okay so this is kind of a weird one. found a listing on indeed for a drone pilot position with a media production company in my area. pay looked decent, said they wanted part 107 certified pilot with experience in cinematography. i applied kind of on a whim figuring id never hear back but they actually called me pretty fast which was surprising.

talked to the guy for maybe 20 minutes and he was nice enough but some things felt a little off. like he kept saying the pilot would also need to do a lot of "ground camera work" and social media stuff and it kind of sounded like the drone part was maybe 20% of the actual job. also he was vague about what kind of drone they use, said they have "a few" but couldnt name them. im going in for an in person interview next week but wondering if anyone else has run into these hybrid role situations and whether theyre worth it or if they just want a cheap videographer who happens to have a 107

thats pretty common unfortunately. a lot of small production companies list "drone pilot" because it sounds cool and they get more applicants but really they need a general video person and the drone stuff is like an afterthought. not necessarily a bad thing depending on what you want — if you like video production in general it could still be a good gig. but if you specifically want to grow as a pilot and build flight hours its probably not going to do much for that.

the fact that he couldnt name their drones is a little weird though, id ask about that directly at the interview. any legit operation knows exactly what gear they have.

ask them straight up in the interview what percentage of time is actually drone work vs other stuff. if they get weird about the question that tells you something. ive had two jobs like this and one was actually fine because the ground camera work was interesting and i still got decent flight time, the other one the drone literally sat in a case for two months while they had me doing instagram content. just depends on the company honestly