Quote:
Originally Posted by porsche4life
What did you guys do before you were flying a lot? I thought you were an aerial photo company?
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We have always owned at least one airplane and done aerial photography and mapping. When we bought the RC-30 and moved up to a state of the art, calibrated mapping camera the flying services really took off. (Pun intended) Before that camera we had a RC-10 which was state of the art for 1960s and before that we had a old Fairchild which was state of the art in WW2. There will never be a step above the film camera we have now. No one makes film cameras now, they are going digital. A new state of the art digital aerial camera is 1.2 million and up and is obsolete is just a few years. They have an annual $70K per year maintenance fee as a minimum. They re just now getting to have equal quality as film but require a lot more flight time and more flight lines to get the same amount of data. They don't have any film to use but the airplane has a lot more flight time.
A big part of what we do now is just a flying service company for other aerial photography and mapping clients. We regularly fly a job and have the film shipped from the processing lab to the customer. We have been as far north as North Dakota, as far east as Georgia & Florida, all over Texas and New Mexico and parts of Colorado. We don't go past the Rockey Mountains or even into that area.