The digital 3D models in Aespect all have one thing in common; the quality stands or falls with the quality of the drone recordings. It is therefore important that all recordings are done carefully, professionally and safely. Joost is a drone pilot, privacy officer and safety manager at Aeroscan. We asked Joost to tell us about his work at Aeroscan.

What are you concerned with?

"It is my responsibility from aviation regulations to maintain a safety management system within the operations team. In simple terms, this means that I make sure the team is aware of the risks of flying a drone. We identify known risks and make sure pilots know how to deal with them. I also deal with privacy assurance."

Can you talk a little more about how Aeroscan handles privacy?

"We take pictures of buildings, but it is not always possible to exclude people from the images. That's why we use software to anonymize people in the photos. The software is getting better and better at recognizing whether something in the photo is a person, and so we can blur that person a lot more accurately. We need to anonymize photos less and less by hand. In the future, I also see it happening that the software will run in the drones themselves, so that the photo is already anonymized before the drone has even landed."

What do you love about your work at Aeroscan?

"Every new situation brings different risk factors, so the work is actually never boring," Joost explains. "Should an incident nevertheless occur, I investigate the facts of the case and, in doing so, consider how it can be prevented in the future. We then all make sure that a pilot in a similar situation is well prepared and can avoid the undesirable situation. Responsible and multi-faceted work, in other words."

Has it ever gone wrong?

"Yes, they did. In one situation, a pilot flew through an alley about three meters wide to take pictures of a facade. The drone automatically keeps one meter away from the walls, so that means you only have one meter of leeway. That's not much. Besides, there was a flag hanging in the alley."

"At the time the pilot started recording, it was windless, so the flag was also hanging still, but as the drone approached, a sudden gust of wind blew up the flag. The canvas entered the drone and blocked the propellers. As a result, the drone fell four meters down to the ground."

Ugh! How did that happen like that?

"The narrow alley made for an unpredictable situation. The drone has little space, but so does the air. A drone naturally moves air itself. We still can't say for sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the drone's air displacement was made stronger by the narrow alley, creating an unpredictable gust of wind."

Of course, you don't want to go through that again.

"No, definitely not! We definitely learned from the incident. Since then, we pay extra attention to moving objects such as flags or branches. We also look at the impact of the drone itself on the environment. Of course, we also included this incident in our annual training. That way we keep each other on our toes and keep learning."

But it's not just about risk right?

"No way. We make really cool flights. My proudest moment is without a doubt the landing with our SARAH drone at the Rijksmuseum. It was the first time a commercial company was allowed to fly so close to Schiphol Airport, and the project was under severe time pressure. Nevertheless, we managed to perform all flights on time and land the drone without incident."

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