so anyway this is a bit of a debrief i guess. we were doing an inspection on a 200ft guyed communications tower yesterday, client wanted close-up imagery of the antenna mounts and some corrosion assessment on the upper section. ive done probably 30 or 40 of these by now and i still got caught out by something dumb.

the issue was the guy wires. i knew where the main ones were, had the site map, walked the base before flying. but theres a secondary set of intermediate guys about 2/3 of the way up that werent on the drawing we were given and i came within maybe 3-4 feet of one on an orbit pass. just caught it visually in time and pulled out manually. heart rate definitely went up.

flying tower inspections in manual mode is kind of essential for exactly this reason, the obstacle avoidance on the M2E (enterprise) just gets confused around all the lattice structure anyway and i had it disabled. but yeah, never fully trust the site documentation they give you. always do a slow visual climb on the first pass before doing any orbits or close approaches.

anyone else do a lot of vertical structure work? curious how others handle the guy wire problem specifically because i dont see it talked about much

guy wires are genuinely one of the scariest things in this work and yeah they almost never show up correctly on documentation, especially older towers where things have been modified over the years. our protocol now is a slow manual spiral climb starting maybe 15-20ft off the structure, purely visual, before we do anything else. we also try to get eyes on the tower from multiple ground positions before the first flight to count anchor points and estimate wire angles.

some guys use the Skydio 2+ for tower work because the obstacle avoidance is actually good enough to handle complex structures, but ive heard mixed things about it around guy wires specifically since they're so thin. havent tried it myself. for what its worth we stick to manual on the M300 for anything with guyed structures, ATTI mode disabled, full manual authority. close calls are way too common when you let the automation get involved near lattice.

this is kind of terrifying to read as someone whos just starting to get into infrastructure work lol. i did my first cell tower inspection a few months ago and honestly i was so focused on the equipment on the tower itself that i wasnt thinking nearly enough about the wires. got lucky i think.

question for you ? do you use any kind of pre-flight checklist specific to tower jobs or is it mostly experience-based at this point? trying to build out a proper SOP for our small operation and the generic Part 107 stuff doesnt really cover the specifics of vertical structure work at all