so ive been doing tower inspections for about 6 years now, mostly rope access and occasionally man-lifts, and the company i work for is seriously considering transitioning a chunk of that work to drones. we mostly do monopoles and lattice structures up to about 400ft and the idea is to use a matrice 300 with the zenmuse H20T for the thermal + optical combo.

my concern is honestly the deliverables side of things. clients have always gotten detailed close-up photos of mounting hardware, corrosion points, cable ladders etc and i dont know how well you can replicate that from even 3-4 feet away on a drone vs having a guy literally touching the steel. like can you actually see torque indicator marks clearly enough to call out a loose connection or are we just telling clients what they want to hear

anyone actually doing this at a commercial level and how are you handling the inspection reports. also curious about wind ? we operate in some pretty exposed sites and the 300 handles gusts reasonably well in my experience but havent pushed it hard in the kind of sustained 25mph+ stuff we sometimes deal with on ridge line towers

yeah we made that switch about two years ago for a regional carrier and honestly the short answer is it depends on the client and what they're actually trying to achieve. thermal on the H20T is genuinely good for finding water intrusion in radome covers and hotspots in power cabling but you're right that the fine mechanical detail stuff is a limitation. we use a hybrid approach now where the drone does the initial sweep and flags areas, then rope access only goes up if something specific needs hands-on assessment. cut rope days by like 60% which is huge for scheduling and insurance costs

on the wind thing ? yeah 25mph sustained is where i start getting uncomfortable on taller structures just because of the turbulence you get off the structure itself not just ambient wind speed. the 300 holds position fine but your image quality suffers and you're fighting it the whole time. we have a hard cutoff around 22mph for anything above 250ft just as internal policy

dont underestimate how much clients actually care about the visual report format tbh. we spent almost as much time building out the reporting template in something like DroneLogbook or AirData as we did on the actual flight ops side. if the PDF looks professional and the annotations are clear most clients dont ask too many questions about how close you actually got. not saying cut corners just that presentation matters more than people think in this space