Drones equipped with video cameras have become all the rage in recent years. In addition to hobbyists, they are now widely used by professional videographers around the world as a cheap and easy way to obtain aerial photos and videos. But what if you want to have both the convenience of an unmanned aircraft and the joy of being able to see the subject with your own eyes and photograph it from the air with a camera?
There's always the solution of learning to fly a paramotor (a paraglider equipped with an individual motor on the rider's back) or buying something like the Ehang 184.This is a new giant drone that will surely one day fly both you and your camera.
Ehang, a Chinese company based in Guangzhou, demonstrated its unmanned aerial vehicle at CES 2016 in Las Vegas. It is about the size of a small car. It is a 1.2-meter-tall electric vehicle that resembles an oversized drone (it has 8 propellers on 4 arms).
It can carry a person weighing up to 260 kg and has a top speed of 62 mph, a maximum altitude of 11,000 feet and a flight range of 23 minutes or a radius of 10 miles. In addition, as is the case with many unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), the Ehang 184 can fly alone, without a passenger.
Using a simple smartphone or tablet app, you can tell your drone to take off, hover, or land with just a few clicks. To determine where you want it to fly, you can set Waypoints using a map.
Ehang says the vehicle has a “fail-safe system” that will immediately and safely land it on the ground if it detects a malfunction or disconnection.
Other features of the drone include air conditioning (!!!), some storage space, a reading light, and a 4G connection (!!!).
See below a promo video from the manufacturer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrPejpbz8RI
The Ehang 184 is expected to be commercially available sometime in 2016 with a price tag of around $200,000 to $300,000. Even if you don't have that much money to buy it, you will definitely see it in the Greek sky since professional videographers and major studio companies will be interested.
