Flight Log
I took the drone out this morning at Horn Pond in Woburn, MA. This is another of the flights that show up on UAV Coach’s Best Place to Fly in Boston that I am slowly working through.
It was a good day for flying, though a bit overcast and the ground was wet from two days of rain. The wind was low (2-3mph, gusts of 7mph), however, and it was cool for the summer, in the high 60’s. I flew two batteries worth over the pond. Horn Pond is in uncontrolled airspace so I did not have to worry about LAANC.
Horn Pond Flight
Overall, Horn Pond was a really fun place to fly. I used the park near the boat launch as a landing and takeoff site, which I’d probably recommend to people trying to fly here. The main parking lot was crowded as usual with people walking around the Pond, and there’s minimal area to take off near the water. The boat launch, on the other hand, has it’s own little parking lot, but isn’t very close to the walking area. I was able to claim a little spot without any people around to safely land and takeoff.
I did take some photos, which I’ll share below, but my only real complaint about Horn Pond is there isn’t much in the way of interesting visuals from above for photography. That said, as a place to fly it was great. The pond is wide open and I was able to fly basically as far away as I had the courage to. At one point, I believe I was 350 feet in the air and 1000 feet away from the home point.
Generally speaking, if you want a place to practice flying that isn’t a field, and you are comfortable over water, Horn Pond is a great location.
Photos
As I said above, Horn Pond isn’t what I’d call great photography, but I did manage to get a few.
One of the more picturesque spots of Horn Pond is a little walking path over the water.
My one complaint with the boat launch area is I would have liked to have gotten a bit better photos of this area. However, I couldn’t maintain line of sight and since people walk across it, I couldn’t get much closer then the photo shows.
I managed to also get a number of pond photos, but there wasn’t much to make them interesting. The details cool, but I wouldn’t expect them to end up on the wall.
The one pretty cool part about photographing Horn Pond was actually the neighborhood around it. By taking the drone up to 200-350 feet, I was actually able to clear the tree line and take some residential neighborhood shots. More importantly, I was able to do so without actually flying over the neighborhood.
You can see all the photos from this flight in this gallery!
