Meet Daniel Burton

I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was at school, although I was interested in graphic design. I went to college and did a Level 3 BTEC in Engineering.

From there, I found myself an apprenticeship as a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) Technician at a big multidisciplinary engineering company, which involved a lot of measuring and building surveys.

After that, I moved on to drone operations with Target Surveys. The job involves a few different tasks, such as measuring buildings (showing what’s inside) and topographical surveys, which show what's going on on the outside.

I check a lot of multistorey buildings, which can take a couple of weeks. A typical standard residential house takes about a day.

Most of the time the client already owns the land and wants to rebuild and regenerate the area. This is where I use the drones.

It took me six months, on and off, to train to get my drone licence, but it’s been worth every minute.

If I am working with the drones, the day before I go out on a job, I do my operations checks to make sure it is safe to fly. If it’s raining, the drone can’t fly because it’s not fully waterproof. If it’s too windy, it also can’t fly. There are lots of checks you have to do to make sure that everything is safe, and that the weather conditions are okay.

I’ll also double-check everything is charged up. Before I get to the site, I look at Google to see where the entrance points are and what the health and safety hazards could be.

On the day of the survey, I come into the office in the morning to collect the kit. Once on site, I’ll then rerun all the checks to make sure the drone is working properly. The flying is then the easy part.

When I’m setting an area that I want the drone to fly in, I can see its location on the control panel screen, and I can generate a flight path for it. I have had instances where birds of prey and seagulls have been eyeing up the drone, so I have to keep my eye on it while it’s in action. I also have to be aware of potential hazards.

Once the drone has flown the area, I take the GPS coordinates. Each battery lasts about 20 mins in the warm weather, so it will come back down after about 20 minutes and I’ll check everything is okay, change the battery and then send it back up.

It remembers the last point it recorded, and it continues mapping from there. At the end of the day, the batteries go into storage if they do not need to be charged for the next day.

The drone takes lots of photos, and I download those off an SD card and put them into the drone mapping software, Pix4D. Typically, we leave it overnight and then, for a small job, in the morning the mapping should be done.

It can take days to download larger jobs, depending on the resolution of the photos and how many there are. Once we have the point cloud, we can start drawing up the plans.