tool" rather than "toy."
While we had some initial concerns about weight gain, the two layers of carbon fiber and epoxy proved its worth when the aircraft experienced a sudden gust of wind in its second flight and crashed. While the impact separated the motor pod, chipped the propeller, bent the motor shaft, and cracked the casing of an on-board camera, the fuselage was totally unscathed. We were not able to recover the on-board video of that second flight.
