Hey, ladies and gentlemen, I’m commercial photographer Tony Rosalind. Welcome to my studio, sorry about the HVAC noise. There’s a little bit of hum in the background. I have a client coming in in a few minutes and I wanted to warm the place up there’s, a bunch of snow on the ground outside, so it gets cold.

Really quick. If I don’t keep that running. So I apologize in advance. What I wanted to talk about was the fact that I just passed my part 107 exam today. I wanted to share that experience with you guys so yeah, let’s.

Do that [, Music, ], [ Applause, ], all right! So, like I said, I passed my 1:07 exam today, giving me a license to operate a drone commercially. So if you don’t know about that, then, basically, let me fill you in if you are operating a drone and you are doing it commercially.

That means you’re, making money from it. You’re, doing something in trade. You’re posting it to a monetized YouTube channel. Yes, that counts. We actually had an FAA representative at the flight school, where I did my crash course yesterday, and he was explaining all these things that people have no concept of that.

They’re, actually breaking the law, so there’s, also rules. As far as how high you can fly and where you can fly in distance from airports and all of these other things so a lot of it, I was just oblivious to.

Fortunately I have not flown my drone anywhere populated. I haven’t flown. It very much at all, since I’ve, had it for about a year now, so because it was worried about all of this stuff. I knew that I was negligent, which is not an excuse and because I’m a professional.

I wanted to operate in a professional manner which meant getting licensed, so I know there are a lot of people out there that operate everyday without a license, commercially doing stuff for clients posted on their Instagram page or whatever, YouTube, etc.

And you know I don’t really care about them or what they’re doing. What I do care about. Is you guys, my subscribers and the people watching this video, who have an interest in doing things the correct way? What I did was signed up for a crash course.

It was a one-day eight hour crash course at a local flight school here I’ll, put the link down below shout out to Northwest flight school. They did a phenomenal job at explaining everything and making it very easy for me to understand.

I signed up for the test today, which was yesterday I signed up for the test. The next day went back this morning at 9 a.m. took my exams took me. 39 minutes I was in and out I scored a 90. I’m issed six questions.

There are 60 questions on the exam. You need a 72 pass. I knew I was gonna pass. There was a few that were kind of you know, gray. As far as the answer there could have been two answers. You know, for example, what is the best way to mitigate risk? A do a pre-flight check and a brief with your crew or B, listen to the C talk and listen for any flight paths or things that may be happening in the flight.

You know the airspace of your area both of those could have been right, but evidently they were looking for one or the other. So I chose the wrong one. Whatever stuff like that, that you’re gonna miss a few.

Probably, could you pass the test without taking a crash course? Maybe I couldn’t. Have there’s no way? A hundred percent know that if I didn’t take a crash course. I would have not passed that test, but because I did it was all fresh, they explained it very well.

I went I took the test. 90 percent. I’m super stoked. With that I paid five hundred dollars for the combination. It was 350 for the class and 150 for the test, my class included lunch and t-shirts and books and study guides and all kinds of stuff, and so I highly recommend that to you guys, if you’re, going to be doing this commercially, do The right thing go, get licensed it’s.

If you take a crash course, it’s, not hard to pass the test. Five hundred dollars, not a lot of money. I’ll, make that back on the very first time. I fly this drone for a client there’s no way. I’m, sending up a drone for less than five hundred dollars anyway.

So I know I’m gonna make it back the very first time I fly. You’re, going to need a visual observer, which is a person who can maintain line-of-sight with the drone. This is another thing that the FAA rep said: people are in violation up there staring at the screen on their drone, their iPhone or iPad, or the display of the controller or whatever, and they’re, not maintaining a visual line of sight with the Drone which is required by the FAA, you only allowed to take your eyes off of that drone momentarily to check battery levels or something of the sort not sit and operate it.

You know staring at your controller. You’re supposed to maintain a visual line of sight, so people read that as a gray area and the rules, but FAA doesn’t seem to think there’s any gray area about it.

So get a visual observer, which means you take your wife or your husband or your boyfriend. Girlfriend buddy photo assistant, whoever out with you and you’re gonna have to pay them if they’re on staffs, so that’s.

Another line item you need to put on your invoice to your client. If they’re just a friend or something well, then you know I am lunch or something like that, but you got to keep in mind these extra expenses that you have.

You need to recoup the cost of your time for the day and training you need to recoup your cost for the time it took you to do the test. You need to recoup your cost for the training, materials and the test.

You need to recoup your cost. For your assistance or line of you, know your visual observers and all of that stuff, so make sure that you recoup those costs and build them into your fee when you start charging for drone work, so I’m super psyched.

Now I have to go through and apply for a whole bunch of waivers and authorizations, because, where I live, I’m within five miles of a couple different airports. All the airspace around me is restricted, so the part 107 license doesn ‘

T really. Do me any good where I live until I start getting those waivers and authorizations because I still can’t fly all the airspace. That’s restricted so that’s. The next part, unfortunately, there’s, a huge backlog at the FAA.

It can take anywhere from thirty to like a hundred days before you get some of those waivers or authorizations back there. Trying to automate that system and when they do it should make it a little bit faster.

So hopefully, that’s, some insight for you guys I didn’t. Think the test was all that difficult learning about air spaces and learning to read charts were the two hardest parts of the whole thing. The rest of it is a lot of really common sense.

There’s, some weather stuff on there, and you know some general practices that you need to know. Knowing all of the regs like how high you can fly and how near to certain you know, towers, and things like that, all of this stuff that we learned in class is very helpful.

Just for me, operating as a pilot and making sure I’m staying within the laws, but if you guys have questions throw them down below and, like I said, I’ll post a link to the flight school. I went to here in Spokane.

If you’re in the northwest, it’s, a definitely an option for you. If you are not in the Northwest, I’m sure. There is probably a test and a crash course given at whatever Airport is near you. I got to go apply for some waivers to fly over people and fly at night and fly and restricted airspace, etc.

So I’m gonna cut out of here, but I’ll talk to you guys on the next one, [ Music, ]