Progress Report #1

Our team has wrapped up our first week of classes and are now ready to begin moving forward with this capstone project. During the first week, we began laying the ground work for our flights, data storage, and mission planning. As operations manager, I have begun creating the flight schedule and flight plan files. Today in class, Evan and I worked with the ArcGIS software to create the mission files, these files will be brought into the mission planning software to ensure precise data collection in each of the specified areas. On Wednesday we plan to work with Thomas to complete this files and come up with five letter names for each of them.

As I complete the flight schedule I am keeping a couple considerations in mind: I want to have teams of two or three out in the field together and scheduled flights every week as well as people ready to fly in the case of a sudden event (such as flooding). My goal is to have the flights take place at the same time of day so that we can have consistent sun angles. It is looking like I will be able to get everyone to fly between 11:30-1pm. Not all flights will take the entire hour and a half, but I wanted to schedule a longer time gap in case teams need to troubleshoot in the field.

Next week I want to get in the field and begin to establish permanent ground control points in each of the mission areas, as well as finalize the flight areas. More updates to come next week.

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