Flights you can plan with confidence

Flights you can plan with confidence

How Omniris turns a drawn area into a flight your drone can fly, checks the plan against camera physics, terrain, no-fly zones, FAA airspace and the weather, and keeps a record of every check the pilot made before take-off.

Summary

A good survey starts before the drone leaves the ground. The pilot has to choose a height that gives the detail the client needs, space the photos so they overlap enough to be stitched, keep the aircraft out of places it must not go, and confirm that the airspace and the weather allow the flight at all. Omniris brings all of that into one place, next to the job the flight is for.

Omniris plans the flight; it does not fly the drone. The planner produces a mission file that the pilot imports into the aircraft's own app (DJI Pilot 2, DJI Fly, Litchi, QGroundControl and others) and flies from there. In the app's own words: "Omniris generates the mission; you fly it in your own app. Check the flight path on a map before you launch."

flowchart LR
  A[Area on the
job or site map] --> B[Aircraft, camera,
pattern, height]
  B --> C[Live preview:
lines, photos,
time, warnings]
  C --> D[Save the mission]
  D --> E[Airspace check
and LAANC]
  D --> F[Export to the
aircraft app]
  E --> G[Pre-flight
checklist]
  F --> G
  G --> H[Fly, then log
the flight]
  

The mission planner

Every job has a Flight Missions card. The pilot assigned to the job opens the planner from it with Plan Mission. The job's client sees the same card read-only: they can open the plan that will be flown over their site and download a copy, but not change it. Missions can also be planned against a site in Site Manager, and while a job is still being created, before it is saved.

Choosing the area

The planner opens on the areas already drawn on the job or site. Pick one from the list, or choose Draw / edit the area to draw a new shape or adjust an existing one on the map. The area can be any shape with three or more corners, including awkward, concave ones. A no-fly zone is never offered as an area to fly; it is shown in red and avoided instead.

Choosing the aircraft and camera

The aircraft list comes from the pilot's own equipment, so a mission is planned against hardware the pilot actually has. When an aircraft has a built-in camera, that camera is chosen automatically. The camera's lens and sensor size come from the Omniris equipment catalogue, which includes common DJI, Autel, Skydio and MicaSense cameras, including multispectral ones. If a camera's details are not in the catalogue, the planner still works but says the ground detail is approximate. If no aircraft is chosen, the planner says the mission cannot be exported as a flight file until one is.

A live preview

Every change re-plans the mission and redraws it on the map within a moment: the flight lines, the take-off point, the photo coverage and, for small missions, each photo's footprint on the ground. The numbers and warnings under the map change with it. What you see is computed by the same code that writes the exported file, so the preview and the file cannot disagree.

Save the mission when it looks right. Saved missions are listed on the card with their pattern, photo count, ground detail and flight time, and a warning sign if the plan carries warnings.

Camera, height and overlap

Most mapping problems are decided before take-off: photos too far apart to stitch, a height that gives too little detail, or a speed that blurs every frame. The planner works these out from the real camera and tells you when something will not work.

Ground detail and height

Ground sample distance (GSD) is how much ground one pixel of a photo covers: the smaller the number, the finer the detail. It depends on the camera and on how high the drone flies. Enter either the GSD you need or the height you want to fly; the other is worked out for you and the two stay in step. The planner's height and speed boxes are in metres; the results show the height in both feet and metres.

Overlap

Front overlap is how much each photo shares with the next one along a flight line; side overlap is how much neighbouring lines share. Stitching software needs both. From them and the camera's footprint on the ground, the planner sets the distance between flight lines and the distance between photos. The camera fires by distance flown, so photos are evenly spaced along each line, and the turns between lines are not photographed.

If the camera is mounted on its side, as on some fixed-wing and custom aircraft, choose Portrait for the sensor orientation. Getting this wrong halves the overlap in one direction, so the planner asks.

Camera angle

The gimbal angle is set for the pattern you choose: straight down for maps, tilted for 3D. You can change it. If you ask for an angle the aircraft's gimbal cannot reach, the planner sets the nearest one it can and says so.

Speed and motion blur

The default speed is 18 mph (8 m/s). Two limits can lower it, and the planner tells you each time:

• The camera must keep up. Every camera needs a moment between photos. If the requested speed would cover the photo spacing faster than that, the speed is reduced. Where the catalogue has no figure for the camera, 2 seconds is assumed, and the warning says it was assumed.
• The aircraft's top speed. The plan never asks for more than the aircraft can do.

Motion blur is the smear in a photo caused by the drone moving while the shutter is open. The planner estimates it for a 1/1000 s shutter. Above one pixel of smear it warns you to slow down or use a faster shutter, because blur spoils stitching long before it is obvious to the eye.

The 400 ft warning

If the planned height is above 400 ft (121.9 m), the planner warns that this is above the Part 107 ceiling (14 CFR §107.51(b)) and needs a waiver, or the exception for flying within 400 ft of a structure. It is a warning, not a block: the rule has exceptions, and Omniris is also used outside the United States. The airspace check repeats the warning if any point of the flight, as actually flown, ends up more than 400 ft above the ground.

Warnings and limits at a glance

Flight patterns

Five flight patterns cover the common jobs. Each comes with sensible starting values for overlap and camera angle, and every value can be changed.

Grid and crosshatch lines can run in any compass direction. Each flight line is extended 49 ft (15 m) past the edge of the area by default, so the drone is straight, level and at speed before the first useful photo. A corridor runs along the long axis of the area you drew; give it a width and the planner adds as many lines as that width needs. An orbit's radius defaults to a circle that keeps the whole area in view, and the first ring of a perimeter starts 66 ft (20 m) inside the boundary unless you change it. On a crosshatch the two passes are drawn in different colours on the map, so they read as two flights rather than one tangle.

Maps, 3D and multispectral

• For a map, use a grid with the camera straight down. The result is what Omniris stitches into an orthomosaic; see the companion paper Maps you can measure.
• For a 3D model, use a crosshatch with the camera tilted, or a perimeter or orbit around a structure. Building 3D models is covered in Digital twins you can see and measure.
• For multispectral work, choose a multispectral camera from the catalogue and the ground detail is worked out for its bands. Processing is covered in the multispectral and agriculture paper.

Following the terrain

A drone told to fly at 330 ft (100 m) flies at 330 ft above the point it took off from, not above the ground under it. On a hillside that means the ground detail changes across the map, and over a ridge the drone gets closer to the ground than planned. Terrain follow fixes this by giving every waypoint its own height, so the drone holds a steady height above the ground.

Should you turn it on?

As soon as an area is chosen, the planner samples the ground across it and says how much the height varies and what that does to the ground detail at your planned height. When the ground varies by 49 ft (15 m) or more, it recommends turning terrain follow on.

What it follows

• A global terrain model. Available worldwide, with heights roughly every 100 ft (about 30 m). It is bare ground and often years old, which is why a minimum clearance is always kept (below).
• Your own surface model from an earlier survey. Far more detailed, and current as of that survey. A surface model (DSM) includes trees and buildings; a terrain model (DTM) is bare earth. You say which one the file is, and the planner reports which it followed. Flying a bare-earth profile into a tree line is the mistake to avoid.

How the heights are set

• Measured from the take-off point, by default. Heights in the file are differences from where the drone takes off, which avoids a whole class of height-reference errors. The price is that the drone must take off where the plan says, so the take-off point is shown prominently and can be moved on the map.
• Absolute heights (above the WGS84 ellipsoid, the reference GPS uses) are offered as an advanced option.
• A minimum clearance of 33 ft (10 m) above the modelled surface is kept everywhere, including on the straight line between waypoints. Waypoints are raised where needed, and the planner says how many.
• A gentle climb. Climbs and descents are smoothed to stay under 10 ft/s (3 m/s) at the planned speed.
• Only as many extra waypoints as needed. Points are added wherever the straight line between two waypoints would stray from the requested height by more than 6.6 ft (2 m) or 5% of the height, whichever is larger.

After planning, the summary gives the relief of the ground, the clearance actually flown (lowest to highest above the ground) and how many waypoints were added. If the ground model has gaps, they are filled from neighbouring samples and the planner says so; if the path between waypoints still comes too close to the clearance limit, it says that too.

Photos, time and batteries

Under the map, the planner shows what the mission will take, recalculated with every change:

Duration and battery count are estimates and are labelled as such. They assume the planned speed throughout and calm conditions.

Sending it to the drone

A saved mission can be exported from the planner's Export Mission menu, or from the Export button on the mission card. Omniris never connects to the aircraft: it writes a file, and the pilot imports it into the app they already fly with.

Every export is a .zip: unzip it and import the mission file into your flight app as usual. The parameter sheet beside it is a plain one-page summary of everything the file cannot carry: the take-off point ("launch here, or the heights will be wrong"), height, overlap, speed, camera details, mission size, terrain follow, no-fly zones, any warnings, and the settings to make in the app itself, such as return-to-home behaviour.

Heights that mean the same thing in every app

Litchi and QGroundControl only understand heights above the take-off point. A mission planned with absolute heights is converted for them automatically, and the parameter sheet says it was converted.

Aircraft DJI has not documented

DJI publishes the code its wayline files use to identify an aircraft for only part of its range. For any other DJI aircraft, Teach Omniris this aircraft takes one mission file exported from the pilot's own controller, reads the aircraft's code from it, and stores it against that aircraft in the pilot's equipment. Every later DJI export for that aircraft uses it.

The mission file as evidence

Save to vault files the exported mission in the job's delivery folder with its own chain-of-custody record. Which mission file was handed to the pilot becomes a recorded fact rather than something reconstructed from memory later. Custody records are described in Evidence you can prove.

Airspace

Omniris reads the FAA's published airspace data in three places: as layers you can switch on over the map, as an Airspace card on every job, and as a check of the whole route on every saved mission. It covers the United States and its territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands), the area the FAA data covers.

Airspace on the map

The main map's layer list has two airspace groups. Airspace Basic is a quick fly / no-fly picture: flight restrictions, prohibited areas and the UAS Facility Map. Airspace Advanced adds the detail:

The job map offers Class Airspace and the UAS Facility Map as well. Weather, smoke and wildfire layers sit in their own group alongside.

The job's Airspace card

Every job with a location shows an Airspace Restrictions card. It answers one question for the job's location: could a normal Part 107 flight here, up to 400 ft above the ground, be in controlled or special-use airspace? It is the quick read before anyone plans a route.

The mission check: the whole route, as flown

A saved mission gets a stronger check. Instead of one point, the planner checks the whole flight: from the take-off point, along every flight line, and back. It walks the route in steps of about 50 ft (15 m) at the height the drone will actually be at each point, including terrain follow, and checks the drawn area as well, so airspace that clips a corner is still found.

Floor-aware: does the airspace actually reach the flight?

Controlled airspace is a set of layers, and many of them do not start at the ground. A floor is the height at which a piece of airspace begins. A Class B "shelf" might start at 3,000 ft above sea level; a drone flying at 200 ft beneath it is not in Class B at all. Omniris compares every floor with the flight:

• Floors given as height above the ground are compared exactly with the highest point of the flight above the ground.
• Floors given above sea level are compared with the highest point of the flight above sea level, worked out from the ground under the route, with a 100 ft margin toward caution because terrain data is imperfect. Floors given as flight levels get a 1,000 ft margin, because they move with air pressure.
• A floor the data does not state is treated as reaching the ground.
• If the ground could not be looked up, the airspace is treated as reaching the flight, and the card says so.

Airspace that exists above the route but starts higher than the flight goes is listed separately as overhead, lowest first, for information only: no authorization is needed for it.

What the check tells you

Two further notes appear when they apply: a LAANC authorization in Class E airspace that extends to the surface is not valid when the weather ceiling is below 1,000 ft; and the return-to-home altitude is the aircraft's own setting and is not checked.

The height used for all of this is the flight's highest point above the ground as flown, not the planned height. Over ground that falls away below the take-off point, a drone holding its height ends up higher above the ground than planned, and the check uses that higher figure.

Kept honest

• A failed check is never "clear". If the FAA service does not answer, you see the last saved check marked Not refreshed, or a message that the check could not be done, never a fresh all-clear.
• A check describes the current plan. Changing a mission's area or height clears its saved check. A Recheck button runs it again at any time.
• It warns; it does not block. The decision to fly stays with the pilot, who can see exactly why each warning was raised.

LAANC: what to file, and a record of what was granted

LAANC (Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability) is the FAA system that gives near-instant approval to fly in controlled airspace near airports, up to the ceiling on the UAS Facility Map. The FAA allows one ceiling per authorization, so a route that crosses cells with different ceilings needs one authorization for each. Omniris works this out from the airspace check: how many authorizations, at what heights, and for which airports.

Choose Get filing details, enter the name of the remote pilot in command and a phone number that will be answered during the flight, and set the flight window. Omniris checks the request against the FAA's LAANC rules before you file:

• the pilot's real name and a phone number are required;
• the window must start in the future and last between 5 minutes and 12 hours;
• the operation area can be no more than 10 nautical miles across;
• no more than 5 overlapping operations for the same name and phone number;
• further coordination must be requested at least 72 hours ahead.

It then gives you a ready-to-paste block of details for each authorization: a centre point and radius in feet and metres that covers the area (most LAANC apps draw a circle in two taps), the maximum height, the start and end in your local time and UTC, the pilot's details and the area's corners. If the mission plans higher than a cell allows, the block says so in the text you are about to paste. File it in any free LAANC app; AirHub Portal, Aloft Air Control and AutoPylot are linked from the dialog.

Back in Omniris, Record authorization stores the authorization number, the app it was filed in, the height and the window actually granted, and optionally the PDF or screenshot from the app, which is filed in the vault with chain of custody. Omniris then compares what was granted with what the mission plans. If the authorization is lower than the plan, or starts late or ends early, it says so loudly. A rejection can be recorded too, with the reason.

Where the route is in controlled airspace that LAANC cannot cover, Omniris links to the FAA's DroneZone and gives you the flight details to apply with. Outside FAA coverage it says there is nothing to file under LAANC and to follow the local rules.

No-fly zones

Sometimes the reason not to fly somewhere has nothing to do with the FAA: a neighbour who has not given permission, a substation, a school playground, a crane working on site. A no-fly zone is an area drawn on a job that the aircraft must never fly over.

Drawing them

On the job form, Add No Fly Zone draws a zone the same way as a site area. Zones look the same everywhere they appear, on the web, the desktop application and the phone app: red cross-hatching, a red outline, and a red "No-fly" tag in polygon lists. Their names always start with "NO-FLY:", so even a KML opened in other software makes the meaning plain. A job can carry up to 50 zones; an outline that crosses itself is refused when the job is saved, where it can still be fixed.

Enforced by the planner

The planner treats a job's zones as a hard rule, not a suggestion. The area picker says how many zones are on the job, followed by the word enforced.

• A standoff. The route keeps a horizontal distance from every zone edge: 25 ft (7.6 m) by default, never less than 10 ft (3 m). The standoff is measured from the aircraft's GPS antenna; the camera can still see into the zone. The keep-out boundary is drawn dashed around each zone.
• Photo runs stop at the boundary. Flight lines are cut where they meet a zone's standoff. Slivers of line too short to give a useful photo are skipped.
• Everything else goes around. Turns, transits between passes, and the legs from the take-off point to the first photo and back are routed around the zones on the shortest clear path. For orbits and perimeters, a detour goes outside the loop, away from the subject.
• Checked before it leaves. Every leg of the finished route is checked against every zone at the standoff. If any leg failed, no plan would be produced. A take-off point inside a zone is refused.

The planner also warns when zones remove more than a quarter of the area from the survey, when the detours add more distance than the photo runs themselves, when a flight line starts right at a standoff with a shortened run-up, and when a standoff under 20 ft is set on an aircraft that does not appear to have RTK (high-accuracy positioning). Ordinary GPS holds position only to within roughly 7 to 15 ft, plus wind drift.

A plan cannot fall behind the job

The job's zones always win. A pilot cannot remove a zone from a plan. If a zone is added to the job, or moved, after a mission was planned, the planner shows a banner and a Regenerate button, and the mission cannot be exported or saved to the vault until it has been re-planned against the current zones.

In the exported file

The parameter sheet lists the zones and the standoff. A QGroundControl plan carries them as exclusion fences the autopilot can enforce. In the boundary export for Wingtra and Autel they are red shapes for reference only, and the sheet says plainly that those apps plan their own route and will fly straight through a zone unless it is excluded in the app.

Weather and go / no-go

Flyability answers the question every pilot asks before a job: which days, and which hours, can I actually fly? It has its own button in the main navigation, with four tabs: Flyability, Weather, Wind and GNSS.

What it reads

• The hourly forecast for your location, for up to 16 days: wind and gusts, temperature, rain and its probability, cloud, humidity, visibility, dew point, fog and thunderstorms, and daylight.
• Air quality, for the first five days.
• The Kp index, a measure of geomagnetic activity that can degrade GPS.
• Your aircraft. Choose one of your aircraft and its rated maximum wind and operating temperatures become the limits; without one, the limits are 20 mph wind and 32 to 104 °F. The aircraft's flight time and other specifications are shown alongside.
• GNSS satellite geometry for the satellite systems your aircraft uses, hour by hour.

The location is your saved address, or your current approximate location, and you can pick another on a map.

How it scores

Each hour is scored from 0 to 100, starting at 100. Some conditions rule an hour out entirely; others only take points off.

Pilots need hours in a row, not scattered good hours. Flyability finds the runs of flyable hours in a row (flyable windows), and the day's score is the average of its best window. You say how long the job takes (3 hours by default); a day whose longest window is shorter than that, or that has too few daylight hours, is marked not flyable. A Kp index above 4 costs 15 points with a warning that GPS may be degraded. A day is flyable when nothing rules it out and it scores at least 40.

Each day lists why it failed or what to watch in its best window: wind peaking near the limit, rain chance, cold that cuts battery life by 30 to 50%, condensation risk, fog at some point in the day, and poor satellite geometry that could degrade survey accuracy. Satellite geometry is reported alongside the weather score and does not change it. Days can be sorted by date or by score, and non-flyable days hidden.

Beyond the score

• Weather: the full forecast, with the nearest airport's current observation and forecast (METAR and TAF), and an extended outlook out to about 46 days from a long-range ensemble forecast. The extended days carry no visibility forecast, and say so.
• Wind: hourly wind speed and direction at heights from about 33 ft to 660 ft (10 m to 200 m) above the ground, because the wind at survey height is often much stronger than at the surface.
• GNSS: satellites in view and positioning quality through the day.
• Send me updates: choose the days you care about and get an email when their forecast changes. The forecast is rechecked every 8 hours.

The job request form carries a flyability panel too, and warns when the requested flight window is short. The warning never blocks the request.

Pre-flight checklists

Part 107 requires the remote pilot in command to assess the operating environment, brief the crew and check the aircraft before every flight (14 CFR §107.49). Omniris turns that duty into a checklist that lives on the job, and a record that holds up later.

The built-in checklist

The built-in FAA Part 107 pre-flight (14 CFR §107.49) checklist quotes §107.49 word for word, item by item, so it never drifts from the rule it claims to cover. Each item names its source in the regulation. It has 22 items in all:

• 9 from §107.49: local weather; local airspace and flight restrictions; people and property on the surface; other ground hazards; the crew briefing; control links; enough power for the flight; anything attached to the aircraft being secure; and the rules for flying over people.
• 7 other Part 107 duties: registration displayed; Remote ID working; height at or below 400 ft or within 400 ft of a structure; visual line of sight; the pilot and crew fit to fly; lighting and training for night or twilight flight; and any required airspace authorization in hand and covering the planned area, height and time.
• 6 practical checks: take-off point matches the plan; return-to-home height above the tallest obstacle; airframe, propellers and gimbal inspected; storage card ready for the planned photo count; compass and motion sensors calibrated if the aircraft asks, and GPS lock before launch; emergency landing areas briefed.

Pilots and organizations can build their own checklists from it, adding and reordering items. The 16 regulatory items, marked ★ required, cannot be removed from any copy: a checklist edited until it always passes would be worse than none. The built-in checklist itself cannot be edited.

Running it

The pilot assigned to the job runs the checklist from the job page. Each item is answered OK, N/A or Issue; an issue needs a note saying what was found. The airspace item shows any authorization recorded for the job, with its number, height and whether it covers the plan, or a note that none is recorded. The checklist cannot be completed while any required item is unanswered; a blank checklist would look, months later, exactly like a finished one.

The record it leaves

• Frozen when complete. A completed checklist cannot be edited or deleted. It shows the time it was completed and, when the device allowed it, where.
• A snapshot, not a link. The checklist's wording is copied into the record when it starts, so later edits to a checklist can never change what this record says was checked.
• One per flight. Opening the checklist again resumes the one in progress. A second checklist for the same job has to be asked for, and is recorded as a separate, numbered flight.
• Visible to the client. The job's client can read completed checklists for their site, but never answer one.
• Protected by legal holds. On a job under a legal hold, checklists and LAANC records are frozen with everything else on the job.

On the phone, the checklist also captures the airspace check and the weather at the moment it starts and attaches them to the record: "the data at the time said this" is stronger evidence than "the pilot said so".

The flight logbook

Each pilot has a Flight Log in their account. Entries can be typed in by hand, estimated from the capture times of a job's delivered photos (a gap of more than 15 minutes means a new flight, usually a battery change), or created when a live-tracked flight ends. Anything Omniris works out for itself starts unconfirmed and is labelled as an estimate, for example "at least 22 min (estimated)", until the pilot agrees with it. Totals keep confirmed and unconfirmed hours apart, with hours by aircraft and over the last 90 days, because currency and insurance both read from a logbook and an estimate must never pass for a measurement. A logbook is personal to the pilot; clients do not see it.

Live flight tracking

Omniris can show a drone's position live while it flies. The drone's control software sends its position to Omniris through the Omniris interface for developers (an API), between one and ten times a second: location, height above take-off, heading, ground speed and flight state.

• Watch with a code. Each flight gets a six-character tracking code. Anyone signed in to Omniris can enter it, under Account, to watch the flight live on a map, with its heading and the path flown so far.
• Share a link. Each flight also gets a public link that opens a live map with no sign-in. It can be embedded in another web page. The link keeps showing the final position and the full path for 24 hours after landing, then stops working.
• Gaps are filled in. A drone that loses its connection can send the positions it stored while offline once the link returns, so the path has no hole in it.
• Kept with the job. A flight linked to a job, which only the job's assigned pilot or its owner can do, keeps its path for as long as the job exists. Other flights' paths are cleared 24 hours after landing.
• Logged. When a tracked flight ends, an unconfirmed entry is added to the pilot's logbook.

Pilot records

Pilots keep their FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot certificate on their Omniris account, and Omniris checks it against the FAA rather than taking it on trust.

• Verified with the FAA. The pilot enters their certificate number, and Omniris looks it up in the FAA's public Airmen Inquiry with the pilot's last name, confirming a Remote Pilot certificate and its date of issue. Or the pilot uploads a photo or scan of the card; Omniris reads the name, number and date from it and verifies them the same way.
• Recurrent training. Part 107 requires recurrent training every 24 months (14 CFR §107.65), and the FAA lookup does not show it. Pilots upload their training certificate; Omniris reads the completion date and shows whether it is current.
• What "current" means. Verified with the FAA, the card on file, and either the certificate issued or recurrent training completed within the last 24 months.
• What it is used for. In the Omniris marketplace, a U.S.-based pilot needs a current Part 107 to apply for jobs, and pilots without one do not appear on the pilot map or in pilot searches. An organization's own pilots are not held to this check, because the organization manages their certification itself.

Web, desktop and phone

The phone app is built for the field. A pre-flight checklist answered with no signal is kept on the phone and sent when it reconnects; the server applies the same rules, so a checklist queued offline still cannot be completed with required items unanswered. The phone app is described in the field app paper.

What Omniris does, and what it doesn't

Omniris helps a pilot plan and check a flight. It does not take the pilot's place, and it says so in its own words:

The remote pilot in command remains responsible for the flight, as the regulations require. In plain terms:

• Omniris does not fly the drone or connect to it. It writes a mission file; the pilot imports it, checks it and flies it.
• Warnings do not block. The planner and the airspace check warn loudly and explain why, but the decision to fly is the pilot's. Only a few things are refused outright: a mission too large for one flight file, an unusable setting, a route that would cross a no-fly zone, and an export planned against out-of-date zones.
• Airspace comes from the FAA's published data, for the United States and its territories only. It is not a NOTAM or TFR briefing: notices and temporary flight restrictions change after a mission is planned, so check them before you fly. Elsewhere, the local rules apply and Omniris says so.
• A recorded LAANC authorization is pilot-attested. Omniris works out what to file and records what the pilot says was granted. It did not issue that authorization and cannot see it rescinded.
• The aircraft's own behaviour is outside the plan. Return-to-home height, signal-loss and low-battery returns are aircraft settings. They are not checked, and can cross a no-fly zone.
• Heights depend on the take-off point. Heights are measured from the take-off point the plan shows. Taking off somewhere higher or lower shifts the whole flight by the difference.
• Terrain models are approximate. The worldwide terrain model is coarse and often years old, and it is bare ground: it does not include trees or buildings. A minimum clearance is kept for that reason, but it does not replace looking at the site.
• Obstacles are not avoided automatically. FAA obstacles are a map layer for the pilot to read; the planner does not route around towers, wires or trees.
• Estimates are estimates. Flight time and battery count assume calm air and the planned speed. Weather scores are forecasts, not observations.
• The checklist does not replace the regulation. It quotes the rule and names its sources so the pilot can check it against them.

Where it matters

Related papers

• Maps you can measure: how the photos from a grid mission become an orthomosaic and surface model.
• Digital twins you can see and measure: 3D models from crosshatch, orbit and perimeter flights.
• Evidence you can prove: custody records, certificates and legal holds behind the mission file, checklist and LAANC records.
• Site Manager and Site Navigator: the sites whose boundaries missions can be planned against.
• The phone app in the field: running the checklist and working on site.
• Multispectral and agriculture: what happens to multispectral captures after the flight.

Glossary

AGL

Above ground level: height measured from the ground directly below.

Crosshatch

Two grids flown at right angles with the camera tilted, for 3D models.

DSM / DTM

Surface model (the top of everything, including trees and buildings) and terrain model (bare ground).

Flyable window

A run of consecutive hours in which every hour is flyable.

Floor

The height at which a piece of airspace begins. Airspace whose floor is above the flight does not apply to it.

Front overlap / side overlap

How much each photo shares with the next one along a line, and with the neighbouring line.

GNSS

Satellite positioning: GPS and its counterparts (GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou).

GSD (ground sample distance)

How much ground one pixel of a photo covers. Smaller means more detail.

Kp index

A 0 to 9 measure of geomagnetic activity; high values can degrade satellite positioning.

LAANC

The FAA's system for near-instant authorization to fly in controlled airspace near airports, up to the UAS Facility Map ceiling.

Motion blur

Smear in a photo caused by the drone moving while the shutter is open.

No-fly zone

An area drawn on a job that the aircraft must never fly over; the planner keeps a standoff from it.

NOTAM / TFR

Notices to air missions and temporary flight restrictions: short-notice changes to where and when flight is allowed.

Part 107

The FAA rules for commercial small-drone flight in the United States (14 CFR Part 107).

Remote pilot in command

The certificated pilot responsible for a flight.

Standoff

The horizontal distance the route keeps from the edge of a no-fly zone.

Terrain follow

Giving each waypoint its own height so the drone holds a steady height above the ground.

UAS Facility Map

The FAA's grid around airports showing the highest altitude LAANC can approve in each cell.

Waypoint

A point on the route with a position, height, speed and camera angle; the drone flies from one to the next.