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● Unmanned aircraft systems · flight record

UAS

Twelve years of flying small unmanned aircraft for pictures, maps and 3D models, from the first flights over Bantayan Island in 2014 to GVC-certified survey work in London. This page counts it: the countries, the sites, the kilometres, the aircraft, and what the flying looked like from the ground.

Countries flown7UK, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Poland
Sites flown1,000+10 of them listed below with a date and a deliverable
Distance flown—from flight logs and mission plans, see the method
Flying since20143stabilised camera drones since 2019, FPV since 20202
Europe ∩ Philippines
Intersections
0
Mean crossing angle
—
tangent of Europetangent of PhilippinesMove the pointer over the canvas to slide one word over the other. Every crossing is solved exactly.
01 · Where

Seven countries, three regions

One dot per country, sized by the number of survey sites listed on this page. The dashed arc joins the two bases: London and Lapu-Lapu City on Mactan Island. Hover a dot to isolate it.

02 · Surveys

The sites, counted

The services page says "1,000+ sites flown"1. That figure covers every take-off since 2014, most of them video and photo work for Budots Media in Cebu. The table below is narrower: only flights that left a dated deliverable that can still be opened, a Sketchfab model, a Luma or Polycam capture, a map or a post. Filter by country.

YearSiteCountryMethodOutput

03 · Distance

Kilometres flown

— kmThe total and how it was counted are filled in from the flight logs.

A survey flight is a lawnmower pattern: parallel lanes at a fixed height with 70 to 90 percent overlap between frames, so a one-hectare site takes two to four kilometres of flying and a resort or a stretch of coastline takes tens. Orbit passes for 3D models add a few hundred metres per building. Video and FPV work is shorter per flight but there is much more of it.

FPV quads fly fast, close paths that a stabilised camera drone cannot: through a doorway, along a hotel corridor, over a running field with the athletes.

The flight Bart cites most is the FPV run over Mactan Newtown during the Ironman 70.3 race in August 2022, filmed for the Savoy Hotel5. Budots Media had been buying FPV hardware and training pilots since 2021; the flights it pitches to resorts and event organisers in Cebu are reveals, follow shots and runs through buildings5.

In London the same skill is sold as a service: "FPV fly-throughs" sit on the services page next to condition reports and gaussian-splat scans1. The 2022 to 2023 London slide deck lists the kit of the time as "fpv analog/digital"13, meaning both analogue goggles and the DJI digital system were in use.

FPV also feeds the 3D work. A quad flown by hand can get the low, oblique passes around a bridge pier or a facade that a survey grid misses, and those frames go into the same photogrammetry or splat pipeline as the survey set. The Aerial Data Ops page explains the pipeline: three ways to turn photos into places.

05 · Field record

On the ground, in five countries

Photographs from the owner's archive: with the goggles on, at the take-off point, testing counter-drone kit at a London expo, and what the aircraft saw. Open one for the full image.

Captions give the country and the month. Camera metadata and GPS tags were removed from the copies on this site.

06 · Aircraft

What was flown

Aircraft named in the owner's own pages, posts and flight logs, with the job each one does.

The General Visual Line of Sight Certificate (GVC) is the UK remote-pilot qualification for the Specific category. With an Operational Authorisation from the Civil Aviation Authority it allows flights closer to people and buildings than the Open category permits15. The services page states "CAA Licensed, UK insured" and readiness to obtain the authorisation per project, once the site and the aircraft are known1. The Operator ID and certificate numbers are not published.

The regulation chapter of the Aerial Data Ops page goes into the framework: Licensing and regulation. Flights in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines were made under local rules; the posts do not describe the permits used.

References

Sources

The owner's own pages and accounts, read on 29 October 2026, plus the flight records on his drives.

    Contact

    A site to fly?

    Surveys and 3D capture in London, media and FPV work in the Philippines, airspace studies anywhere.

    LinkedIn ↗ Aerial Data Ops → Sketchfab ↗