Good drone operations start before takeoff and continue after the aircraft lands. This section covers mission planning, crew roles, site checks, airspace considerations, checklists, batteries, payload setup, communications, abnormal situations, logging, and post-flight work. The focus is on repeatable procedures that help crews run missions with fewer surprises.
Topic
Drone Operations: Planning, Flying and Managing Missions in the Field
Latest topic news
Colorado high school team flew a rescheduled 300-drone community show
Reporting published 9 November describes St. Vrain Valley Schools students flying a 300-drone show on 28 October in Holyoke, Colorado, for a Make-A-Wish recipient. Bad weather had shifted the event from the preceding Sunday, requiring a midweek deployment by the student team.
Read newsMission Planner proposes repairing blank Android maps without restarting
Mission Planner PR 3862 reports that the Android Flight Data and Plan views may show an empty map while overlay controls still appear. It proposes restoring control double buffering under XplatUIMine.
Read newsPX4 protects 1.18 auxiliary global-position settings during upgrade
PX4 PR 29541 proposes migrating older EKF2 AGP auxiliary global-position parameters to the 1.18 per-source EKF2 AGPn layout. The author says release/1.18 has the new setting structure without corresponding migration.
Read newsEU Drone Summit begins in Brussels with operational implementation on the agenda
The European Commission's EU Drone Summit 2026 begins on 9 November and continues through 10 November in Brussels. Organizers scheduled technical and industry sessions on safe scale-up today, with high-level policy discussions planned for tomorrow. EUROCONTROL listed a U-space stakeholder meeting for this afternoon.
Read newsQGroundControl proposes nonblocking pause and mission-start commands
QGroundControl PR 15386 introduces proposed asynchronous FirmwarePlugin methods for pause and startMission across PX4 and ArduPilot subclasses.
Read newsTopic articles
Betaflight, INAV or ArduPilot: choosing flight controller firmware for an FPV drone
Almost every FPV flight controller is designed with Betaflight in mind, and for most pilots that settles the question. It comes back when you build something Betaflight was not designed around: a long-range quad that should fly a route on its own, a wing, or a project that needs full autopilot features. That is when INAV and ArduPilot come up, and switching changes more than the name in the Configurator.
Read articleAn RTK fix is not an accuracy certificate for a drone map
A drone can report an RTK-fixed position for every photograph and still produce an elevation model that fails an independent survey check. The position solution constrains where the camera was, within the uncertainty of the observation and its timing. Photogrammetry must also infer lens geometry, camera orientation and the position of each reconstructed surface point. Those are different estimation problems.
Read articleA mission can have more MAVLink commands than QGroundControl shows as waypoints
A survey mission may show six points on a map while the flight controller holds many more commands. Camera triggers, speed changes and landing-pattern instructions can sit between the navigation points. For operators this is usually a convenience: the ground station combines related actions into one editable visual item. For software deciding whether a mission can be continued, however, the distinction can become a correctness problem.
Read articleBetaflight Altitude Hold and Position Hold: setup, first hover and what changed in 2026.6
Betaflight 2025.12 added two modes that DJI pilots take for granted: Altitude Hold, which keeps the quad at a fixed height, and Position Hold, which also keeps it over one spot. Flip a switch and the quad levels out and hovers while you check your bearings, untangle a goggle strap or wait for a car to pass. Oscar Liang compares it to the panic button on the DJI Avata 2.
Read articleA drone's Remote ID signal cannot prove its flight is authorized
A receiver can decode a drone's identifier, position and broadcast status without learning whether that aircraft has permission to fly where it is. That distinction is easy to lose when a single map combines radio detections, planned flights and airspace rules. The symbols may look similar; the evidence behind them is not.
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