How does the search operation from vessel, plane and with a drone compare? This document also includes a discussion about the camera angle of view and ground resolution calculations.

Friedrich Beckmann, Searchwing - Search Area Calculations, January 2019

After some experience with the vessels where the drone is supposed to be used I have put together some requirements for the drone.

Friedrich Beckmann, SearchWing - Requirements, May 2020

The weights and the dimensions of the X-UAV Mini Talon drone with the payload and the power consumption.

Friedrich Beckmann, SearchWing - Weights, Dimensions and Power, May 2020

How does weight, drag and speed impact the range of the drone?

Friedrich Beckmann, SearchWing - Flight physics for dummies, November 2021

A.C. Kermode, Mechanics of Flight, Pearson 2006

T.A. Talay, Introduction to the aerodynamics of flight, NASA Technical Report NASA-SP-367, 1975

Mohammad H. Sadraey, Aircraft Design - A Systems Engineering Approach. Wiley, 2013

As described in “Searchwing - Search Area Calculations” page 4, at 550 m attitude a vertical field of vision (image) is 495 m long (Table 4). For covering boots at the surroundings of an image an overlapping of 5 % is needed, so that approximately every 470m an image is taken.

With a avg flight speed of 13,8 m/s the drone is moving to a new image every 34,06 seconds. This means with a mission time of 1 hour we shot approximately 106 Images. An image has a avg size of 1 MB, so every mission produce approximately 106 MB of images per hour, per Camera.

Raspberry Zero W can transfer images over Wifi with 4,46 MB/s, so 23,77 seconds is needed for transmitting the images to a laptop.