so ive been doing tower climbs for about 8 years and the company i work for just bought a mavic 3 enterprise to start doing pre-climb inspections and honestly i have mixed feelings about it. the idea is to fly it up before we send anyone up, get a look at the equipment, check for obvious corrosion or loose hardware, that kind of thing. sounds great in theory.

the problem is the person they put in charge of it has like 3 months of drone experience and keeps losing orientation when he gets above 200 feet on these lattice towers. also the wind up there is completely different from ground level, we had a close call last week where he almost tagged a guy wire he couldnt see on the monitor. nobody got hurt but it shook everyone up a bit.

my question is basically ? is this a workflow that actually works well for other people doing telecom inspections, or is the learning curve just too steep for a small crew that doesnt have dedicated drone ops? we're part 107 certified but that doesnt mean much if the piloting skills arent there yet. thinking about whether we should just hire out to a dedicated inspection company instead of trying to do it in house.

yeah the guy wire thing is a real hazard that a lot of people dont appreciate until its almost too late. we do a lot of transmission tower work and the rule we follow is never fly within like 10 meters of any structure until you really know what you're looking at from the air. the problem with lattice is there's always something you cant see on the fpv feed, especially with a wide angle lens compressing depth.

to answer your actual question though ? in-house can absolutely work but you need someone who flies regularly, not just on job days. the skill degrades fast if he's only getting airtime once every couple weeks. we had our guy doing at least 3-4 hours of stick time a week for the first few months before we trusted him near live infrastructure. also highly recommend practicing around similar structures before going near the actual towers, even empty lattice at a yard or something. the situational awareness is just different when you're threading through that kind of geometry.

we outsourced for about a year then brought it in house and honestly both had their place. outsourcing was great for the quality of the deliverables, these guys showed up with a matrice and a zenmuse zoom and the data was incredibly detailed. but the scheduling was a nightmare and it got expensive fast once we were doing more than a handful of sites per month. in house is cheaper per inspection once you're past the learning curve but you really do need someone who treats the drone as their primary tool not a secondary one. the hybrid model worked best for us ? in house for routine pre-climb stuff, contracted out for the formal inspection reports that go to clients.