Adam Luther

A Life of Curiosity and Problem Solving

I’ve spent most of my life accumulating esoteric skills.

Some have been useful. Some have simply been interesting. Most of them came from the same habit: I like learning how things work, and I like figuring out problems.

Aviation was part of my life from the beginning. My father was a flight instructor and owned aircraft, so I grew up around airplanes and spent more than a few family vacations flying to places like Florida and Iowa. I took a few lessons myself, but my career eventually went in a different direction.

I spent more than 30 years in information technology, including 10 years at SAP. Along the way I also got involved in photography and video, worked as a computer graphics artist for a weekly television show, produced a low-budget music video for a friend, experimented with 3D printing, and picked up a number of other interests that probably make more sense as a collection than they do individually.

Then I got laid off from SAP.

Around the same time, my wife, a real estate agent, wanted drone footage she could use to help market properties and Chester County. Given my background in aviation, photography, and technology, flying a drone seemed like a pretty natural next rabbit hole.

That led to my FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate.

It also led to Icarus Drones.

More Than Airspace

Studying for Part 107 made one thing very clear: figuring out whether you can legally and responsibly conduct a drone operation can get complicated quickly.

Most of the tools available to pilots do a good job with airspace. But airspace is only part of the question.

Where can you launch and land? Who owns or manages the property? Are there local ordinances or land-use restrictions? Does a park, municipality, school, or other authority have its own rules?

The more I learned, the more I wanted all of that information available in one place when I planned a flight.

At the same time, I wanted to learn Python and see what I could actually do with AI. Rather than working through exercises, I decided to build something I needed.

That became the Drone Map Project.

It is still an evolving project, but the idea is simple: bring together the information a pilot needs to make a better-informed decision about where and how to fly.

What’s the Story?

The same problem-solving approach carries over into my photography and video work.

My first question isn't necessarily, “What shots do you want?”

It's:

What’s the story, and how can we best tell it?

Sometimes that means getting high enough to show a property in the context of the landscape around it. Sometimes it means getting closer. Sometimes the better answer is a ground-based camera and a gimbal rather than a drone.

And sometimes the shot you originally imagined just isn't practical or permissible.

That doesn't mean the answer is simply no. It means figuring out what that shot was supposed to communicate and finding another way to tell that part of the story.

I'm process-oriented about flying for a reason. Drone operations can involve aviation regulations, property rights, local rules, and real liability. I would much rather understand those constraints before a flight and work within them than discover them afterward.