Eyes in the sky
From linework to farming, drones change the game
A low, buzzing sound fills the air as the drones ascend, then disperse. Students crane their necks upward as they send their cameras into the sky.
On a cool spring morning, they’ve gathered in an empty field behind the softball stadium at the University of Kentucky in Lexington to practice flying drones—and they’re doing it for course credit.
Over the past five years, the Journalism 377 course, focused on drone photography, has helped students achieve new perspectives using tools that hadn’t been available to them in the past.
“It was clear to us that the technology was within reach,” says class instructor David Stephenson, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media within UK’s College of Communication and Information. “You didn’t have to have (an aircraft) pilot’s license to have aerial photography anymore. It was clear (drones) weren’t going away, so we wanted to give that tool to our students and help them become licensed so they can do it legally, safely, and they can have that experience on their resume to make them more attractive to employers.”
Stephenson says he tells the students on the first day of class that “back in the day,” the first news organizations that had aerial photography bought their own helicopters and hired their own pilots and mechanics, with budgets running in the millions of dollars.
“There were very few news outlets that could do that—only major markets like L.A., Chicago and New York,” Stephenson says. “Now drones have democratized that area of photography. Really, anybody can do it. You can get a decent drone for $500 and shoot decent footage now.”
While Stephenson’s class focuses on newsgathering and filmmaking, the applications of drone technology extend to many other areas as well, including power line inspection and agriculture. From military uses to aiding search and rescue during disasters and even replacing typical booming fireworks displays, drones have become a factor in the jobs and daily lives of many people.
“We saved days of outage”
Drone usage at East Kentucky Power Cooperative started with Isaac Blanford, a senior electrical engineer in EKPC’s Reliability Group, who began with a single drone in 2018. Today, there are 10 drones and 15 licensed pilots.
Blanford says EKPC purchased the first drone as a tool to help with inspections of transmission lines, rights-of-way and substations. Blanford says he had some drone experience as a student at Ohio University when he retrofitted a drone with a methane gas detector to help speed up detection.
Blanford says the adoption of drones at EKPC was a process. They knew they wanted to use the drones for inspections, but he says they didn’t know how valuable the technology would be right away.
A major ice storm in 2021 demonstrated how much the drones could help. “The cloud ceiling was too low for the helicopters to get up in the air, but we could still deploy the drones,” he says. “At that point, we had several pilots and we looked for trees that had broken and fallen over on to lines. We had broken poles.”
For Blanford, it was a turning point: “We saved days of outage time because we were finding these problems and reporting back to our power delivery maintenance and telling them exactly where the problems were.”
The drones have especially been helpful when dealing with “really long spans of transmission lines” in rural areas, he says.
“The drone takes a lot of the foot traffic out of it, or a side-by-side to patrol these lines,” he says. “We can find and identify the problems really quick with drones.”
Going from one drone to 10 has given EKPC a useful tool to help its customers and those living in the area it serves—89 counties in 16 owner-member cooperatives.
“I think safety is the biggest advantage,” Blanford says. “Any time that you can take a person out of a helicopter, you reduce risk. Also, you have the ability to restore power much sooner to our customers.”
EKPC now hosts a drone workshop day that helps co-ops start their own drone maintenance programs, which Blanford says have become quite sophisticated.
“Some of (the members) are up to speed where we are,” he says. “We all share our knowledge with each other, and it really does help everyone.”
Innovations in agriculture
“These aren’t little drones,” Bestway Ag Marketing Manager Danny Vowell says of the agricultural drones his company sells. “They have about a 10-foot tip-to-tip wingspan with about 230 pounds, drone weight included, of lift capacity.”
Bestway Ag, which is headquartered in Hopkinsville, sells drones that can do liquid application, or the tank can be swapped out to do granular applications Vowell, who has been with Bestway Ag for four years, says he has seen radical transformation in the agriculture business because of drones.
“When I first got here, it was very much traditional implements we were manufacturing, and we still do … but drone sales went from nothing to 22% almost overnight,” he says. “This is our first full fiscal year that we have been selling drones. That is massive growth in a short amount of time. In six months, we captured about 15% of the market share.”
Vowell said part of that success is due to the model Bestway uses with its dealer network. Farmers expect a certain level of service; for example, if a tractor breaks down in the middle of the field, a technician comes out to fix it. Bestway developed the same type of customer service for the drones through its network.
“You have to have service on the drones,” he says. “It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.” But the pitch is clear to the customer: “We tell people that it puts the power to spray when you need to spray back into your hands.”
Vowell says one hurdle to using the drone is changing the mindset of farmers. Drone application doesn’t use as much chemical as a ground rig. While the aerial rate is much lower, he said farmers do immediately see an attractive difference between spending a half-million dollars for a spraying rig and $30,000 for a sprayer drone.
Anyone who wants to fly an agricultural drone needs a Federal Aviation Administration Part 107 drone license, Vowell says. This license covers operations of drones under 55 pounds, so operators will need the 44807 heavy-weight exemption in addition to their Part 107. An FAA third-class medical exam and the Part 137 aerial applicator’s license are also required, he says.
“The process sounds confusing, but we have resources in place that simplify everything,” Vowell adds. “It is also important to check with your state and local authorities to obtain the proper application licenses as well.”
Vowell predicts drones will get bigger and become more efficient, and might one day operate on a hybrid fuel source.
“The big one I foresee is ‘see and spray’ technology, where instead of spraying across a whole field, it can identify weeds and spot spray,” he says. “When it sees the weed, boom, it sprays it only and keeps moving on.”
A fresh angle on the news
David Stephenson, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media within University of Kentucky’s College of Communication and Information, says drones offer students a powerful new angle on visual journalism. Drones change the scope of news coverage and offer a different view than someone might get from the ground.
“You just have a flying camera in your pocket now, or in your toolbox or in your trunk,” he says. “It helps us to see things we couldn’t see before, and it helps us to cover things we couldn’t before—especially disasters. It offers a perspective that is really useful to show scale and scope. It is also very good for exposition when you are trying to set the scene of a location of a story.”
One of Stephenson’s former students, Corrie McCroskey, took the drone class in 2021 and has since used drones with her work with BloodHorse magazine as a videographer. She plans on using drones when she makes documentaries and films in the future.
McCroskey joined the London Film School in England this fall to work on a master’s degree in filmmaking. She said the drone videography just gives, literally, a new perspective.
“I think with video, you are always trying to find new ways to keep engaged, because people’s attention spans are so short now,” she says. “The drone footage is still something that captures people’s attention and gives them something different.”
McCroskey says it is sometimes difficult to put the drone in the sky with the Federal Aviation Administration waivers required to operate in restricted airspace—like that over the Kentucky Derby—but it is worth it.
“It is really fun, but it does give you some anxiety to fly this drone in the air,” she says. “It was awe-inspiring to look back at the footage we shot, and I think there has always been something about humans and wanting to explore things that we can’t physically do. Drones really give us the ability to see things that we could never really see by ourselves.”
From military use, to replacing typical booming fireworks and being useful tools for search and rescue during disasters, drones have become a factor in the daily lives of many people and their jobs.
“In the class, we teach all the different ways you can use drones for the photography. We look at all the different ways you can use drones for newsgathering and filmmaking,” Stephenson says. “Those are the two we focus on, even though we do talk about other careers like package delivery and real estate and power line inspections.”
Stephenson says he wants students to think like photographers. They’re not just operating a camera in the sky: without artistic attention, drone footage can be overused and uninteresting.
“A shot from above is easy, but being a photographer in the sky is difficult,” he says.
