Whilst I much prefer flying drones in the countryside surrounded by beautiful scenery, sometimes slightly less scenic locations have to be flown at. An industrial estate can never compare with Snowdonia or the Iford Valley in Wiltshire, but a job is a job and bills have to be paid! So, Sunday morning saw an early start to arrive at a local industrial estate to inspect some guttering that was suspected of causing a leak into the building.
After careful planning, risk mitigation, obtaining land owners permission to take-off and land and informing the Police of the operation, I was confident that the job could be safely completed. My only small concern was over the number of Gulls that could be at the site. I have worked on industrial estates before, and whilst there have always been Gulls present, they never caused a problem. They clearly get angry over the invasion to their airspace, but they have never attacked our drones.
Upon arriving at the industrial estate, the first thing to do was to inform the security office of the operation. They mentioned how many Gulls are on the roof we were to inspect during the summer, but I hadn’t seen many at all during my visit to the company earlier in the week, so wasn’t too worried.
With our three man crew all happy and ready to go, we took to the air. As the drone climbed to reveal the roof, we could see that there were only a couple of dozen or so Gulls warming themselves in the early morning sun. However, this soon changed! Within a few minutes, there must have been over one hundred angry Gulls in the sky around the drone. They seemed to be arriving from all directions. If I’m honest, I found quite unnerving! But as with previous encounters, they never showed any aggression towards the drone. I believe that due to the large size of the drone, they don’t attack it, they just try to intimidate it out of their airspace by flying close(ish) to it and calling a lot. If the drone was small, maybe they would try attack it.
With careful flying, we go the job done. The Gulls actually went away after a couple of flights. I guess they realised that the drone wasn’t a threat. The cause of the leak was identified, another issue was spotted, and we could also make a record of where the Gulls were starting to nest. By 8am we were packing up and I was grateful that there wasn’t any feathers on the drone!
Drones are a great tool for roof inspections. They make for a fast and efficient way to inspect any problem areas and save unnecessary time and money spent on scaffolding or putting people on the roof.
