AERIAL MAPPING
Highways often get start with a view from
the air
By KATHERINE WINDER Special to The Frederick
News-Post
FREDERICK — Next time you drive your car
remember this: That road was probably built long
after an aerial photograph was taken on nine-inch-by-nine-inch
film with a $450,000 camera, weighing 350 pounds,
mounted in a hole in the bottom of a small plane.
That film was digitized and made into a highly
detailed map that could determine down to the inch
just how much dirt would need to be moved to build
that road, the best alignment of the road for drainage
purposes, and many more intricate details.
"If you engineer something like building
a building or a road, it has to start with a highly
detailed map," said Richard Crouse, owner
of Richard Crouse and Associates (RC&A). "Those
maps are designed using aerial photographs."
RC&A, based at the Frederick Municipal Airport,
takes aerial photographs for the purpose of
surveying land and mapping. Most of the pictures
they take are a far cry from decorative photographs
of, for example, a stadium from above, although
they occasionally develop those kinds of photographs.
More likely, an engineering company will hire
RC&A to do an aerial survey. That engineering
company may have been hired by a government agency
to create maps for planning purposes. The planning
process begins with RC&A taking aerial photographs
anywhere from 300 feet above ground level to 24,000
feet. The photographs are delivered to the engineering
company, which develops them into three-dimensional
images, and eventually, highly-detailed maps. The
maps can be used for a wide variety of projects
ranging from the construction of a new road to
the installation of a new sewage system to determining
the health of the Chesapeake Bay.
“Technology, computers and GPS (geographic
information systems) have increased the value of
geospatial information more and more every year," Mr.
Crouse said. The maps "solve all kinds of
geospatial problems."
One of RC&A's projects was to photograph the
Dulles Toll Road in northern Virginia prior to
construction to add lanes. Most of the surveying
was done in the l Jet Ranger at around 300 to 500
feet above the ground. Surveying the land from
the air as opposed to from the ground spared commuters
traffic congestion, decreased the potential for
accidents, and increases the level of accuracy.
Accuracy is also assured by flying in perfect
weather conditions, which, for aerial surveying,
are on sunny days when the sun angle is good and
there is little vegetation. That means a pilot
and photographer may spend a lot of time waiting
around for the perfect conditions.
Tommy Toftestuen flies the Bell Jet Ranger 206B
helicopter for RC&A and says he enjoys his
job. "I get to travel to so many different
places," Mr. Toftestuen said. "It's never
the same."
And the flying is never dull. One job required
him to fly the length of the runways at BWI at
a very low altitude while big commercial jets were
taking off and landing just above the helicopter.
One of the biggest challenges, Mr. Toftestuen
said, is negotiating with air traffic controllers.
The sites that need to be photographed can be in
the way of arriving and departing aircraft at busy
airports.
"It can get hectic with the controllers,
but when we get something done, it feels rewarding," he
said. Scott Crutchley, a photographer for RC&A
who often flies with Mr. Toftestuen, agrees.
"I have a mobile office," Mr.
Crutchley said. "I get to spend the day in
a [helicopter] and go all over the place."
RC&A has been hired to photograph projects
all over the country because the Jet Ranger is
one-of-akind. It is the only one in the United
States that has a camera mounted in a hole in the
belly of the aircraft. There are only a handful
of other helicopters in the country used to take
aerial photography, but in those aircraft,
the camera is mounted in a basket outside of the
helicopter.
"It was an opportunity we saw," Mr.
Crouse said, and it is one of many that have paid
off.
RC&A has grown steadily at roughly 15 percent
almost every year since its inception. When Mr.
Crouse founded the company in 1990, he was the
sole photographer and had one employee, one plane
and one camera. Today, the company has grown to
include six airplanes, one helicopter, seven cameras,
20 employees in Frederick and an office in Spartanburg,
S.C. It seems as though the business will continue
to do well because the need for aerial surveying
continues to increase.
"The Earth isn't growing," Mr. Crouse
said. "They aren't making more land. So the
relative value of land increases every year."
Mr. Crouse's expertise in the industry began to
develop before he was a teenager. His father, Richard
Crouse Sr., founded PhotoScience, Inc., an aerial photography
and photogrammetric mapping company, in 1955, where
Mr. Crouse worked for several years before founding
RC&A. PhotoScience still exists today under
new ownership and is now called EarthData. The
two companies know each other well and work together
on large projects.
"We use subcontractors who can give us high
quality work quickly and efficiently," said
Mary Hiatt, senior vice president for EarthData. "Because
of their dependability and experience, they are
very valuable to us."
Frederick County has utilized RC&A's services
for developing its GIS (Geographic Information
Systems) program. The GIS has many purposes including
mapping roads, schools, land elevation, watershed
areas and agricultural preservation. The county
hired mapping company, Vargis LLC in Virginia,
which subcontracted RC&A to do the aerial photography
in 2005, according to Marshal Stevenson III, Frederick
County GIS Manager.
Spring is the busiest season for RC&A because
the leaves are off the trees, there is usually
no snow on the ground and the sun angle is high.
Wherever you are reading this, remember this:
an aerial survey of that land may have been
produced to determine where every cubic yard of
dirt was to be put, if it is near a wetland, or,
maybe even, how many acres had been defoliated
by gypsy moths.
The Frederick News Post – Frederick,
MD
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