So today was the day flew, and it was great!
A crowd from the local village we had driven through to get to the sandbar came to watch. It was painfully ironic how the UX5 probably cost more than the whole village would earn in a lifetime and they didn’t really know what it was but they enjoyed watching it launch. This sort of highlights the severe inequality within India whilst showing the importance of the project which ultimately aims to clean the river which so many people rely on.
The take off and landing were seamless and all the data collected was great with brilliant resolution and no blurring. There were however a few range issues as the transmitter that was meant to be good up to 5km cut out at 2km. This created a few nervy moments when we momentarily lost contact with the UX5. It however would have just returned back to us anyway – but you never know. The range issue meant that we only flew half the flights we were going to but we still got far more data than we originally planned anyway so not to disappointed by that.
We managed to make it back for the end of lunch and then spent the afternoon downloading the images, linking them with the log files and starting processing them n Photoscan which will take a few days due to the sheer size of the data.
I went swimming with Dipro in the late afternoon and we all had pizza to celebrate in the evening which was a welcome change to spicy food. So now there is just some GPSing to do and all of the data will have been collected which is good news.