Above: Sir Peter Blake’s son James is forging a successful career as a documentary filmmaker but also practises the family trade racing this Volvo as onboard reporter on Dee Caffari’s Turn the Tide on Plastics. Party piece… flying his drone in through the VO65’s interior to emerge back out of the forehatch – all while racing. Nick Bowers’ drone programme with Team New Zealand was altogether more sombre and serious (right) with the relentless pressure to deliver high-quality footage each day with the correct orientations to keep the design and sailing teams moving forwards without the multiple tune-up boats available to their main America’s Cup rivals
path or the confidence to change direction with your thinking and your philosophy. So drone vision provided more rapid step- ping stones towards success in Bermuda. ‘Of course, this does not just apply to
the America’s Cup. I think particularly with development classes where you are on a steep curve, you are not refining tenths here and there, you are looking at quan- tum leaps in performance, knots of boat speed between having it right and wrong. I think all teams in the future, but particu- larly in the Cup, will have somebody run- ning drones getting otherwise impossible aerial footage and images daily to enable better-informed development decisions. ‘Looking back at our own Olympic
campaigns with the Tornado, the coach was providing us with that external view, partic- ularly of how your rig was set up compared to your opponents. That is something that you have to innately trust your coach on – but even with some still and video footage shot from the RIB you are relying a lot on his verbal feedback to paint a picture of how things look from off the boat. ‘Occasionally you would get off the
boat yourself and have a look from behind at the rig and you could get a bit of a picture. But when you were sailing in anger it was very difficult to get those accurate representations, particularly with jerky video footage because the coach boats are always bouncing around. ‘Really what we relied on then was out
of 10 or 15 still photos getting one or two that were lined up well enough, then you’d be staring at just those few shots taken from behind the boat or from another use- ful angle to judge your set-up. ‘By contrast, these days with the drone
footage you can see a multitude of differ- ent angles in a very short period and you can look at the rig dynamically as it is operating while you are sailing along; that’s something that in the past has only
46 SEAHORSE
been available at a pretty imprecise level. ‘In the Olympic cycle going forward this
will be critical. Think about the bumpier water in Tokyo and the dynamics of how the rig and sails respond together, along with the crew, compared with how those things work sailing in a flat-water venue. Consistent aerial footage will be a game- changer. One can imagine across a sailing squad a drone being used to study the set- up on three or four boats and then com- paring it with the results on the water in a way that drags the whole group forward. ‘The role of the coach will change too,
sitting down with sailors looking at the video footage together, looking at tech- niques and rig set-ups rather than shooting hand-held video out on the water or paint- ing a verbal picture during the debriefs. ‘The use of drone technology in
Olympic campaigns is going to increase dramatically ahead of Tokyo 2020. Drone footage might not make a difference between a gold medal and no medal, but I think it will be a piece of the puzzle that sailing teams worldwide will utilise to give them the one or two per cent here or there that could ultimately make the difference between success and failure. ‘The use of drone vision is increasingly
becoming standard in all kinds of football to help players understand positioning on the field; and that is very similar to sailing pre-starts. You can see sag in the line, accel- eration, sail trim, kinetics and steering tech- nique. How the boat/players move around compared to how the players/crews thought they had moved. ‘It really is an exciting future and it will
only get better and better. Plus as we move forward, as with anything else the machines get cheaper and smarter and also more user-friendly. ‘In the not too distant future you will
have a transponder on your boat and the coach will launch the drone and it will fly
off and stay exactly in a range of pre- programmed positions relative to your boat for 30 minutes or so, before it heads back to shore or to the coach boat for a battery change plus a vision download.’ And so it is… a glimpse of the precision
positioning already available occurred during the Volvo Race leg from Hong Kong to New Zealand. Onboard reporter James Blake (son of Sir Peter Blake) showed the advances that have happened when he flew a drone from high in the sky into Turn the Tide on Plastic’s cockpit, through the companionway, inspected below decks and flew out of the forward hatch… then back skywards. DJI, the dominant producer of camera
drones, have sold over 700,000 Phantoms to date, with the current top-of-the-line Phantom 4 Pro expected to be replaced shortly by a faster Phantom 5. Industry talk suggests that the new model will allow interchangeable lenses like the top-end Aspire model, greater speed, longer flight time, further improved obstacle avoidance and greater flight autonomy. DJI already have a waterproof model, the Splash, and a compact foldable drone, the Mavic Pro; in time all those features and more will no doubt be added by other manufacturers. However, for America’s Cup speed needs
these will still not be enough. Nick Bowers’ high-speed drone’s development continues. Today he is co-operating with an undis- closed US military contractor to make further speed and control advances based upon his existing patented technology. You can be sure some very fast photo
drones – friend and foe – will be buzzing alongside the first foiling AC75 monohulls to go afloat, for defender and challengers alike, providing detailed analytical vision from aerial cameras on virtual dollies to help designers fast-track their work and sailing coaches prepare as they rush towards Auckland 2021.
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