DroneBase Client Mission Frustrations

[Zhelfer0306]

Ive been waiting for probably a half a year to see a client mission pop up on DroneBase, and I was finally notified about one yesterday and another today. By the time I clicked into them, someone else had already taken it. Mind you, the one today had only been up for 20 minutes and the one yesterday was only up for THREE minutes. Three.

The first come first serve setup is such a feel-bad system. You’re happy to see a good job roll through at the right place and time, but it just ends up being a teaser. Anybody else run into this?

 

[BigAl07]

I've landed several DB jobs simply because I replied first. I don't see any other way it could (or should) be done.

How would you propose it be done without giving preferential treatment to certain applicants?

 

[Zhelfer0306]

I’d have to really simmer on that one for a while to give you an intelligent answer.
I guess I was just surprised at how fast people can send/receive email, read through it, and make a commitment. The system doesn’t reward good work, loyalty to program, etc. Instead, it encourages pilots to hover over their email constantly and haphazardly accept anything that comes their way.
Once again, I don’t have a better solution as of right now, but I still feel there is a better system than a race to push a button.

 

[BigAl07]

I’d have to really simmer on that one for a while to give you an intelligent answer.
I guess I was just surprised at how fast people can send/receive email, read through it, and make a commitment. The system doesn’t reward good work, loyalty to program, etc. Instead, it encourages pilots to hover over their email constantly and haphazardly accept anything that comes their way.
Once again, I don’t have a better solution as of right now, but I still feel there is a better system than a race to push a button.

With today's technology everything is the speed of light. When I get an email I immediately review it and decide if it's something I want to do. More often than NOT I simply delete the email (not enough $$, too far away, silly project etc) but once in a while I accept it.

A few months ago I got one and accepted it. I went to the site, flew the job, came home and uploaded the images all in less than 45 minutes. Easy as pie and I had fun doing it. The job site (rec park) just happened to be about 2 miles from my house. Most of them are NOT that easy LOL.

 

[Nick DroneBase]

Hey guys -

Good feedback. We know this is an issue and its very annoying from a pilot standpoint. I've voiced this to our team and we are going to work on a better way of dispatching.

 

[Zhelfer0306]

Hey guys -

Good feedback. We know this is an issue and its very annoying from a pilot standpoint. I've voiced this to our team and we are going to work on a better way of dispatching.

Glad to know someone is listening!

On your end, the available pilot demand greatly outnumbers the mission supply. I can understand why it’s not necessarily in your business interests to work on something like this if it doesn’t affect you bottom line.

My advice to you is to first find your business needs (what traits do you want to select for in the pilots who fly your missions and represent Drone Base). Then, you have something to work off of when you engineer that selection algorithm.

For instance, in order to create a more randomized distribution of pilots who accept your missions, you could curb the selection bias for “people who check their email often”. While the mission does need accepted quickly, you can offer the mission in priority tiers. First, take the pilot pool and randomly assign each pilot a priority tier. Then, let the mission become available to each tier in certain time intervals. i.e. 10am - mission opens to tier 1, 1 pm - mission opens to tier 2 and 4pm - mission opens to tier 3. This still leaves the door open for other selection factors if you don’t want a truly random distribution because you can weight the random number generator to make certain pilots more likely to land in a higher tier at your discretion. Now everyone has a better chance to get some amount of missions and you have better control over who is more likely to fly them. In the end, your missions will still be accepted in a reasonable time frame.

Anyway, I appreciate you looking into it and look forward to flying for Drone Base in the future.

 

[Kentrol72]

Due to the bad weather here in northern Alabama, I've been getting a ton of mission offers the last 2 days. There must be a good pool of pilots in the area because the missions get accepted pretty quickly. As soon as I hear my email notification sound off, I open DroneBase and see one or more offers, and I have just enough time to look and see if the date or time conflicts with another mission I've accepted before I get a chance to respond or it gets taken by another pilot. That being said, I've booked quite a few throughout this coming week but had to decline a few due to scheduling conflicts. I am happy to get the work and the experience.

To brainstorm on Zhelfer's comments, maybe something that separates pilots' availability during a day. Those that can take morning missions/ afternoon missions/ evening missions or combination of. Maybe like a calendar on the pilots dashboard that we can highlight days and "time zones" we are available and DB can see to distribute the jobs to.

 

[MTO]

I was on my emails a few days ago when a client mission came in, I immediately punched in the date and confirmed but the job was already taken. It was literally less then 6 seconds! But that’s how it goes, you have to be quick. Most of the jobs I’ve gotten from them were in remote locations, people don’t respond so fast to those.

 

[BigAl07]

Glad to know someone is listening!

On your end, the available pilot demand greatly outnumbers the mission supply. I can understand why it’s not necessarily in your business interests to work on something like this if it doesn’t affect you bottom line.

My advice to you is to first find your business needs (what traits do you want to select for in the pilots who fly your missions and represent Drone Base). Then, you have something to work off of when you engineer that selection algorithm.

For instance, in order to create a more randomized distribution of pilots who accept your missions, you could curb the selection bias for “people who check their email often”. While the mission does need accepted quickly, you can offer the mission in priority tiers. First, take the pilot pool and randomly assign each pilot a priority tier. Then, let the mission become available to each tier in certain time intervals. i.e. 10am - mission opens to tier 1, 1 pm - mission opens to tier 2 and 4pm - mission opens to tier 3. This still leaves the door open for other selection factors if you don’t want a truly random distribution because you can weight the random number generator to make certain pilots more likely to land in a higher tier at your discretion. Now everyone has a better chance to get some amount of missions and you have better control over who is more likely to fly them. In the end, your missions will still be accepted in a reasonable time frame.

Anyway, I appreciate you looking into it and look forward to flying for Drone Base in the future.

I don't see why DroneBase should intentionally "delay" their process just to try and make it more "Fair" for you, Their customer is the one who is paying and the one who doesn't want/need any "engineered delay" in the process. It's business and the early bird still gets the worm.

In this day and age of mobile technology you should be able to check your email fairly quickly. If you're busy or not "Eager enough" then you miss the opportunity. With the sheer # of Part 107 operators in the nation it's only going to get harder and harder and you've got to pound the pavement to find the work to pay the bills.

 

[Lorne_K2]

Yes, it does appear there are a lot more folks out there looking for missions - even more than a few months ago. Missions would go unclaimed for an hour or two in my area, but now they don't last more than a few seconds. Literally - had missions in my area in the last few hours show up on my dashboard, and they were taken by the time I clicked on the notification in the dashboard to see what the mission was!

But I did have something happen today that had never happened before. I was in the DroneBase Dashboard, and I clicked on the "notifications" button. A mission popped-up in my area, but rather than giving me the option to Accept/Decline, it automatically assigned me the mission (not that I'm complaining...!). There were also a couple other "glitches" in the mission information. Maybe there's an issue with the new Dashboard UI that was rolled out recently?

 

[Zhelfer0306]

Yes, it does appear there are a lot more folks out there looking for missions - even more than a few months ago. Missions would go unclaimed for an hour or two in my area, but now they don't last more than a few seconds. Literally - had missions in my area in the last few hours show up on my dashboard, and they were taken by the time I clicked on the notification in the dashboard to see what the mission was!

But I did have something happen today that had never happened before. I was in the DroneBase Dashboard, and I clicked on the "notifications" button. A mission popped-up in my area, but rather than giving me the option to Accept/Decline, it automatically assigned me the mission (not that I'm complaining...!). There were also a couple other "glitches" in the mission information. Maybe there's an issue with the new Dashboard UI that was rolled out recently?

If the system is auto-assigning missions, that could explain how they're disappearing so fast.

By the way, the amount of missions is really picking up in my area - I'm actually flying one tomorrow. Ya, some are still getting snatched up in the first 30 seconds, but at least there's enough of them that the not-so-early bird still gets a worm or two.

 

[O6-Hammerhead]

DB works great for me. Love it.

 

[Yooper]

You have to be fast. I do enjoy the opportunities I get

 

[Kentrol72]

Yes it's like tapping that buzzer on family feud lol but I've gotten to do quite a few missions so I'm extremely thankful. I did one covering a bank's property..11 stories up winds aloft were crazy but I'm proud of how my phantom performed.

 

[Matty1551]

IMO it should be a tiered system based on factors like experience, quality of past work, quality of drone, etc. This would increase the quality dronebase can offer to their clients because they are using their best pilots more often instead of offering that same job to every pilot in their database at once.

Today I've seen the same job be re-offered multiple times and the payment amount continued to increase each time. The only stipulation with this job is that it had to be flown today. In this instance, it appears DB are shooting themselves in the foot because pilots are rushing to accept the mission before reading the mission details because of their fear of someone else beating them to it.

Ultimately, the pilot is responsible for reading the mission details before accepting. However, DB's current system for offering client missions is not going to encourage that behavior.

 

[Kenneth-UAV]

DRONEBASE /Eagleview is a scam. They promise you will 'start accepting client missions" after first completing hours of online training, field test missions and your Part 107 license number. When complete and "quality check passed", I discovered zero client missions for the entire state of Florida. Answers from "support" were consistently irrelevant, false or evasive.

 

[Kentrol72]

It's definitely NOT a scam, I've flown 30+ missions in 2 1/2 weeks...
Kenneth-UAV it wasn't until we had some severe weather here in northern Alabama before we got tons of missions. It will come.

 

[MTO]

NOT a scam! They seem to come in waves though. You have to be patient.

 

[Matty1551]

DRONEBASE /Eagleview is a scam. They promise you will 'start accepting client missions" after first completing hours of online training, field test missions and your Part 107 license number. When complete and "quality check passed", I discovered zero client missions for the entire state of Florida. Answers from "support" were consistently irrelevant, false or evasive.

It sounds like maybe you don't live in an area where there is a large market for these types of services. Best of luck.

 

[BigAl07]

DRONEBASE /Eagleview is a scam. They promise you will 'start accepting client missions" after first completing hours of online training, field test missions and your Part 107 license number.

Scam? Hardly... I get "Mission Requests almost daily in my area and have done several of them over the last couple of years. The bigger problem is the Job to Pilot ratio being horribly upside down because anyone with a credit card can now be a "Commercial UAS Operator".

I discovered zero client missions for the entire state of Florida. Answers from "support" were consistently irrelevant, false or evasive.

The whole state? Hardly.. keep in mind Client Missions are offered and accepted within minutes rather than missions hanging out there online just waiting for you to happen to check. It's a VERY quick process to say the least.