Drone Services
Canadian Drone Services: Options, Pros and Cons
As drone services become more prevalent, how do you plan on leveraging this technology for your business?
Are you looking to add drone services to your offerings, or to include aerial data in your products? There are three realistic routes, and each carries a different mix of cost, control and consistency. Below we walk through all three so you can judge which suits your organisation.
In-House Drone Pilots
Piloting your company’s own drones sounds like a great, and genuinely fun, opportunity at first blush. However, like many new technology adoptions, there is rather more to it than acquiring the hardware.
In Canada, your pilots will need certification in most cases, which may itself be a benefit you can offer employees. Beyond the time and effort of getting certified, expect to spend on related gear as well: vests, cones and emergency equipment, on top of the aircraft. Remember too that knowing how to fly a drone and knowing how to collect reliable, quality data are two different skills. You will likely want training beyond the basics to scale the service.
In favour: pilot certification doubles as a continued learning opportunity for staff, and you keep full scheduling flexibility. Against: you carry the investment in aircraft and gear, the time and resource cost of training, and the simple fact that a worker who is flying a drone is not doing their other work.
Contracted Drone Pilots
Hiring certified drone pilots is another way to add aerial services to your portfolio. The benefit is that you avoid investing time, effort or money in sourcing an aircraft, arranging training, or buying the related gear, and you do not need to get employees certified.
Challenges arise in finding qualified pilots and then assuring they meet your standards. Will the same pilot be available for your jobs regularly? Will they deliver repeatable results? Can they prioritise your work when you need it? And what will you pay to get the answers you want?
In favour: no hardware purchases and no pilot certifications required on your side. Against: it is expensive, quality assurance sits with you, and consistency between jobs can suffer.
Remote Pilot Network Pilots
RPN pilots come vetted by industry experts to confirm their capabilities. Not only are they certified, they are supported by end-to-end software that makes scalable, repeatable, quality data capture possible as often as you need it. There is no need to purchase drones, training or other equipment to stand up a drone services programme inside your organisation.
Your employees might have enjoyed company-sponsored training, but they will certainly appreciate being able to focus on their actual role while still having the aerial data they need.
In favour: no hardware purchases, no pilot certifications required, vetted pilots, and results that are repeatable and scalable. Against: your own employees do not end up certified.
Worth deciding early: whether certified pilots on staff is a goal in itself, or whether you simply need the data. That single question usually settles which of the three routes fits, and it is much cheaper to answer before you buy aircraft than after.
Where to Go From Here
If you are leaning towards building the capability in-house, our drone program start-up package covers the aviation side, and our enterprise services handle training and compliance at scale. If you would rather buy the data, the Remote Pilot Network is a collaboration between Coastal Drone Co and Spexi Geospatial. Read more about the Remote Pilot Network and how to start using it.
Not sure which route fits your organisation?
Talk it through with our consulting team before you commit to hardware or headcount.