I'm not sure it'd be a great business, but a fun site that would get dugg for sure. I tend to doubt there's much staying power in audiences viewing great fliers. The big draw would be actually controlling the plane (hard to scale) and viewing pilot POV to a lesser extent.
The live stream is mostly easy since you can just use wireless cameras and relay the stream from a computer on the ground. Do you know anything about making the remote computer-based control actually work and also not crash? I haven't flown RC airplanes in some years, have things advanced this far? The military remote computer controlled stuff required some pretty fancy engineering.
that's a really interesting idea. the biggest questions i have are....
1. how much will it cost? for equipment, sensors, etc?
2. is anyone willing to pay for it?
If you don't want to ask anyone in particular, you can ask yourself other feasibility questions like:
-how heavy will it be? will it affect the flight of the plane?
-how much do current planes cost? how does that compare to the cost of adding a camera device?
-how many people fly planes? how many planes do they have?
-how often do people crash planes, and why do they crash? how expensive is it to fix? how does this cost compare to a camera that could prevent a crash?
my initial guess is that there is no feasible business model there, but what if you twist your idea around a bit? such as sharing videos of airplane flights? and modifying video equipment so that it could be installed on model airplanes? that could potentially be useful.
If the onboard camera is a problem, then I could just have a camera on the ground.
The idea here is to allow people to profit from their hobby by letting thousands of people fly their planes.
And those people can do so from the comfort of their homes at their computers.
You might have a free service where people fly a plane together in a collaborative way. If you want more control over the plane, then you will need to pay. You might be able to fly for free if you can demonstrate that your flying skills will draw a large audience.
Thinking about it some more, you could have a revenue sharing system where people who build model planes can let others fly them (perhaps collaboratively) through this service. They would get a share of the profits.
Moreover, the owners of such planes can take over flight inputs whenever they are not safe. It's their planes after all.
The live stream is mostly easy since you can just use wireless cameras and relay the stream from a computer on the ground. Do you know anything about making the remote computer-based control actually work and also not crash? I haven't flown RC airplanes in some years, have things advanced this far? The military remote computer controlled stuff required some pretty fancy engineering.