this has been bugging me for a while and figured id post here because im not sure if its a me problem or just how this industry works.

we do telecom tower inspections, cell towers mostly but some broadcast stuff too, and we've been pitching drone-based inspection to a few clients as a way to reduce the number of actual tower climbs. safety argument is obvious, cost argument is obvious. but keep running into the same wall where the structural engineers reviewing the reports dont fully trust the drone data for things like bolt torque verification or antenna mount wear.

i get it, there's stuff you literally cannot assess without hands on it. but we're using a zenmuse h20t on an m300 with a 23x optical zoom and the image fidelity is genuinely insane, like you can see corrosion on individual bolts from 5 meters away without putting anyone in the air at 200ft. the issue seems to be more about documentation standards and nobody agreeing on what constitutes an acceptable drone inspection report for structural sign-off.

anyone dealt with this? is there like an actual standard emerging for this or are we all just making it up as we go

yeah the standards thing is a mess. ANSI/TIA-222 touches on it a bit but its mostly written around physical inspection. i've seen some operators basically create their own inspection checklists that mirror the manual climb checklist item by item and then annotate drone footage timestamps to each line item. its extra work but it gives the engineers something familiar to sign off on instead of just a folder of jpgs.

the torque verification thing is just always gonna require a climber, no way around that, but the argument is you send a drone up first, identify the 10 things actually worth checking, and the climber only goes up for 45 minutes instead of 3 hours. reduces exposure time significantly. some clients get that and some dont.

we had almost the exact same conversation with a utility client last year. ended up bringing in a third party structural firm to essentially co-sign our inspection methodology before we ever flew a single tower. cost us some margin on the first few jobs but after that the client had sign-off from their own engineers basically blessing our workflow so it stopped being a fight every time. kinda annoying that you have to do that extra step but once its done its done

also the m300 with h20t combo is what we run too, its just the right tool for this. tried a matrice 30t for a while and the zoom just isnt quite there for bolt-level detail on taller structures