drone pilot jobs

What Types of Jobs Are Available in the Drone Industry?

UAV / Drone Pilot Jobs

Considering the high level of pay that Drone Pilots Jobs earn, it’s no wonder being a UAV pilot is one of the most coveted UAV Pilot Jobscareers in America. The average drone pilot can expect to make around one hundred thousand dollars a year, and the highest paid drone pilots can make a quarter of a million dollars each year.

Considering most drone pilot jobs do not require the pilots to have a college degree of any sort, it’s a career that most people can pursue in a fairly short amount of time, as long as they have the money for start-up costs and training. The most common jobs in the drone industry right now relate to aerial photography/videography.


Some places you don’t want to send a human employee unless necessary. By using drones, pilots can fly their UAVs into areas that are dangerous for humans to go. One example is bridge construction and maintenance.

If something appears to be wrong, it’s a lot less risky to have the drone patrol the area than to have a human employee dangling from cables at five hundred feet. After reviewing the footage, those in charge can decide if it’s necessary to send someone down to make repairs.


Many of today’s blockbusters have at least a few aerial view scenes of the city where the story is supposed to take place. In the past, these types of scenes could easily eat into the producer’s budget. Hiring helicopters and paying for a film crew to shoot from the aircraft could be a lofty expense.

Now there’s a better option. The producers can now hire a skilled UAV pilot to film whatever top-down shots they need and completely forego the helicopters and the film crew (for aerial scenes anyway). UAVs can also be an invaluable asset when it comes to filming action scenes.

Having a human controlling a camera while an explosion happens can be a certain liability. Setting up a camera and hoping it captures everything the director needs can also be a waste of money. The special effects scenes are already expensive to make, but if the camera doesn’t capture everything at the right angle, the director will have to do it all over again.

Hiring out a team of drone pilots for a few hours is a much better way of capturing the moment. The pilots can collectively record the scene from every angle while piloting from a safe distance away.

The worst scenario would be having to replace a drone that was damaged in action. Two recent popular films that used UAVs to record scenes were Skyfall and the Wolf on Wall Street.


Industrial farmers once had to hire a team of workers to walk through their fields and inspect their potential harvests. This could take several days or even weeks depending on how large the farm was and the type of crops grown. Drones are now being used to monitor crops in a manner that is both more time and cost efficient.

The drone pilot can return video surveillance of the plants for the agriculturalist to review. By inspecting the footage, those in charge of product growth can see some different things that will affect strategy. They can see if the plants might be infested with aphids if so they can have someone go out and treat the plants for bugs.

They will able to see if the vegetables are ripening faster or slower than expected and send someone out to pick the produce or have them apply more fertilizer. The video should also show any malfunctions among automatic farm equipment like the sprinklers.

Because of drones being a new concept to farming, it is expected to save farmers billions of dollars over the next five years. This could dramatically reduce the price of fresh produce at the grocery store.

Real estate

When a huge property is being sold, it is common to include aerial photos of the property in the online posting. Until recently these photographs would have been the product of a cameraman getting on a helicopter and being flown out to the home. This was something that agents would try to get the home owner’s to pay for.

Because the process of getting these type of top-down pictures is so expensive, some homeowners would refuse. At that point, the agent could offer to pay for the photography in hopes that they would make back what they put in when the house sold, and they were paid their commission.

The agent might also decide that the risk was greater than the reward and not have the pictures taken, potentially costing them a sale. Now that drone photography is available, pilots of UAVs are frequently being contacted to take photos both on top of and inside of properties.

Although the pilots are still paid just as much if not more as a regular photographer, no one has to pay the exuberant price tag of the helicopter rental. Drone pilots for real estate agencies are one of the steadiest lines of UAVs careers on the market right now.

These are just a few of the jobs available to UAV pilots on the market right now. Because laws have recently changed and drone technology is constantly improving, Americans can expect to see more emerging careers in drone piloting shortly.

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