One company for everything a drone does

Anyone who manages property or builds things has hired a drone pilot and then chased the files. The photographer delivers by one link, the mapping firm by another, the inspector by email. Nobody can find last spring's flight. The engineer has a different version from the site office. The scope was a phone call.

DroneLink is one company for everything a drone can do for property and construction: aerial and property media, mapping and survey, inspection, exterior cleaning, which is coming, and pilot training. You order from one catalogue, and every flight and deliverable for a site lives in one project record.

That record is the point. A developer, a builder, a surveyor, an architect, a realtor, a strata council and an insurer can all be working on the same site in the same year. When the aerials, the maps, the inspection photos and the invoices sit in one place, with comments on the image and a version history, people stop working from the wrong file and stop asking who has the latest one. Scope is written on the order, not remembered from a call. Next year's flight lands in the same record as this year's, so a comparison is one click away instead of an archive search.

On Vancouver Island, DroneLink's flights are flown by Elite Drone Solutions, a Transport Canada certified, Advanced Operations-certified operator in Victoria, British Columbia, serving real estate, media production, architectural visualization, construction and utilities. Elite also flies for BDM3d Studios.

Elite is led by David Olivier, its founder: a commercial helicopter pilot with more than 20 years of flying, a Transport Canada Advanced Operations pilot certificate and Transport Canada Flight Reviewer certification. Mapping and survey work is processed by a geomatics specialist with 15 years in remote sensing and 8 years in aerial surveying, including LiDAR and orthomosaics. Every Elite crew member flying commercial work holds an Advanced certificate, and operations are insured.

Outside the island, we take your order and assign it to a vetted local operator. That network is being built now across North America. Tell us where your site is; we confirm a certified local operator before you commit. Every operator works to the same planning and safety standard.

Operators who want to run DroneLink services in their own territory, with training, brand, ordering and software, will be able to join a licensed operator program. It is coming; certified operators can apply to be notified.

DroneLink runs on StudioLink, the platform built by BDM3d Studios, the architectural visualization studio in Victoria behind renderings, films and interactive sales tours. Aerial capture feeds its renderings and site context; see bdm3d.com.

Live today: online ordering, estimates, orders, invoices and payment; a project record per site with every flight and deliverable; delivery by link; review and approval of photos and video with comments pinned on the image and version history; and choosing the shots you want from a set. Coming: the interactive site map viewer with measurements, volumes and cut/fill in the browser, progress comparison between flights, accuracy reports, a client portal with all sites and history, the operator network portal and compliance records for operators.