Why don't you just invite the vendors to come to your company, show them exactly what you are up to and let them SHOW you in real life if their products are up to the specs. If you are a reasonable sized company than you should be able to afford a flight ticket and maybe 2 days of accomodation. Might cost you a few 100 €, but that's nothing compared to what you are about to risk. That way you will already see who of the vendors is serious about business and who is not. That can be done even in a tight time frame. Then make damn sure to have a waterproof contract with the vendor about all the specs and abilities you are promised...but I doubt you will get one. Also think about what will happen IF that thing crashes and the person responsibel for the desaster has to be found.Chris
First of all i see the point, but a lot off vendors would loose minimum 2,3 days total in travel just to show off the product to the client. Multiply that with 50 enqueris and u get 150 days in travel. I doubght vendors can afford this.
Second of all if the client comes to us, we can improvise on spot if he has his camera with him we can put in on the kopter and do a demo shoot and flight. If we go to client we dont have that option.
Second the transport of the copter to location is from 500 to 100o eur and takes up to 3 days to deliver.
ABOUT waterproof contract. Well since this is a hobby line production and you do not get any waranty from manufacturers, you cant expect that the company that makes the kopter will give u waranty. Even in Mikrokopter electronics where u have a blackbox, it is hard to say what has gone wrong in 80% of cases when something hapenes. So there is no way to know what realy happened.
But i must say that if you fully understand the how does it work and if you go threw basic flight school a lot of things can be prevented. Like using altitude mode, gps mode, carefree, poi .... at the end are not recomended since they are number 1 on who to blame crash list. Second preflight check on componets, taking care of bateries, checking temperatures off motors and controlers, checking the solar activity ...
If you know all this then u are 99% positive that nothing will happen. We have 30 clients that report back to us for over 1.5 year with good results and no crashes. Satisfied customer is always the best one.
Offcourse is the vendor sais that his kopter will be ready to lift 5kg in normal conditions then he has to keep his word. But then what is normal condition. (for example about 0 to 1500m elevation, temperature around 20 to 25 degress, normal to low wind, no rain, no snow ...) Cause everithing changes if you need a copter in Jakarta or Canada or Mexico. 3 diferent setups are required.