Progression Reports by Drone
13th of December, 2021
For the last year we've been working with Thomas Johnstone Limited on their renovation of the Dundonald Links Golf course near Irvine on the Ayrshire coast. This beautiful 110 year old course looks out over the Firth of Clyde to the Isle of Arran and now has the infrastructure to compliment the scenery. TJL have taken the existing pro shop and clubhouse, which was effectively a portacabin in the carpark, and created a new, multistorey building that looks amazing from all angles. The clubhouse now has a much bigger pro shop as well as a restaurant and spa facilites.
There's still a bit of landscaping to do, but the addition of the self-contained lodges for 2, 4 or 6 people is brilliant for golf tourism. The lodges themselves are great. Prefabricated and dropped into position by crane, they are state-of-the-art and very very comfortable.
This in the interior of the 6 bed lodge. And you can just see out the window a putting green for those who just can't get enough golf into their day.
We used a couple of drones on this job and utilised the Litchi app to preprogram flight paths. This allowed us to recreate our flights and capture the same footage almost exactly, just with a few months difference to show progression. We did some flights over the whole site to show the construction work, and we also did some smaller scale flights around the course itself, as the club was redesigning a number of holes. The Litchi app gave us great flexibilty to plan and map exactly what we wanted each time. Not only could I program each flight path on my desktop at home, but it allowed me to do on-the-fly adjustments in the field. Once the waypoints are programmed, they're saved to the magical cloud in your account, to be downloaded to your aircraft when it's needed.
I used the Mavic 2 and Phantom 4 Pro for Litchi flight paths, but there are newer models being added all the time. The Mini 2 was on hand, as always, to capture some close in stuff and some of the interiors.
If you're a keen golfer, or know someone who is, you couldn't find a better place to stay than here.
