“Why in the heck are we buying Chinese drones?”
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Simple.
Low cost. Reliability. Performance. So simple to use a cave man can do it. Results.
My company uses nothing but DJI drones for our photogrammetric products. There are other companies, but there is nothing that can compete in terms of the 5 main categories listed above.
However, we do not take them onto military properties. A couple years ago it was discovered that DJI has a rather nasty way of hijacking imagery (in real time) to the motherland. This is due to the fact that in the normal manner DJI products are used a live internet connection is maintained that — unknowing to the user — can download data direct to the Chinese.
Even a cave man would have figured out that they would include that capability.