Everyone is Matt Williams, mr. MPW, and welcome to today’s. Video today’s, video we’re, going to be looking at weather and how you can make sixty five thousand pounds a year or more as a drone operator.

This video is proudly sponsored by UAV hub comm, connecting you to the heart of the drone industry. Everyone welcome to today’s video, so I’ve been a couple of strange weeks. To be honest, I’ve totally lost.

My voice, thank you to all of those who have been following along. I’ve sent in emails or called the office to make sure I’m. Ok, I am just about and yeah it’s still, not great. I think it’s going to take probably another week or so the rate is getting better, but over the last couple days it has got much better and we’re able to now hopefully do the videos, but apologies there’s a bit more Barry White, a couple of octaves lower than I normally am back to normal soon.

So today’s, video 65 grand as a drone operator. It’s, one of those things which so be honest, really pisses me off people saying this now. This has come from a lot of the drone training companies out there, and I guess you know they are using it as a marketing tool.

They are saying that or you can earn 65 grand or more as a drone operator, and that may be true for some people. I know. Certainly you know we ‘ Ve made a lot of money over the years from flying drones and the opportunities.

Definitely definitely are there, but what I think is going on is that there’s, a bit of misrepresentation that’s, potentially a bit of mis-selling and people building up false hopes, I think, and false expectations.

You know people expect him that by getting a website by getting a drone, you know maverick 2 pros. I mean like that by getting their PFC, I was it was their operational authorization with the GBC as it as it will be, or even an A to C f/c thinking that by doing that, you’re gonna, be you know, rolling in gold And you’re gonna make of an absolute fortune and, like I say well, stat potentially is the case.

It’s only gonna happen. If you understand that you need to hit it as a business and I think it’s important to put that into context 65 grand a year is a lot of money. You know teachers, a newly qualified teacher.

If we look at some kind of salary scales to put it into perspective, and then we’ll come back to how we can get there or if we can even get there as drone operators. You know teachers newly qualified teachers.

They start off on about twenty four grand a year up to 30 grand a year, depending on your past experience. What qualifications you have the type of teaching you’re going into and the area that you’re going into.

You know. London bias on the wages about 30 grand a year, so nowhere near the 65 grand a year, which you know we are being sold as drone operators. That might be a possibility. The average pay for a teacher when they’ve, been in the job.

For five to ten years is 35 grand a year so still 30 grand a year short of where the drone companies some of the drone companies, certainly are telling me where they can expect to be. As a drone operator, headteachers starts at forty six and a half grand a year for running an entire school.

Yes, it goes up to over under grand one hundred, and fourteen, I think, is the maximum for a head teacher in London who’s very, very experienced, but the average pay teacher wise, highly qualified, looking after our children day in day out, so that We can go to work and nothing near to the 65 grand a year that the drone operators are potentially been told that they can earn doctors.

A fully qualified general practitioner in the UK earns between 58,000 and eighty-eight thousand pounds a year based on experience again, you know you ‘ Ve got to be a doctor, a fully qualified doctor specialised in general practice.

Having done that for a probably 10 to 12 years, on top of all of your medical training on the way through and being a junior doctor and all that sort of stuff before you even hit the 65 grand and easyJet pilot starts on about 32 32 grand A year as a pilot having done 12 months as a ATPL learning, having spent probably the thick end of a hundred grand getting their qualifications and like take 12 months to in that hundreds of flying hours, minimum of 150 to go and sit in the right-hand seat.

As a junior first officer, and then you start on 30 grand a year, you’ll, also, probably then be bonded to the airline that you’ve joined for a minimum of five years and over those five years you’Ll be having to pay them back for the type rating to go and fly the Airbus we’ll go and fly the 737 whatever it may be.

So, actually you earn a lot less than that and the first five years until you become a senior first officer and you jump up to something like 65 grand. And then you know that you think you’ve done a minimum of a year’s.

Training you’ve, then spent basically three years learning on the job you’ve, been paying them back for the entire time. You know to get to the 65 grand a year and the airline’s. You’ll, probably look in as someone green coming into it with no flying experience, probably looking at five to seven years.

You know someone coming into it a lot of experience. You could perhaps go on to that within three years, but even so very highly specialized. You know you ‘ Ve got to be pushing well to be on in sixty five grand a year.

Yes, you can earn up to. You know just over a hundred grand a year with an airline like easyJet, short, all airline, quite a bit more than that with the long-haul fleet, but you know again, 65 grand. It takes a lot of specialisms.

It takes a lot of learning. It takes a lot of experience to work up to that and then just from my own experience as a frontline combat-ready helicopter instructors in the Air Force. Having been in for 12 years, I was a flight lieutenant pushing on Zack’s and scored a leader.

Forty five grand a year is what I earned, including my flying, petty, albeit I joined at 18, so I went in without a degree, so people who got a degree were probably on about fifty to fifty five, depending on how long they’ve, been In but that’s, you know again frontline combat ready pilot, so I think kind of the two big takeaways from this other.

You know by investing in a basic drone. You know mavet mini maverick 2 Pro, which is what we see. Probably 98 % of people coming through the course with now and paying the bare minimum to get through a couple of days, a one-day half-day course, whatever it may be and get in at the moment your PFC, oh and get in in the future.

Your operational authorization with GBC permissions or with standard permissions on whatever it may be, isn’t going to be the thing guys which owns you 65 grand a year, like I say, take to earn that kind of money.

You’ve got to be graffed in hard and all at the same time have a specialty which people are willing to pay. You know a reasonable amount of money for a lot of money for in most cases, you got to find some in which sets you apart.

If you want to move up to these kind of realms of the 65 K plus and it has to be run as a business, if you want to make some serious cash now, how do you do this? Ultimately, you have to invest in yourself.

It’s, not just money for training, but it’s also, I would say the time to practice and become the best at what you do. You’ve got a master flying if you want to earn this kind of money. The same way, an airline pilot working their way up to becoming captain to an big money has to master their art.

They have to master their trade. Thou have to do some networking as well to be honest to get there, and we need to do the same in the drone industry if we want to get there. In addition to mastering the flying, though I would say you also need to even if you’re gonna be operating as a two or three person operation, which is what we used to do in the professional drone realm.

You still need two. As a pilot know and understand in depth, I would suggest camera settings and Composition, because that allows you to put the camera in a position which is going to allow the camera operator and the director or the producer, whoever you may be working with to get the Shots that they want you ‘

Ve got to get your head around the fact that you know you actually not been paid to fly a drone. We are in the production world, just a piece of grip. We’re. Just an item of grip that is tasked with putting the camera in the right place to get the shots that people need.

If you’re doing data collection and you’re doing 3d mapping and surveys, you know you are not just flying a drone. You are using that drone as a tool to collect data. It’s. What you do with that data is how good that data set.

Is it’s, how you then qualify and quantify that data which puts a value on it, which was a value on you which gets you up to your 65 grandi that you want. You need to also, I would suggest, if you want to get up to this, consider very strongly getting a drone which sets you apart from everybody else, because I say we see most people coming through with Mavic to pros having to zooms and Mavic minis.

That kind of aircraft you need to be looking at the inspire to as a minimum with camera and lens combinations on there. That makes you stand apart if you can and you can afford the investment think of investing in something like a heavy lift rig like the Alta rake.

That is the altar cinema package. If that’s, the route you want to go down, if you want to get on the media route, you ‘ Ve got to be looking at that kind of aircraft. If you want to be going down the data collection route, you know it’s all well and good.

Turning up and trying to collect 3d survey data and photogrammetry data with a Mavic, you really need to be looking at doing that with a specific aircraft that can give you RTK precision that can give you better quality photographs, mechanical shutter, for example, which means that the Images don’t blur and the aircrafts moving quickly, just all improves your value.

It improves the data that you can collect. It improves the level of kind of delivery of data that you can deliver to your clients and ultimately allows you to charge more one of the big things that we always used within the drone industry.

To allow us to charge more and don’t get me wrong. Like I say we aren’t a lot of money. You know 65 grand per pilot was kind of the East wage. I guess that we would have made per operator when we were doing this not just kind of not 18 months ago, when we stopped, because we wanted to drill down into the Train inside and not be in competition with our students, but the you know.

That came because we had an operating safety case. We had an OSC. We leveraged the hell out of that to mean that even if we weren’t operator under our OSC, it was an incredible marketing tool that allowed us to charge 1500 pounds a day 1250 a day if it was a big block of work.

That was our kind of going rate for people who contractors to do a couple of weeks or more. You know, and that was what set us apart. It was having those aircraft, it was having the OSC we didn’t, always use the OSC.

We didn’t, always use those big aircraft, but by god did they look good when people came for meetings and we sat them down in the office and we had the air, we’re gonna. Have it and we had the alterator, we had the ebiere, you know and we would go to trade stands and trade shows and we would have a stand and it would be the halter rate that was out there for people to play around with all connected up With a tarot deck and they could see the feed on the screen, you know it just means that you stand out above other people, and I totally understand that not everyone can afford to invest in that.

Not everyone wants to do this full-time, but this comes back to one of the videos that we did a couple of weeks ago. Just before I lost my voice properly, where we talked about the gold rush, you know and people thinking that by getting a website or getting a drone qualification from the CIA, they’re gonna make a fortune and it’s, not Gon na happen guys, you have to treat this as a business.

As part of that you have to become an expert in your field. You have to find a way to invest in yourself. Timewise monetarily to make yourself stand out from other people, run it as a business. You’ve got to work out how you generate more leads and other people you’ve, got to work out how you take those leads on a journey to becoming a client of yours, ultimately, so that you can deliver value to them And earn money, I think you know, to put it again into perspective 65.

Grand a year breaks down to something like if you look at the flyable days that we have in the UK 180 to 200 500 days a year, it breaks down and having to earn almost 400 quid a perf liable day to get your 65 grand a year.

Ok, so by the time you factor in a couple of weeks that you might want a week off at Christmas, you might want a week offer in the summer with your family, you take weekends out as well. There’s, not a lot of flyable days, and you’re gonna be have to have to be hustling hard and actually charging a lot of money.

So, therefore, delivering a lot of value to your clients, you can also be able to make the 65 grand a year that a lot of people are selling and doing me wrong. You know, 65 grand a year is achievable.

I think just put in the flesh on the bones of that. You know when I did the America’s Cup and Bermuda. You know we got that gig because we marked it hard. We set ourselves aside as experts. We had aircraft that no one else had we had permissions that nobody else had, but there’s, nothing that stops.

You know that main that we would get that that you, couldn’t go and do it was just a lot of hard work. You know, and that was four weeks he paid 1,500 quid a day plus expenses. You can do the maths on that.

So yeah that was four weeks worth of work and we aren’t a lot of money from it and we had gigs like that all the time, but you have to be looking at it as a business. You ‘ Ve got to be concentrating hard.

You’ve got to be working hard. I’m working smart as well. It’s, not just about putting the most hours in it’s about working efficiently and potentially having to do that alongside everything else, you do.

If you want to know more about that, give the team here a shout over at UAV hub drop me a line. I’m more than happy to help. We have products out there again. This comes back to investing in yourself.

We have products out there that can teach you the business side of things that teach you the method that we employ an employed to become the biggest drone training company in the world to become one of the UK’s top drone operators and make More than a million pounds in our first year of drone operations say if you want more about that, get a Miss from PW comm.

The marketing courses and sales courses are on there. You can call the team at you over your comm more than happy to help out, but my voice is about to go so I’m gonna have to wrap this one up. Thank you, as always for being part of the community, thanks for bearing with us.

Well, I’ve had to take this a couple of weeks who you get my voice to recover. I’ll, hopefully be back every day from now on. So stay tuned make sure you give the video a like if you did subscribe. If you haven’t go follow us on the socials.

I’ll drop, the links those down below and we’ve got a great community narrow building on Facebook, on Instagram on LinkedIn, and if you want to get flying with me, we’re, starting that and the next couple Of days I will drop a link to the twitch channel down below there’s, nothing on it yet, but we’re, hoping to go, live at about eight and eight till half eight every single night, so every single weeknight UK time, But yeah find out more about that on the socials go and follow us on Twitter.

I by Matt Williams, fly safe blue skies. You