Drone or UAV’s are quickly establishing themselves as the inspection equipment of choice for transmission assets across forward thinking utilities in the US and globally.

A quality commercial grade drone under the control of an experienced RPIC, with a high resolution camera can capture high quality images with minimal risk compared to the current method of climbing the steel and or using a helicopter. The process takes anywhere from 20-45 mins, it is considerably quieter and no humans have to leave the ground. The captured images are then packaged and electronically delivered to the Utility for quality control, review and further action if needed.

Specialized drone teams undertake the image capture, the images are reviewed by trained electrical workers and scare lineman are used far more efficiently as they are dispatched to repair problems which have been identified from the images rather than inspect perfectly good towers.

Each shoot list will be custom depending on particular customer requirements, Laguna Drones will review images internally to make sure they meet customer requirements and then they are uploaded for customer review.

This page contains images and video designed to showcase the image detail available in both still and video. These images have been taken with our range of drone mounted cameras and drone platforms. The choice of drone/camera for your particular project will depend on several factors and in particular on the image detail that you require from the finished project.

Our standard operating procedures call for a Minimum approach distance (MAD) which varies by voltage. The MAD is determined by (FERC) The federal energy regulatory commission and it is not unusual to have additional standoff distances added by customers.

On commercial, industrial and technical projects teamwork is very important, we work with your in-house technical staff to develop a plan based on your particular needs and then we deliver the images required to help you staff answer the projects questions.

The shooting of the images is the tip of the spear, before we get to that phase we have integrated with with air ops and safety teams and other internal/external stakeholders to make sure we are operating as efficiently as possible while remain well inside both our internal and your safety guidelines.

Laguna Drones was part of the PG&E Wildfire Inspection Program (2019)(WISP) in capacities as RPIC ( Drone Pilot) and VO ( Visual) observer and Andy Kettle, president of Laguna Drones is an PG&E approved RPIC and contractor in good standing. The WISP program was at the time and still is the largest Drone inspection program ever undertaken, with 50,000 Transmission towers captured over 6 months and a minuscule percentage of flight related incidents per flight hour.

The slideshow below is designed to give you and insight into the capabilities and image resolution of our commercial inspection drones.

We are always fighting the trade off of Image Quality Vs Load time on website, for both ourselves and website visitor and in most cases the images file size has been reduced to improve load speed.

The sample still images below are uploaded at full size for review. These images have a file size in or around 7mb and a click will open them on a new page in full size at 5280*2970(px). You will need a good internet connection and a quality monitor to view this images in optimum detail.