SVALBARD, AN ISLAND WHERE POLAR BEARS OUTNUMBER PEOPLE

I knew I had less than 30 seconds. I’ve been in Thailand enough to know what a fast-moving summer rain cloud is about to dump a few inches of water on me in a matter of seconds, and I had $1,400 worth of flying computer 300 feet in air that one rain drop could send crashing to the ground – and I still didn’t have the shot I wanted. The drizzle was starting to make my iPad Mini viewer difficult to see so I slammed the camera control to its highest setting and began pushing frantically at where I thought the shutter button was on the iPad. The raindrops began splattering on the iPad, make further shooting work impossible so I pulled back all the way on the left toggle and my drone began dropping out of the sky. I slid it sideways to avoid the rainforest trees and reeled it in, thankful I had chosen a deserted parking lot as my launch pad. Without having to look for other people or cars, the last 100 feet went quickly and I leaned over the drone to shield it from rain as I wound down the motors. Another day in the life of a drone pilot trying to capture the beauty of Thailand through a drone.

  My decade-plus love affair with Thailand began in 2002 when I met my future wife in Railay Beach – she was managing an internet café and I was there on a rock climbing trip. Two years of long-distance relationship followed by a fiancé visa, a wedding and then a little boy, and eventually turning some raw land on a primitive island into a small resort, and my ties to Thailand were solidified. 

Combining drones and temples happened the first time I brought a drone to Thailand. My brother-in-law is a former Buddhist monk and was watching me fly my drone around my father-in-law’s sugar cane plantation, when he approached be about using my drone for doing roof inspections on the Buddhist temples, or wats as they are called in Thailand. He explained that the way the monks currently do roof inspections is to the send a monk – usually the skinniest and lightest – up a rickety ladder to visually check out the temple roofs. The problem is that the ladders are made from bamboo poles with crossbars made from bamboo or random pieces of wood, all help together with some combination of nails, screws, and strips of old inner tube tried around the joints. So, you want to be 40 feet up in the air on one of those ladders trying to look for cracked roof tiles? Me neither.

With visions of thousands of monks looking nervously between their feet to see if the last bailing wire-repaired cross piece was going to hold up, the family piled into our pickup truck and headed over the temple. The monks had never seen a drone before, but quickly grasped the concept. Drone have several (usually four) propellers that spin to give drone lift. The controller allows you to fly the drone through two toggle switches that cause the motors to move at different rates, thereby allowing the drone to go up and down, spin around, and move horizontally in any direction you want. The drone also has a camera that can take stills and videos, and is controlled by a dial that rests under your left index finger.

We asked the monks which roofs they wanted inspected  and they very politely told us to only do what we could. After one battery it became clear that all the roofs needed inspection so we flew all of our batteries and came back the next day for more flying. We then downloaded the images and video to a laptop and the monks looked if over and made note. After seeing the footage from the roof inspections, the monks were delighted and used the drone images as part of a proposal for funding repairs of their temple. 

Back to my current flight, the rain was beginning to pour so I grabbed the drone and, hunched over to protect the drone, controller and iPad from the rain, sprinted as best I could back to our van. As is typical in Thailand, 20 minutes later it had stopped raining and I had just enough battery life for one more flight . . .