Flying High

Unmanned aerial drones have become extremely popular and provide a variety of uses, from photography and video to military operations. For Carstens Surveying in Polson, drones are opening up new and exciting avenues in a variety of applications.

According to Carstens surveyor and drone pilot Carrie Fahlgren-Prewett, the company first began using drones 2.5 years ago and now uses them in roughly a third of all of their projects.

“This is a service that is continuing to grow. So far as I know, we are they only surveying company in northwest Montana using drones for this application at this time, using it for more than just imagery,” Fahlgren-Prewett said. “There are companies using drones to capture images, which is great for telling where structures and features are, but we take it one step further. We pull as much data from each flight as we can.”

While drones have become an integral part of Cartstens business, Fahlgren-Prewett says she was apprehensive when the company’s founder, Marc Carstens, first made the decision to buy a drone. According to her, Carsten became interested in drone applications at the Montana Association of Registered Land Surveyors Conference when he saw a display, which showcased RDO Integrated Controls.

“While the rest of us were looking around the conference, Marc just kept hovering over this booth. He sat in on one of their field instructions and he was just really interested in what they were doing,” she said. “I told him that I didn’t think drones were a good idea and, if he was going to get into drones, I didn’t want anything to do with it. He completely ignored me and went ahead and bought the equipment. We are glad he did.”

Carstens Surveying came away from the conference with a fixed-wing drone, weighing 1.5 pounds, that the company lovingly refers to as the “beer cooler airplane” due to its Styrofoam composition.

Fahlgren-Prewett worked the front desk for the company at the time, but was put in charge of learning how to fly the new drone because of her experience with geographic information systems (GIS).

“Marc said ‘hey, you have some map-making experience and know about data layering, why don’t you take this on,’” she said. “That’s how I became the drone operator.”

While the purchase included two days of instruction on how to operate the drone, Fahlgren-Prewett said it took some time to get comfortable with its operation.

“I’ve landed it in an apple tree and in a Ponderosa pine,” she said. “It takes some getting used to.”

Now a fully-licensed drone operator, Fahlgren-Prewett was in Creston earlier this month, using the drone for one of it’s more unique applications; precision agriculture.

While there are several surveying companies around Montana using drones for aerial imaging, Carstens is currently experimenting with more advanced applications, including near infrared imagery and precision agriculture. The drone’s infrared camera allows the company to measure the color spectrum of plants in an image and determine which plants are healthy and which are stressed, information that is of great use to agricultural operations.

We really think precision agriculture is the next big thing. It’s the next big step in technology for agriculture,” Fahlgren-Prewett said.

While in flight, the drone takes hundreds of photos, all precisely located using a system of GPS pinpointed control points on the ground. Once the flight is finished and the data collected, the intensive post-flight analysis begins. Once completed, the data allows the company to precisely determine the location of structures, objects and property lines.

“We flew the entire city of Ronan when we first got the drone and helped them build a super-accurate map. We tied all of the water meters, power poles and manhole covers onto our map so that now they have a really good, accurate map if they need to fix a water leak or sewer issues,” Fahlgren-Prewett said.

While Carstens has already found exciting uses for its fixed-wing drone, Fahlgren-Prewett says she is learning to fly the company’s new quad-copter, which will allow them to get into much tighter areas with dense vegetation and tree cover.

“We are still somewhat limited with this particular drone. We still can’t get into really tight spaces with heavy timber. That’s why we purchased the quad copter, which I am still working to master,” she said. “We have already come up with some great uses for our drone, but with it, and the quad copter, the sky really is the limit.”