u/xrs9956

I’m curious how people handling larger or more demanding commercial jobs approach this.

If you have a mission scheduled and the weather looks questionable, how do you decide whether to fly as planned, change the timing or mission plan, or postpone it?

Do you mostly check the forecast against the aircraft’s published limits, or do you have some way of estimating how the expected conditions will affect the specific mission you’re planning?

And have you ever arrived on site and found that a mission that looked workable beforehand wasn’t really practical once you started flying?

Interested in how people actually handle this in the field.

I’m a drone pilot and software developer and I’ve been working on an app called RangeSight.

One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how people doing larger mapping jobs deal with wind and battery reserve when planning a mission.

Basically, how confident are you that the drone is actually going to finish the planned route with the reserve you want, especially when the wind picks up?

That’s one of the reasons I built RangeSight. It looks at the aircraft, battery, wind/weather and reserve and estimates battery use across a planned mission. It can also flag parts of the route where things start getting marginal.

The app is working now, but at this point I’d rather get it into the hands of people doing real mapping work than keep building features based on my own assumptions.

For those of you doing larger surveys, corridor mapping, etc., how do you handle this now? Do you mostly trust the flight time estimate from your mission planner, add your own safety margin, or just go by experience?

I’d also be interested in finding a few people willing to try RangeSight against missions they’ve already flown. I’m especially interested in hearing where it gets things wrong or where the workflow doesn’t make sense.