Professional UAV Redundancy

The drone industry is ever-evolving. Small quadcopters are improving with every model iteration and the rate of development is showing no signs of slowing. This is thanks to companies like DJI who have just unveiled the brand new Phantom 3; a £1200 investment that will now provide the discerning hobbyist or professional client with a feature-filled 4K capable UAV. This means an established production company or inspection firm can obtain an out the box solution incredibly easily. Hurray for progress! What we are seeing however is an increasing level of blind dependency on a single Phantom in a flight case. In any other professional environment, having a redundancy is key. The bulk of our clients are photographers and videographers who should know all too well that having backup kit is paramount if they want to avoid embarrassing and costly mistakes. You would never turn up to a job with one camera body and lens in your kit bag. Planning for kit failure and accidental damage is an obvious one if you plan on keeping end customers happy and maintaining a good reputation. So why is this logic rarely applied to quadcopters? Especially when a drone is subject to way more risk than a camera that spends its time on the ground in relative safety. As the DJI Official Repair Centre for the UK we are seeing huge numbers of Phantom repairs coming in from professional clients - most of which want their rig fixed yesterday as they are relying on it for upcoming jobs. Would a painter and decorator have one paint brush? Of course he wouldn't, his work depends on it so he has a van full of expensive ones. Tenuous analogy I know but you can see the point.