Chinese drone maker DJI is fast-approaching that magical one-hour figure of flight time. That’s thanks to today’s launch of the DJI Matrice 300 RTK, the company’s newest commercial, i.e. enterprise-oriented drone. This flagship package is rated for up to 55 minutes of flight time, meaning the magical one-hour mark may be a mere software update with some optimizations away.
Though you shouldn’t count on that, naturally, as most DJI devices are unchanged in that regard post-release. The occasional few, however, benefit from significant optimizations affecting the maximum duration of their flights. Of course, this heavily depends on specific use cases and environmental conditions, but the progress in the field is definitely happening and it is happening fast.
Another novelty introduced with the DJI Matrice 300 RTK is the so-called Dual Operator Mode. The name is pretty self-explanatory, as it denotes a function that allows two pilots to share control priority. Meaning you can literally have a co-pilot tasked with landing the drone safely in case anything happens to the primary pilot(‘s connection). Quite a neat trick for implementing some additional safety measures meant to guard your hefty drone investment.
How heft we’re talking about here is still unclear; while DJI is already taking M300 RTK pre-orders, the company hasn’t communicated a standard pricing structure for enterprise customers. Presumably because there’s no such thing, i.e. prices depend on order sizes.
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