Flying high

Four metres wide with a weight of five kilograms – the brown-pink aircraft glides gracefully over the field. It has two special cameras aboard: “They provide us with multispectral and thermal images that tell us something about the condition of plants, for example about growth, biomass or drought stress,” says Dr. Bastian Siegmann from the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences (IBG-2). The special production of the Bremen company Aeromedes can do 7 meters per second. “It is half as fast as commercially available fixed-wing aircraft,” says Bastian Siegmann, “but flying slowly improves image quality.” In the future, the images will help to estimate crop yields.