Infrastructure inspections are a routine task for businesses like Valmont Industries. But a recent mission from Valmont is making headlines because it saw the company flying a gas-electric hybrid drone nonstop for 77 miles! The drone flew for almost three hours, from Childress to Aspermont in Texas, inspecting vital infrastructure like power lines, railroads, bridges, and more.
As DroneDJ reported recently, Valmont has received a Part 107 Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly its drones across the United States. The company leveraged a Harris Aerial H6E drone equipped with a Sony A7RM5 camera for the landmark mission.
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According to Valmont, using a conventional inspection method such as helicopters would have taken thrice as long. Not only was the drone inspection significantly faster, but it was also more fuel efficient. The mission was completed using less than two gallons of fuel. And even though the route was pretty rural, T-Mobile 5G managed to provide live data transfer throughout the three-hour flight.
“Range has been a hurdle in the drone inspection space, until now,” says Jake Lahmann, UAS manager at Valmont Industries. “To be able to get this kind of range in a single drone flight is really going to revolutionize the way the industry approaches infrastructure inspections.”
Valmont says it plans to offer drone-in-a-box (DiaB) services nationwide in 2024. It would provide anyone needing aerial inspection services with the ability to order a drone, unbox it, and watch it run its inspection while a Valmont pilot flies it remotely from virtually anywhere in the US.
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