so ive been doing tower inspections for about 3 years now and my company just started pushing us toward using drones instead of sending climbers up for the initial visual checks. im not against it but im genuinely not sure if its saving us time or just shifting the problem somewhere else.

right now we're running a mavic 3 enterprise for most of it and yeah the zoom on that thing is solid for getting close looks at antenna mounts and coax runs without actually putting someone at 200 feet. but the workflow to get usable footage for the structural reports is kind of a mess. we're stitching together manual flight paths and it takes forever to get consistent coverage on the whole structure especially on lattice towers where theres just so much going on visually.

anyone doing this at scale with something like a skydio or using automated inspection software? ive looked at the skydio x2 for the obstacle avoidance on complex structures but the price jump is hard to justify to management when the mavic is technically doing the job. curious if anyone's actually built out a real workflow for this or if everyone is kind of just winging it like us

yeah we went through this exact same thing about a year and a half ago. ended up going with the skydio x2 specifically for the autonomy on monopoles and guyed towers and honestly the obstacle avoidance alone probably saved us from a serious flyaway incident early on. lattice is still tricky though, the structure scan mode works okay but you really have to do a manual pre-flight to set your boundaries or it'll try to fly inside the tower cavity and freak out.

the workflow we settled on is using the skydio for the primary structural pass and then swapping to the mavic 3e with the zoom for close detail shots on specific hardware we flag during the skydio run. two aircraft sounds like more work but the report quality went way up and our climbers are only going up for confirmed issues now instead of every single tower. management liked that story a lot better once we showed them the near-miss reduction numbers.

not doing towers specifically but we use drones for high voltage transmission line inspections and the workflow problem is real. we tried a couple of the automated platforms and honestly nothing beats just getting really comfortable flying manual and building your own shot lists for each structure type. the automated stuff assumes the structure is going to be consistent and power infrastructure really isnt. but maybe cell towers are more standardized idk