Good day all out there and safe landing...
I am very curious, given the high cost of airborne sensors and the rapid and regular change in technological advancement of these sensors, how many sensors are out there and dormant? Many years ago when I joined the industry I learned operating from the film analogue cameras, to mentio a few, we had Wild Heerbrugg RC10's both 152 and wide angle 80mm Lenses. We also had the Zeiss RMK A. All these were soon replaced by the famous and more advanced RMK TOP 15 and within two or three years the Wild nad RMK A were gathering dust on the shelves, two years later they were donated to the South African Air Force Museum section of Aerial photography.
It was not very long after before we were introduced to the new digital age of the ZI/Imaging's DMC family and the Vexcel Ultracam D and the glorious years of the RMK TOP 15 were over and it was forgotten. From there on, the Digital Aerial sensors has evolved with such speed that I sometimes sit and wonder what happened to all those pieces of historical artistic masterpieces which have paved the way to the current breed of highly technological automatic sensors. Like honestly, the tech advancement in the current breed of sensors have amost reduced us to system monitors than operators. Make no mistake, the amount of work and merticulousness it requires in current mission planning and preparation for a succesful mission gives the same satisfaction one would have from manually obtaining 60% forward overlap during uncostant aircraft ground speed and altitude with and analogue.
And I am grateful for the evolution and progress we have made but, i would like to know if there is still some analogues or the first eneration of digital cams gathering dust in some office out there in the world and what do you think its final ending will be. Do you think it could still take one more flight before it finaly rests? Similarly to Lidar systems. I remeber one year after the arrival of Riegl 480i we had almost forgotten of our once glorius Optech ALTM system and years after the 780i we almost forgot that the 680i ever existed, let alone the 480i
What systems do you have shelved? I would just love to know...
Comments
Excellent post!
Most of the film systems pre date my time as a sensor operator, although I've used cut down aero film for my personal photography hobby.
In my case, as an ASO, I have only seen the L3Wescam SD sensors shelved, in favor of better resolution HD variants.
Hi Meshack, super post. Yes, it would be interesting to see if the community is still using legacy systems currently for specialised task or projects.