A local online retailer helps drone owners keep their aircraft in shape.
Online retailer offers planes and parts, plus instruction
As a high school pole vaulter, Robert Quarantello of Houston spent hours practicing how to fly through the air.
Then a different kind of flying sparked his interest. Hobbyists began flying remote-controlled airplanes in a park by his track field.
Quarantello bought one for $800, though his friends discouraged him. It started a fascination with remote-controlled aircraft that grew into Space City Drones 10 years later. The online retailer of amateur drones and drone parts opened in November.
“I started my company for one reason,” Quarantello, 28, said. “I kept crashing my own drone, and it was getting harder and harder to find parts. I’d have to buy from China and then wait three or four weeks for them. I knew if I was frustrated, other people were, too.”
Quarantello launched Space City Drones with eight different models and $8,000 in inventory. He said he expected to sell $500 worth of product a day on a website he built. He ended up selling a tenth of that, but traffic steadily grew.
He estimates the website’s first-year gross revenue at $100,000, and said he hopes to double that in its second year.
Flying drones for fun has become increasingly popular. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, consumers will spend close to $130 million worldwide on drones in 2015. That’s a 55 percent increase over 2014. FAA rules
The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates the industry, has imposed six rules on users of what they call Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
Rules state that users shouldn’t fly above 400 feet in the air, lose sight of their drones or fly within 5 miles of an airport, among other regulations. Penalties include fines or jail time.
If someone purchases a drone for business, the FAA requires them to apply for a Section 333 permit. To date it’s granted about 1,000 of them.
“A lot of people start as a hobbyist in this, and then they see how advanced the technology is becoming, so they decide to go into it professionally,” said Bryan Archer, president of the North Texas Drone Users Group, one of the largest in the state. “The commercial drone industry is supposed to generate over $80 billion in the next five to 10 years, so everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.”
Space City Drones offers 41 models on the website. About 40 percent of them are stocked in a local warehouse. The remaining orders are filled by the manufacturer. How to fly them
Quarantello said a key to his website’s success has been 30 YouTube videos he created that illustrate how to fly drones. The videos explain everything from how to rotate a miniature drone to how to take better pictures with a more advanced model.
Drones on Quarantello’s website begin at $23 for a miniature version, called a nano drone. For $40, a customer can purchase a unit with a camera that takes up to 100 pictures at a time. For $80, a customer can simultaneously see what the drone sees on a WiFi camera.
Quarantello’s customers range from hobbyists to professional photographers and real estate agents. If an agent “has a property in a place like Lake Conroe,” he said, “what better way to show off the lake in the background than to take an aerial picture?”