Up, Up, and Away!

We have all heard “don’t judge a book by its cover” and the more we all grow up, that phrase seems to work with a lot of other situations that don’t pertain to books. This summer internship was one for me! No, I am not saying that I thought that I wouldn’t enjoy this internship, I truly didn’t know what I was getting my hands on. 

This summer I had the opportunity to work with AirScout post-flight image surveying for field images. In layman’s terms, our company’s pilots take pictures of our client’s fields (farmers), then a team of “processors” assess the best image of the field, and finally, through GoogleMaps application, we match our images to GoogleMaps to then send to our farmers. In AirScout terms, “imagery of crops collected via fixed-wing manned aircraft to build precision prescription zones and strategic scouting plans to maximize return on precision ag equipment.” (About AirScout) 

Where do I stand with this company? I am part of their processing team! The team of processors is a group of five people that does the ground-work of the pictures that are taken by our team of pilots.  

When starting this job, I was told by my supervisors that I could have the opportunity to actually go up with one of our pilots for the day. Monday, today, was that day and let me tell you, what a cool experience! My pilot for the day was, in fact, one of my best friends, Chloe, which only made today’s participation even better. Chloe has been going to school to be a pilot and flying for the last three years, so with that being said, she completely wowed me when she showed me all the controls and her knowledge behind them. We went through routine pre-flight procedures before we took off, and even that involvement was mind-boggling! Seeing what I would be seeing in picture-form on my laptop translated to life-size form and also 5,500 feet in the air was what made the entire experience more of a learning tool for future processing projects! The view was also pretty awesome too! We stayed close to Illinois for today’s surveying where all of the fields were either growing corn or beans. We were in the air for five hours and stopped to refuel the plane once. After finishing our route and gathering all the images we needed, we landed and finished the flight with a post-flight procedure. 

The Gateway Arch- St. Louis

Small storm 20 miles out.

For future endeavors with AirScout, I will be continuing to work on their processing team during this harvest season, then again in for next year’s planting, growing, and harvest season. By next year, I hope to be in the position to create an informational “manual” on how AirScout surveys their fields and the type of precision agriculture you’re working with when it comes to field survey. When getting hired, this was a side of the job prospect that was explained that I might be able to endure. I look forward to continuing my work with AirScout so that I can get to that level of knowledge to be able to write this manual and to be able to put my name on it! Leaving that legacy would top off my internship experience with AirScout more than it already going into the air today already did!