How it works
How We Work
What a project actually looks like from the first phone call to the files landing in your hands — including the part most aerial companies won’t put in writing, which is what drives the price.
The process
Five steps, no mystery
Scope
Send us the site boundary or corridor and tell us what decision the data has to support — pricing a clearing job, verifying cut/fill against a design surface, documenting storm damage. What you need out of it determines the sensor, the flight plan, and the ground control, so we'd rather start there than at acreage.
Plan
We check airspace, access, and terrain before anything leaves the ground. Sites near controlled airspace need FAA authorization, and wooded or steep ground changes both the flight plan and which sensor makes sense. This is also where we settle ground control — how the data gets tied to real-world coordinates.
Fly
The capture itself is usually the shortest part of the project. Flights are scheduled around weather and, for thermal work, around the time of day that produces a usable temperature differential. Most sites need no one from your team present.
Process
Raw capture becomes the thing you actually use: point clouds classified into ground, vegetation, and structure; terrain and surface models; orthomosaics; contours; volume and clearance reporting. Processing is where most of the project time goes, and it's what separates usable data from a folder of photographs.
Deliver
Data arrives in the formats your existing software already opens, with the coordinate system you work in. If something doesn't drop cleanly into your workflow, tell us — that's a delivery problem to fix, not something you should have to work around.
The deliverables
What the data looks like
Two of the outputs come up on nearly every job. If you have not worked from drone data before, this is roughly what lands in your inbox — and more usefully, what each one is actually good for.
Point cloud, coloured by elevation
The point cloud
Millions of individual elevation readings, each one a place the laser actually touched the ground. It is the raw measurement everything else is derived from, and because LiDAR reads between vegetation, it keeps working on ground your GPS rover would need a machete to reach. Delivered in LAS or LAZ for your engineer to work from directly.
Cut / fill map
The cut / fill map
The same surface compared against your design grade, then coloured by how far off it is — warm where material has to come out, cool where it has to go in. This is the one that settles arguments about quantities, because it turns a dispute about dirt into a number both sides can look at.
What it costs
What actually drives the price
We scope every project against the real site rather than a rate card, because two jobs with identical acreage can be very different amounts of work. These are the variables that move the number.
Size and shape of the site
A compact tract and a long, narrow corridor of the same acreage are not the same job. Corridors take more flight lines, more battery swaps, and more ground control per acre covered.
Which sensor the job needs
Photogrammetry over open dirt is the most economical capture. LiDAR costs more to fly and process, and earns it anywhere vegetation hides the ground. Thermal is its own capture with its own timing constraints.
How accurate it has to be
Accuracy is bought with ground control. A planning-grade map and a dataset tight enough to settle a pay dispute require different amounts of survey work on the ground before the drone ever launches.
What you need out the other end
A single orthomosaic is one thing. A classified point cloud with bare-earth terrain, contours, and a volume report referenced to your design surface is considerably more processing.
Access, airspace, and travel
Controlled airspace, restricted site access, or distance from our yard all affect scheduling and mobilization.
How often it gets flown
Recurring capture on an active site is cheaper per flight than one-off mobilizations, because the flight plan and ground control are already established.
Versus a ground crew
Where aerial wins, and where it doesn’t
Aerial capture is not the answer to every question about a piece of ground. Here’s an honest read on where it beats putting people on the site, and the one place it plainly doesn’t.
| Aerial capture | Crew on the ground | |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Whole site, uniformly — every square foot is captured at the same resolution | Points a person walked to; detail between them is interpolated |
| Time on site | Hours for most sites, including long corridors | Days to weeks as acreage and terrain increase |
| Safety exposure | Nobody walking energized corridors, steep slopes, or active equipment | Personnel on the ground in whatever conditions the site presents |
| Repeatability | Re-fly the same plan monthly and every capture is directly comparable | Repeat mobilization cost each time |
| Record produced | A dated, visual 3D record you can re-measure later for questions you haven't thought of yet | The measurements that were requested at the time |
| Legal boundary work | Not a substitute — aerial data does not replace a sealed survey | Required; this is what a licensed surveyor is for |
Worth being clear about
Aerial mapping does not replace a licensed land survey. Legal boundary determination and sealed survey documents are the work of a licensed professional surveyor. What good aerial data does is let you bid, plan, and track work with confidence — and make any survey engagement you do need a shorter one.