The following post was written by Nick Osgood, Head of Operations @ DroneBase.
At the core of our thesis: DroneBase is a large network of drone pilots, highly engaged by streams of commercial and creative activities, or "Missions".
To create this value, onboarding and “pilot success” are fundamental processes for our operations team to ensure that pilots meet our standards of professionalism and imagery quality.
The first step to our onboarding involves collecting new pilot information at signup including their location, drone “license” such as Part 107 information, and drone systems. Pilots can do this programmatically through their DroneBase profile and our team behind the scenes reviews the information. This is the most critical task for DroneBase to ensure that our network of pilots is compliant and equipped with the most recent drone technology.
Over tens of thousands of professional (pro) flights, we have been able to aggregate data and feedback to develop best in class flight plans across property and asset types. For example, we’ve standardized offerings that include a range of shots to review property damage from hail and wind storms to specific camera angles and image overlap requirements for creating 3D models of cell towers.
To ensure that our pilots can execute on these flight plans, our second step is to “pilot success” each individual before they fly for our clients. Each pilot becomes trained on our safety and professionalism requirements as well as the specific flight plans required. We have always done this with personal calls, operations manuals, examples, test flights and flight support 7 days a week.
As an interested pilot, we offer a variety of other activities to help sharpen your piloting skills through such as Getty Missions. For interested clients, rest assured that we track each pilot in our proprietary database to ensure that we dispatch qualified pilots that are trained and professional to your worksites, properties, and infrastructure.
Looking ahead to 2018, we plan on adding additional pilot certifications and training through a variety of innovative ways unique to DroneBase. This will include more semi-pro missions like additional categories for Getty, potential breaking news categories, as well as AR integrations using our newest product, AirCraft.
Nick Osgood is Head of Operations at DroneBase HQ. He oversees DroneBase’s national and international flight operations across real estate, construction, stockpile, insurance, telecom verticals.
