Drone & UAV Expert Interviews

Since 2022, the mydeardrone.com interview series has brought together voices from every corner of the drone industry. From YouTubers who grew their channels around drone content to Navy SEALs turned autonomous robotics engineers, these conversations go beyond product reviews to explore what’s actually happening at the frontier of unmanned aviation.

Browse All Interviews

Guest	Topic	Read
Sally French — Founder, The Drone Girl	Origin of Drone Girl & the drone market’s future	Read →
Brett Velicovich — US Army Veteran & Author	Counter-drone and his role at WhiteFox	Read →
Aviv Shapira — Co-Founder & CEO, XTEND	Drones & his aerospace experience	Read →
Joe Snodgrass — Navy SEAL turned Field Engineer, Exyn Technologies	Aerial autonomous robots & his 8 years in SEAL	Read →
Timothy Gillespie — Managing Director, SWARM	Search and rescue drones	Read →
Chief Charles Werner — Director, DRONERESPONDERS	Public safety UAS programs	Read →
Chad Sweet — CEO, ModalAI	VOXL Flight first open-development platform	Read →
Alan Perlman — CEO & Founder, UAV Coach	Drone education and future insights	Read →
Kaushik Gala — Chief Business Officer, FlytBase	World’s first Internet of Drones platform	Read →
Barry Alexander — Founder & CEO, Aquiline Drones	Using drones for planetary protection	Read →
Gianluca Salone — Founder, Drone Solutions	Drone solutions & unmanned system technologies	Read →
Illy Gruber — VP Marketing, Percepto	Percepto DIB solution & autonomous drones	Read →
Leo McCloskey — VP Marketing, Echodyne Corp	First-ever BVLOS UAS mission	Read →
Michael Kelly — VP Global Sales, TerraView	The RangePro X8P Pixhawk drone	Read →
Anthony Hearst — Co-founder & CEO, Progeny Drone	Progeny Drone & precision agriculture	Read →
Aaron Zhang — A2Z Drone Delivery	Patented drone delivery mechanism	Read →
Peter Muhlrad — President, GuardBot	Spherical amphibious robotic drone systems	Read →
Joe Darden — Director IoT Business Dev, Iridium	Iridium & the emerging UAS world	Read →
Prachi Kawade — RA Aerospace & Defense, Frost & Sullivan	Space & satellite mega constellations	Read →
Mark Askelson — University of North Dakota	Drones’ role in smart cities	Read →
David Schmale & Shane Ross — Virginia Tech Researchers	Microbe research using drones and fluorescent dye	Read →
Dr. Nickolas Macchiarella — Professor, Embry-Riddle	Mapping oyster reefs using UAS	Read →
Michael Griffin & Annette McClelland — Tekuma Co-Founders	One-handed controller for robots and drones	Read →
Mario Cugini — CEO, FoxFury Lighting Solutions	FoxFury backstory & their drone lights	Read →
Edgar Munoz — CEO, Aeronyde Corporation	Aeronyde backstory & drone technology	Read →
Mr. Wei — SD Corporate Development, Cepton	LiDAR for UAV	Read →
Yanislav Malahov — Founder, aeternity	The drone graffiti project	Read →
Kyle Trotter — Director Creative Video, Shutterstock	Using drones for digital storytelling	Read →
Mark Condon — Founder, Shotkit	Shotkit backstory & drone photography	Read →
Toby Liew — Co-Founder, Drone Run	Drone Run flying game	Read →
Michel Moskal — Managing Producer, JustPlanes	JustPlanes backstory & aviation programs	Read →
Ann Young — Chief Retoucher & Author, FixThePhoto	Aerial photography retouching	Read →
Ken Dono — YouTuber & Video Creator	Drone industry & his YouTube journey	Read →
Billy Kyle — YouTuber & Video Creator	Creating drone videos & his YouTube journey	Read →
Dan Davis — Tech YouTuber & Founder, DansTube.TV	Creating drone videos & YouTube advice	Read →
Marc Hennige — Drone Instagrammer	Aerial photography & his Instagram journey	Read →
Vitor Hugo — Drone Instagrammer	Travel photography & drones	Read →
Mike — Owner, Drone Supremacy	Drones & FPV	Read →

About This Interview Series

The mydeardrone.com interview series was launched to go beyond product specs and buying guides. Drone technology is being built and applied by real people with fascinating stories — engineers pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight, pilots using drones in life-saving search operations, researchers mapping ecosystems that were previously impossible to study. These interviews capture that human layer of the industry.

If you’d like to be featured in this series, reach out through the contact page.

Why Read Drone Interviews?

Spec sheets and product reviews tell you what a drone can do. Interviews tell you how real people are actually using them -- and that gap between specification and application is where the most valuable knowledge lives. When a commercial inspection pilot explains how they pre-plan a power line survey route in DJI Terra, or when a film director describes how the Mavic 4 Pro Hasselblad system changed their approach to aerial cinematography, that context is impossible to extract from a buyer's guide or a spec comparison table.

The interviews in this series span the full spectrum of drone use: solo hobbyists flying for the joy of flight, professional photographers who have built six-figure businesses around aerial imagery, engineers designing autonomous systems for infrastructure applications, and regulators shaping the policies that define what all of us can do in the sky. Each perspective adds a different dimension to understanding where drone technology is and where it is headed.

I approach every interview with the same question framing: what did this person learn that they could not have learned any other way? The answers consistently reveal the non-obvious -- the workflow hacks that save hours, the failure modes that only appear at scale, the regulatory insights that matter only when you are trying to do something specific and ambitious. These are the conversations that change how you think about your own drone practice.

Interview Categories

Aerial Photography and Cinematography

Our photography and cinematography interviews cover professionals who have built careers around aerial imagery. These conversations explore creative process, technical workflow from flight planning to post-production color grading, and the business realities of commercial aerial work. Topics include: how top photographers approach location scouting for drone work, which camera settings they rely on for consistent color matching with ground footage, how they manage client expectations and pricing for commercial projects, and how the shift from DSLR and mirrorless cameras to dedicated drone cameras has changed their creative approach.

Several interviews dig into specific specializations within aerial photography: real estate aerial photography with its specific requirements for interior-exterior exposure matching and virtual tour integration; landscape photography where drone access to perspectives unavailable to ground-based photographers creates entirely new creative possibilities; and event photography where timing, battery management, and airspace authorization intersect in complex ways. If you are building a professional photography practice around drone work, these interviews provide the contextual framework that equipment reviews cannot.

FPV Racing and Freestyle

Our FPV interviews connect you with pilots at the elite end of the racing and freestyle world. These conversations reveal the practice methodology, simulator regimens, and technical tuning processes that separate competitive pilots from recreational flyers. Top FPV pilots spend more time in simulators than in real-world flights during intensive training periods -- the ability to practice maneuvers thousands of times in a simulator before flying them on hardware accelerates skill development dramatically.

Freestyle FPV interviews explore the artistic dimension of the discipline: how top pilots choose music for their videos, how they plan and execute complex lines through environments, and how they balance the risk management of flying near structures with the creative imperative of capturing shots that push boundaries. The intersection of athletic skill, artistic vision, and technical mastery in elite FPV creates some of the most compelling content in the drone world, and understanding the process behind that content elevates your appreciation of what the top pilots achieve.

Commercial Drone Operations

Commercial operations interviews cover the business and operational dimensions of professional drone work. Subjects include agricultural drone service providers who manage fleets of spraying drones across thousands of acres per season, infrastructure inspection companies that have built data analysis pipelines on top of drone imagery, and real estate drone photography services that have scaled from solo operator to multi-pilot regional businesses. These interviews address the less-glamorous but essential aspects of commercial drone work: pricing strategy, insurance requirements, client contract structure, Part 107 compliance at scale, and the economics of equipment investment versus lease.

Several interviews explore the specific challenges of working in regulated or complex environments: flying in controlled airspace around major airports, operating in wildfire management contexts where airspace restrictions and smoke conditions create unique challenges, and working in international markets where regulatory frameworks differ significantly from US rules. If you are considering turning drone flying into commercial work, these interviews accelerate your understanding of what the business actually looks like from the inside.

Technology and Research

Our technology and research interviews bring perspectives from drone engineers, academics, and industry researchers who are building the infrastructure and capabilities that will define drone operations for the next decade. Topics include autonomous systems development for industrial inspection, AI-powered obstacle avoidance and path planning, sensor fusion for BVLOS operations, and the engineering challenges of scaling drone delivery from pilot programs to operational networks.

These interviews are particularly valuable for understanding the current state of drone technology beyond what product marketing communications describe. When engineers discuss the real-world reliability challenges of operating drone fleets at scale, or researchers describe what current AI cannot yet reliably do in complex environments, you gain calibrated expectations for what drone technology will and will not be able to accomplish in the near term. This perspective is valuable for anyone making equipment investment decisions or building business plans that depend on specific drone capabilities.

Featured Interview Highlights

The Wildfire Intelligence Perspective

One of our most-shared interviews features a former military aerial intelligence officer who transitioned to leading drone operations for a western US state forestry agency. His interview covers the development of wildfire monitoring drone programs, including the operational challenges of flying in proximity to air tankers and helicopters working active fire lines, the sensor systems that provide actionable intelligence to ground incident commanders, and the regulatory frameworks (TFR coordination with the FAA) that make simultaneous manned and unmanned aircraft operations possible in emergency scenarios.

What makes this interview particularly valuable is its frankness about the learning curve in the early days of integrating drone operations into existing emergency response organizations. Resistance from pilots of manned aircraft, confusion about command authority over drone assets, and the challenge of communicating drone capabilities and limitations to commanders who had no context for the technology -- these are the real organizational challenges that technical capability alone does not solve. His practical guidance for drone pilots who want to work in emergency response is the most actionable content in our archive on this topic.

The FPV-to-Film Pipeline

A cinematography interview that consistently generates reader engagement covers a director of photography who transitioned from documentary filmmaking to commercial drone cinematography and now manages both a traditional film career and a specialized FPV cinematography unit. His description of how the DRL Simulator pipeline identifies pilots with the instinctive three-dimensional spatial reasoning that elite FPV cinematography requires -- and cannot be taught explicitly -- is one of the most illuminating discussions of craft in our archive. His breakdown of how FPV footage is integrated with traditional cinema camera work in post-production, particularly the color matching challenges between log profiles from different camera systems, has been cited by other cinematographers as reference material.

The Agricultural Scale Operator

Our agricultural drone interview series culminates in a conversation with an operator whose team manages spraying operations across 40,000+ acres annually in the Central Valley using a mixed fleet of DJI Agras T40 and T25 drones. The operational logistics discussion alone justifies reading -- battery management, chemical loading scheduling, operator fatigue patterns across multi-day operations, real-time weather decision making when field humidity conditions change -- is a masterclass in scaling precision agriculture drone operations. His perspective on the ROI case for drone spraying versus helicopter and ground rig alternatives, grounded in five years of actual cost data, is the most data-driven analysis of agricultural drone economics available outside of proprietary research.

Conducting Your Own Drone Interviews

Several readers have asked how I approach finding interview subjects and conducting productive conversations. The short answer: most people in the drone community are remarkably willing to talk about their work when asked with genuine curiosity and specific questions. Cold outreach to pilots whose work you have followed and admire, with a specific question about a specific aspect of their work, generates a much higher response rate than generic interview requests.

The preparation that makes drone interviews valuable is understanding the subject's technical context before the conversation. Knowing the difference between OcuSync and O4 transmission systems before talking to a DJI enterprise engineer means you can ask meaningful follow-up questions rather than spending 20 minutes on background. Reading the subject's existing published work, watching their videos, and identifying the gap between what they have explained publicly and what you want to understand privately is the preparation that makes interviews productive rather than just pleasant.

Post-interview, the editing and framing challenge is identifying which 20% of the conversation generated 80% of the value, and building the published piece around those moments. Most interviews contain a handful of genuinely non-obvious insights surrounded by contextual material that is valuable to the subject but less so to a general reader. Finding those moments and making them the core of the published piece is what makes interview content worth reading rather than just watching in raw form.

Industry Insights from Our Interview Archive

Across 39 interviews, certain themes emerge consistently that provide a composite picture of where the drone industry is and where the most experienced practitioners see it heading. These are not my observations alone -- they are patterns that emerge when you listen to enough people who are doing serious work with drones.

The Automation Paradox

Nearly every commercial operator we interviewed flagged the same counterintuitive reality: more automation in drone systems creates higher demands on operator skill, not lower ones. When a drone can autonomously execute a pre-planned route with centimeter accuracy, the human operator role shifts from basic piloting to mission design, contingency management, and data quality verification. These are higher-order skills than stick-and-throttle flying, and they are harder to develop quickly. Multiple interview subjects noted that the most common errors they see from new commercial operators are not flying errors but planning errors: routes that assume clear sightlines that do not exist, battery calculations that do not account for wind conditions, and mission parameters that exceed the airspace authorization obtained.

The practical implication: if you are transitioning to commercial drone work, invest proportionally more learning time in mission planning and data quality verification than in manual flying technique. Manual flying skills are still necessary for emergency interventions and setup, but the value-creating activities in commercial work are increasingly cognitive rather than physical.

The Regulatory Convergence Ahead

Multiple regulatory and legal interview subjects described a convergence trend that will shape drone operations over the next five years: the gradual harmonization of drone rules across jurisdictions as BVLOS corridor development requires internationally consistent standards. When drone logistics networks operate across county, state, and national lines, the current patchwork of local restrictions creates operational complexity that makes national networks economically marginal. FAA BVLOS rulemaking, EASA Advanced category development, and bilateral agreements between aviation authorities are all moving toward a more consistent international framework.

The practical implication for commercial operators today: building operational documentation and safety management system practices that would satisfy advanced regulatory scrutiny, even if current rules do not require it, positions you ahead of competitors who will need to scramble when more rigorous requirements arrive. Several interview subjects described how building robust documentation practices early became a competitive advantage when enterprise clients began requiring it before signing commercial contracts.

The Content Quality Ceiling

Multiple professional photographers and cinematographers observed that drone footage quality has reached a practical ceiling for most commercial applications. The difference between a DJI Air 3S and a DJI Mavic 4 Pro is meaningful to a cinematographer and negligible to a real estate client. As hardware quality at the $1,000-$2,000 price point has become genuinely excellent, competitive differentiation among commercial drone pilots is shifting rapidly toward creative quality, workflow reliability, and client relationship management.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge: hardware-based competitive advantages are difficult to sustain because everyone has access to the same equipment. The opportunity: pilots who invest in creative skill development, efficient post-production workflows, and strong client communication practices build advantages that are much harder for competitors to replicate than hardware upgrades. Several of our most commercially successful interview subjects specifically cited their post-production workflow and client communication as the primary drivers of repeat business, not their drone equipment choices.

What Beginners Learn from Expert Drone Pilots

One consistent thread in interview feedback is that beginners find the honest account of expert failure more valuable than the account of expert achievement. When experienced pilots describe the crash that taught them to check compass calibration, the client project that went wrong because of inadequate pre-flight location research, or the equipment choice they regret -- these cautionary accounts save readers from the same costly lessons.

From the interviews in our archive, these are the lessons that beginner pilots consistently cite as most valuable from expert conversations:

The 15-minute pre-flight location visit changes everything. Multiple commercial photographers described how visiting a location on foot before a flight assignment -- checking for power lines below the intended flight path, identifying obstacles that do not appear on satellite maps, confirming that the angle of light at the shoot time works for the intended shots -- eliminates the majority of on-site problems. The efficiency gain from this preparation more than offsets the time cost, particularly for paid assignments where on-site problem-solving is expensive.

Battery management is a system, not a calculation. Operators who run multiple batteries across a professional session describe building battery rotation systems that ensure every battery is charged and cooled in predictable sequence, rather than grabbing whatever battery is available. The failure mode this prevents -- discovering a battery at 40% charge when you needed 80% -- is a foreseeable problem with an entirely procedural solution.

The best drone shot is usually not the highest drone shot. Multiple cinematographers and photographers noted that the most common beginner error is flying too high. The best aerials often come from 30-60 feet -- close enough to show detail, far enough to provide perspective. The instinct to climb to maximum altitude and shoot down is a beginner reflex that experienced pilots unlearn as they develop creative confidence in lower, more dynamic perspectives.

Know your return-to-home altitude before every flight. In complex environments with obstacles of varying heights, the default RTH altitude may be insufficient to clear nearby structures. Every pilot we interviewed who had experienced an RTH incident described it as preventable -- either the RTH altitude was not set, was set incorrectly for the environment, or the home point was not updated after takeoff movement. Setting RTH altitude as a explicit pre-flight checklist step, not an assumption, prevents one of the most common drone-loss scenarios.

Contributing to the Interview Series

The mydeardrone.com interview series is always looking for practitioners doing interesting work with drones. We are particularly interested in perspectives that are underrepresented in public drone media: operators working in developing markets, pilots using drones for humanitarian and conservation purposes, engineers working on the enabling technology that makes commercial drone operations possible, and commercial operators who have navigated the regulatory and business challenges of scaling beyond solo operation.

If you have a perspective that would add something genuinely different to this archive -- a use case we have not covered, a lesson learned from a notable success or failure, a view from a part of the industry we have not yet reached -- I would like to hear from you. The best interview subjects are not necessarily the most famous names in the drone world. They are the people doing original work that most pilots would benefit from understanding, regardless of their public profile. Use the contact form on this site or reach out through our social media channels to start a conversation about contributing.

The interview archive at mydeardrone.com represents one of the largest collections of practitioner perspectives on drone operations available online. It exists because the drone community is genuinely collaborative -- pilots and operators who are competing in the same commercial markets still share knowledge and lessons at a rate that would surprise observers from more guarded industries. That generosity is what makes this series possible and what I hope every published interview reflects back into the community.

Drone Career Paths: What Interview Subjects Wish They Had Known Earlier

One recurring question I ask interview subjects is: what do you wish you had known at the beginning of your drone career? The answers cluster around a handful of themes that appear across different specializations and experience levels.

Get your Part 107 before you need it. Multiple commercial operators described waiting until a specific paid opportunity appeared before pursuing certification, then losing the opportunity because their certification was not yet in hand. The Part 107 process typically takes 4-8 weeks from study start to certification receipt. Starting the process before a specific need materializes means you are ready to say yes to commercial opportunities when they appear. The test fee and study time are trivially small compared to a single missed commercial job.

Build a niche rather than a generalist practice. Pilots who have built the most durable commercial practices tend to be known for specific types of work rather than general availability. The real estate aerial photographer who has shot 400 properties in their market knows every permit, airspace, and lighting condition in their area in a way that a generalist cannot match. The infrastructure inspection pilot who has developed specific documentation methodology for their sector commands higher rates than an identically equipped generalist. Specificity creates expertise, and expertise commands premium pricing.

The community is the career. Multiple interview subjects described their most valuable professional relationships coming through the drone community itself -- fellow pilots who referred work they could not take, introduced them to clients, or partnered on projects requiring multiple operators. Building genuine relationships within the drone community, through events, online forums, and local flying clubs, consistently shows up in interview accounts as more valuable than any amount of marketing spend. The drone world is small enough that reputation circulates quickly, and large enough that genuine expertise in a specialty is in demand far beyond what any single operator can supply.

Document everything from the beginning. Operators who built thorough flight logs, mission documentation, and incident records from their first commercial flights describe that documentation as invaluable when: applying for liability insurance (underwriters want flight history), bidding on enterprise contracts (documentation demonstrates professional operations standards), and defending against complaints or regulatory inquiries (records show you followed proper procedures). Starting documentation practices after a problem arises is always more difficult and less credible than demonstrating a consistent pre-existing practice.

Price for the outcome, not the time. The most common early-career pricing mistake in commercial drone work is hourly or half-day rates that fail to capture the full value delivered. A drone operator who completes a $300 real estate shoot in 90 minutes is not getting $200/hour -- they are getting $300 for the deliverable that enables a $500,000 property sale. Understanding the value chain your work participates in, and pricing relative to that value rather than relative to your time cost alone, is the mindset shift that most commercial drone pilots describe as the biggest factor in reaching viable commercial pricing. It is a perspective that comes through in interviews again and again, and it is one of the most practically useful things this archive can transmit to pilots at earlier career stages.

The interviews in this archive represent genuine investment from the pilots, engineers, operators, and researchers who gave their time to these conversations. The least I can do is ensure their insights reach people who can act on them. If you find yourself returning to a particular interview, please share it with someone else who would benefit -- that is how these conversations compound their value beyond the single exchange from which they came. And if you have questions about drone operations that the current archive does not address, leave them in the comments -- your questions are often the clearest signal about what interview topics matter most to the community.