Broadwing Drones at your Service

More on drones after a blog post back in February.  Met up with Koos Maring at the Future of Advertising conference, a half day briefing for the publishing and advertising branch in Amsterdam. At the drinks afterwards Koos introduced himself and explained his company Broadwing.eu designs and flies drones for a living. Having heard about drones and the military, mainly via the political satire show NoAgenda, I was intrigued to see what Koos was up to with his company's modified helicopters. They prefer to call them UAV, Unmanned Airborne Vehicles and the airframes are usually made of carbon fibre - strong yet light.

Koos Maring, CEO Broadwing

Koos is experimenting with his own designs of UAV's and different video cameras on board. Broadwing operates as a team of three people.


The most recent project was filming the Race of the Classics. It's the largest and most prestigious student sailing regatta in Europe. Various teams from Universities and High Schools in the Netherlands get the chance to sail around the country on classic sailing ships. The ships set off the Rotterdam Veerhaven harbour and head for another Dutch or Belgian port. Then they head off for the UK. The third and final leg of the race involves everyone heading for the Dutch port of Ijmuiden. 


Koos explains there has also been interest from other sporting events as well as from police and law enforcement agencies during special events. They feel that some of the tragedies at events like pop concerts last year could have been reduced if crowd monitoring was possible. They rarely use police helicopters because of the expense, the noise and length of the event (several days). The website explains that they have been experimenting with the new Sony mirror-less cameras. 

I see that the top video below may not play directly in some countries because of the music used (YouTube has intervened). But you can watch it on the YouTube site if you click through.