“The payload is called the payload for a reason. It’s the part you get paid for.”
One of my colleagues commented on a post of mine with this zinger a couple months ago. As funny as it is, it has a point.
Unless you’re one of the folks who gets to fly airplanes and UAVs for fun aerobatic tricks, there’s practically no one in the world who will pay you to fly around just for the sake of flying. You’d have to keep the bird within a box of a couple miles up and out just to be able to see it, anyways.
The whole reason you’re sending an airplane up is because someone specifically wants to put a 20-lb gimbal or a Starlink dish or whatever other high-tech goodies they’ve got into the air. The aircraft part is honestly just there to accomplish it.
If there were a way to levitate the sensors and communication devices at the right altitude, you could probably get paid to just do that and skip the aircraft entirely.
I know I ramble on about focusing on the aircraft’s purpose a lot, but it’s important to keep this perspective. If the reason people fly UAVs is to carry around that payload, and they are specifically giving you money to acquire or use said UAVs…
Then you should probably really focus on the payload, and making sure you can get it where it needs to go—ideally, via your airplane.
It’s called the payload for a reason.