Celebrating Our 5th Anniversary With 5 Lessons We've Learned

By Bill Rogers, Co-Founder and CEO, and Andy Carroll, Co-Founder and CTO

When we started Skytec over 5 years ago, we were confident that Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) would take the commercial world by storm and bring rapid changes to an array of industries. That occurred to some degree and adoption is still slowly evolving, but it is nowhere near the predicted levels that so many hyped investors desired. In the past two years alone, several multi-million-dollar capitalized drone-as-a-service (DaaS) and software ventures have come and gone. When we first received our FAA 333 Exemption for commercial UAS operations, we did not and could not foresee the challenges and steep learning curves ahead.

Our eyes are now wide open to the complexities and challenges to safely operating, collecting data, and delivering accurate information efficiently. We can confidently say we are now experts in unmanned systems and remote sensing. At the same time, we are in the field today collecting data and learning new lessons, even after thousands of flight hours completed and terabytes of data processed and delivered. The unmanned systems space requires constant learning and adaptation. In celebration of our 5th year of operation, we would like to share 5 lessons learned, along with our thoughts on current challenges and exciting future developments.

Safety should be priority number one. Safety and risk management is a top discriminator between “fly-by-night” operations and true aviation programs. We take safety very seriously at Skytec, and it is paramount for all clients. We actively promote an aviation culture through tools such as a safety management system. This includes standard operating procedures and project risk mitigation protocols. We invested in a detailed audit of our flight operations by a third party, resulting in our award of the first ARGUS Platinum safety rating. Armed with these safety resources, we have successfully operated in challenging industrial and environmental sites. Our clients know they can focus on their data needs and our solutions without concern for dangerous or risky operations on their sites.

Data is everything – if your data product is not timely and accurate, then it’s worthless. Five years ago, there was a drone operator boom. New DaaS operations were popping up on a weekly basis in these early days of legal commercial operation. Many of these new businesses quickly learned of the large knowledge and skills gap between drone operation and aerial mapping/remote sensing. If you have been around the mapping, GIS, and remote sensing professions long enough, you have likely encountered stories about bad drone mapping experiences. Products were advertised and delivered as “design-grade” without any understanding of geomatics, photogrammetry, or LiDAR processing. The resulting product, while sometimes visually stunning, is so full of error and inaccuracy that it is unusable.

A thorough understanding and broad amount of experience with geospatial technologies is required to generate good results from drone mapping. At Skytec, we maintain a very high level of that expertise, along with business partnerships with the leading software technology companies in the space, such as ESRI and Autodesk. We have met many clients that were hesitant to try drone mapping services again due to bad past experiences. Fortunately, we were able to convince them to try our services and products and they quickly became repeat customers

If you are going to operate UAS’s, you better have lots of grit. If you are thinking about starting a UAS business, then be prepared to operate in every imaginable climate of lands near and far. You can expect to manage challenging site conditions with dangerous wildlife and people with guns that don’t like unidentified flying objects. We have encountered all of these, and such scenarios add even more stress to an already stressful operation. In addition to challenging environments, there is the real potential for equipment failure. While a handful of reliable systems exist, even these systems are prone to firmware updates, poor battery life, and interference issues, which means you need to be prepared for troubleshooting and repair in the field. Organizations need to do as much preparation and training as possible to best manage these issues as they occur.

At Skytec, we have developed close working relationships with our distributors and manufacturers. We have developed custom maintenance and training programs for each system and type of UAS operation we provide. With these resources and a lot of hard work by our team, we have turned challenging situations into opportunities to highlight expertise and commitment to our clients.

Remote sensing requires time and capital investment. If your clients require a steady stream of high-end data, then you will need capable sensors and aircraft to carry them. This isn’t exactly a cheap proposition. The costs of aircraft, sensors, equipment, and insurance quickly add up. At minimum, you need to cover the expense of high-dollar equipment flying away from you and the insurance cost to ensure its safe return. On top of those capital expenses, there are the training, salary, and travel expenses required to get to a job site and safely collect data. This is a high barrier of entry, and again, a discriminator between companies dabbling with UAS technology and those building enterprise programs around it. To truly leverage the capabilities of these systems, organizations must be prepared to invest the time and energy to do it right.

Focus on a specialty and excel at it. Going into year two of our operations, the Skytec team managed to arrange a potential teaming opportunity meeting with a very large international AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) firm. During this meeting, the global UAS lead for this organization asked us, “What is your specialty?” We, being a company with a broad array of systems, sensors, and GIS/remote sensing experiences, had a difficult time answering that question. It was a couple of months after that meeting that we identified our specialty and a real discriminator for the organization: It would be UAS LiDAR for Skytec. We focused on providing our clients with access to a premium LiDAR product and integration into GIS and CAD software platforms. This specialty opened into many new opportunities and client sectors that we had not originally imagined or targeted. Defining a specialty and maintaining a “laser” focus on it certainly paid off for Skytec.

As we sit back and reflect on the past 5 years, it is hard not to feel a great sense of accomplishment. We have achieved so much and served many amazing clients along the way. There are many who helped us to reach goals and objectives along the way; for that, we are greatly appreciative.

Looking to the future during this challenging time for our communities and organizations, the need for location-based information for monitoring and measuring assets, infrastructure, and resources has never been greater. Skytec is uniquely positioned to deliver these solutions through powerful GIS tools, expertise, and networks of spatial data providers. These services are allowing customers to continue business and operations while maintaining safety and increasing efficiency and cost savings. We have several exciting announcements surrounding satellite imagery offerings and custom software solutions coming in the days and weeks ahead. We eagerly look forward to the next 5 years and thank you for your part in our journey.