In the DLP Radio episode embedded in this article below, we interview Isabella Gustave from UAVCoach.com and Colin Snow (aka Drone Analyst) from Skylogic Research about some of the key findings from the research results of Skylogic’s 2018 Drone Market Sector Report. This mission critical report is extensive and contains information every drone service business needs to know and covers many more topics than we can address in a 30 minute podcast. however, we have tried to focus in on some key areas which should be of interest to most Part 107 Pilots looking to build their drone service business. We are also recommending that you order the whole report so that you can focus your business on the right issues and the right moments of opportunity (see below for information on how to order your copy of the report from Skylogic).
What are the opportunities and risks facing Part 107 Pilots in 2019 and beyond?
If you are looking to build your drone service business, you need to understand what the playing field looks like today, as well as where the drone service market is headed in the future. What industry market sectors are hot? Does Skylogic’s research suggest slow or rapid growth of the drone market? What are the best opportunities for drone pilots in the short and long term? What kind of revenue are your competitors likely generating? What markets would our interviewees focus on if they were building a drone service business? Isabella Gustave and Colin Snow answer these questions and more.
Do you want to order the 2018 Drone Sector Report or obtain access to a dozen free industry reports? See the links at the bottom of this page to order the report and for additional resources discussed in this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Drone Law Radio podcast where drone pilots become drone professional.
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Topics Covered in this Episode of DLP Radio:
Here is a summary of Issues Discussed by Isabella Gustave from UAVCoach.com and Colin Snow (aka Drone Analyst) from Skylogic Research / Drone Analyst – UAS / UAV Advisors.
1. The technology of sUAS is available for many types of operations. But people have failed to account that demand for new and emerging technology is always well behind the capabilities of the technology. You have been expressing caution for years. The 2018 DRONE MARKET SECTOR REPORT identifies both challenges and opportunities. Give us a high level view of the key “challenges” you see for drone service providers today based on the survey results.
2. I want to talk about real world situation for the Part 107 pilots trying to build service businesses using drones. Insight 4 of the report states “The U.S. market is still flooded with service providers reporting very little revenue, but a few are expanding operations.” I want to quote this paragraph “Our data shows almost half of all service providers have only been in business less than a year, and most report very little revenue. For example, the survey finds that 78% earn under $50,000 per year, and only 12% make over $100,000. About half have just one full-time employee (themselves) and operate their business as a part-time venture. Most employ only one remote pilot—again, themselves.” So if I am trying to launch a drone service business, what strategies do you think account for modest revenue, part-time operations and positioning for future market growth.
3. Continuing with Insight 4, the Report states: “Still, we may be seeing the beginning of an upward trend in revenue. Compared with last year, a lower percentage make $50,000 or less, and a higher percentage make over $50,000. Additionally, we find more full-time employees and fewer part-time employees. Our detailed analysis provides other year-over-year comparisons.” In your opinion, is there a tipping point where market demand moves from ‘slow growth’ to ‘rapid growth’ — and if so what are the triggers you expect will drive the increase in demand that many have expected for years, but still has not arrived? Or do you think the market will simply continue to grow slow and steady?
4. Insight 8 reports the opinions from Part 107 pilots that “Results pointed to issues regarding regulations, such as the difficult and lengthy operational waiver approval process, restrictions on beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, and state and local restrictions, among the top five complaints. Other complaints from service providers centered largely on low-priced competition and illegal operators.” Isn’t the real problem that prospective customers of services using drone data and imaging are not ready to buy? Isn’t there a difference between convincing someone to buy your services, and true market demand where customers are demanding services on a volume basis?
[Transcript]
Welcome to DroneLawProRadio. This is Dronelaw.Pro. We are Part 107 pilots become Part 107 professionals. Here is your host Drone Attorney Enrico Schaefer.
Enrico: Welcome to DroneLawProRadio. My name is Drone Attorney Enrico Schaefer. Today we have two special guests on the show. We have Colin Snow. Colin is the CEO and founder of Skylogic Research, LLC. He is very well known in the industry as the drone analyst. He has a 25-year technology industry background. He is a veteran in technology. He has a background in market research, enterprise software, electronics, digital imaging and mobility. His experience includes aerial photography as well as making, programming and piloting remote control aircraft. He holds an MBA from Florida Atlantic University. He is a member of all major UAS industry groups including AUVSI and the AMA. He holds a FAA Part 107 remote pilot’s certification and he is the man behind Skylogic Research. Skylogic Research for those of you who do not already know this is a research, content and advisory services firm that Colin started back in 2012 with the purpose of supporting all participants in the commercial unmanned aircrafts systems space. His missions, Skylogic Research’s missions, is to help companies make critical investment decisions with confidence by providing research base insights on the commercial drone market segments. Colin is here on the show today and we are really looking forward to talking to him. We also have Isabella Gustave and Isabella is the marketing manager at UAV Coach. UAV Coach is a drone training, education and news company for unmanned aerial vehicle operators. She is a great person and has a great feel for the pulse of the drone industry. She shares the top drone’s stories of the week at the UAV Coach Newsletter. The newsletter is delivered to nearly 50,000 drone pilots around the world so you need to subscribe to that. She also connects drone pilots with educational resources such as flight training classes, and Part 107 study materials. You could learn more about her and UAV Coach at UAVCoach.com. The technology of sUAS is available for many types of operations, but people have failed to really account that to man for new and emerging technolgy is always well behind the capabilities of the technology itself. Colin, you have been expressing caution for years. The 2018 version, the 2018 Drone Market Sector Report identifies both challenges and opportunities. Give us a high-level view of the key challenges that you see for drone service providers today based on the survey results.
Colin: Thank you for having me on the podcast. Let me first start by putting your contexts, putting a questioning in contexts of the research. This is our third annual benchmark report and our objective really is to gain insights on which industries are thriving and which are not, and how businesses are using in drone-acquired data in their day-to-day operations. We look at four segments of the market. We look at drone aircraft and payload purchases, we look at drone service providers, we look at business and publications to users and we look at the software and apps. The data from this report and what I will be mentioning throughout the podcast comes from a survey we conducted just this past July and August and it had over 2500 respondents. The full report is 107 pages; and has 51 figures and tables. It is a big, large report that we still have not obtained some of the key insights. One of them is the one that you just mentioned. We have seen, for at least the last two surveys, that drone news and industry and publications is still new but it is still maturing. While everybody complains about current drone regulations and pints for beyond visual line of sight operations freedom, it is important to remember both the strengths and weaknesses of the current situations we are in. This is our view of it. One of the real good strengths about where we are today in the drone industry is that we have some pretty good solution maturity. That means solution, meaning the aircraft and software although it is constantly improving and out-of-the box data capture accuracy but most drone solutions are good today. If greater accuracy is needed, people can easily get readily available better technology like our TK or PTK. The other thing that is really good about where we are right now in the industry is the costs of drones themselves. That is the costs of consumer drones and the broad base support from a range of software developers and the pricing plans and subscription based models for that software and mapping services. It is competitive so there are many opportunities we think that are good opportunities; please check them out. A lot of software packages have premium capabilities and then there is a good availability of resources including legal services like your own or drone specific aviation insurance, trade shows, flight training, webinars, and how to guides like what UAV Coach provides. There is just a plethora of resources available for anybody who wants to start their own practice. The problem is that there are some weaknesses right now, with what we see in at least some of the technology and where we think there is still more growth to be had is, first, has to do with data processing bottlenecks. Most solutions we have seen not all require that you upload images from the drone aircraft to a mobile device, laptop or cloud service. Then they are stitched together to create a 3D model and then the underlying data is processed into usable layers. In most situations, you pretty much have to wait for the information, sometimes hours or sometimes overnight. The other weakness of course, and you know a lot about this, is the airspace restrictions, piloting drones over building and construction sites or (6:51) in a city or urban district or an airport zone or area identified as critical infrastructure; sometimes that is a real challenge. It came out in our survey; we saw that people were challenged by getting permissions. There are other challenges that are outside of the purview of any of the technology like weather conditions. There may be legal restrictions outside of airspace for particular locations, getting access to a take off and landing point and then there may be job site obstructions itself. You may be flying into construction; there are cranes and cranes move from the last time you were there so it is hard to do a repeatable mission. Then there are some other things and these are more complex. We see issues in IT and data governance in some cases. For example inspections, a single drone can collect 550 to 100 GB of data and managing these large data sets still have not seem to be worked out yet by IT departments— it is, the people who are consuming it. You may be able to collect many good data, but people are struggling on the enterprise business side to know how to deal with that. That is what we sort of see or the strength and weaknesses where we are right now.
Enrico: Great. Isabella why don’t you chime in and give us your thoughts and questions.
Isabella: Thank you for having me on the podcast as well. I like that we can talk about some of the challenges in the industry right now. The survey also pointed out some opportunities and one of those is that there is a very low barrier to entry for service providers. So one of my questions to Colin is, do you think that barrier to entry to start your own drone business as a service provider is going to stay low with only requiring Part 107 certification or do you see the entry barrier to entry rising in this feature as the service side of the drone industry becoming more saturated?
Colin: That is a good question. The best thing we see at least legally from the regulators that would be more than just the FAA, because our survey is global, we do not see anything outside of the regulators themselves changing or making things more difficult. Besides regulations, no I do not think there is anything that is really going to raise the barrier at all. I think there will be more competition as more, we said this early on, and we even said this before we had Part 107 actually become law when it was first proposed. We thought there is a considerable barrier of entry. Before we had Part 107, we were under Section 333 and that basically was businesses had to apply for an exemption. That was a fairly large hurdle for people to get over because to fly the drone, you had to have some type of a pilot’s license. Well now, we do not. You know the requirement for pilot’s licenses may change. The FAA could change that requirement. There is nothing in the law that restricts them from changing it, but we will see. Our take is in as far as we can see, we project that about 5 years; we do not see that hurdle increasing.
Enrico: Colin I want to talk a little about real world situations for Part 107 pilots trying to build a drone service business. Insight #4 of the report indicated some really interesting things. The quotes are that the USA market is flooded with service providers reporting very little revenue. Almost half of the service providers have only been in the business for less than a year. 78% earn under $50,000 per year, only about 12% make over $100,000 per year, and I assume that is gross revenue. About half have just one fulltime employee, and that is the remote pilots themselves. So, big step back, if I am trying to launch a drone service business, I get my Part 107, what strategies do you think I need to account for given the modest revenue and part time operations in order to position myself to be ready for future market growth.
Colin: Thanks for asking me that question. We are asked this question quite a bit. We have written several times, in fact, we just published three reports called quick start guides that provide an introduction to drone use in specific industries. The papers are designed for people you just described who want to get into and understand so they want to get the drone base service business to maximize the value that they can bring to the business operational groups. These reports were written to provide guidance per industry specific that should help new Part 107 service businesses kick-start their business. There is one for energy; there is one for infrastructure inspection. Let me answer the question specifically. Research we did this year and last year tell us pretty much the same thing, if you want to make money in the drone business, you cannot be a generalist. You must be a specialist. That is, you must be or become a subject matter expert in a specific industry or (12:45) use case. We do not think it is gone, but we think where people start out is in aerial photography and video and that is a market that is pretty saturated. There are plenty of businesses that serve plenty of Part 107 pilots that can service that business and those are the part timers. Those are the people making below $50,000 a year. The ones that are making above $100,000 a year— that is where it gets interesting because it is specific. They offer services beyond just flying a drone itself, they are doing photogrammetry work or they are in and offering surveying and mapping services. Let me give you an example what kind of expertise you would need. For example, critical infrastructure. You need to be an expert on that asset. You need to know the customer’s specific workflow and the analytics they need. You cannot just fly a drone and hand them some data. They are not looking for just that. They are looking for more than that. If you are thinking, oh gosh I have an automated mapping and mission-planning program and now I can become a surveyor or mapper, you cannot just hang out your shingle and say you are doing surveying. In fact, you cannot do that because that is illegal. In most states, you need a license to be or to say that you are a surveyor or mapper. So here is what we recommend, we recommend that people learn a specific service. It could be as simple as learning how to do photo or video editing. So you are offering more than just taking a picture, you are actually offering a service beyond that— the processing of the data. Another one would be is learning how to become a photogrammetrist and photogrammetry of course is being able to take multiple pictures and be able to create a 3D digital image of a particular subject and there is a lot of software that does that but the software is not completely automated. There is a lot you need to do to process that to make it accurate and usable for a particular customer and photogrammetrist not new to drone photogrammetry has been out there before drones ever go on the scene, especially aerial photogrammetry and a couple organizations offer certifications. One of them that we point people to is the ASPRS, which is the American Society of Photogrammetry Remote Sensing. They offer certifications in not only in drone news but also, in particular, photogrammetry. That is where we think and how people will make money.
Enrico: Yeah, and Colin, we obviously see this a lot on our side too when we speak to these folks who buy a drone and they want to get into it and the first questions are do you have a customer base and what is your expertise? And when and if the answer is I do not have a customer base and I do not have any expertise, it always seems to us and we recommend you may look at this is, where you are building a company. You are going out and you are finding the pieces to the puzzle, right? Therefore, you need to bring someone in to your company as a co-owner or what have you or an employee to be able to provide that piece of the puzzle within a specialized niche. I am sure Isabella you are seeing this too within your pilot database. What thoughts to do you have about this particular part of the puzzle?
Isabella: Absolutely. We have interviewed a handful of business owners operating drones and part of their business whether it is in photography or mapping or surveying, and we get a lot of the same or similar feedback. When we ask them for advice, what advice as a successful service provider would you give to someone wanting to start a drone service business? They always say find a specialization and really hone their skills. Then don’t promise more than you can deliver like in the example Colin made with surveying. You need a certification to survey and in addition to a certification to fly a drone commercially, and sometimes people going in to drone services without doing the proper research find out they promised more they can deliver. Really being aware of different regulations in the industry you want to enter into and not just drone regulations but regulations around that industry such as surveying or mapping and being aware of federal laws and also state laws. There is a lot that goes into it but we have seen repeatedly that it is possible and like we mentioned barrier to entry as well. If you do the proper, research and really commit to a certain field, specialization, or sector industry that is when we see some success as well.
Enrico: And you know we have been doing new and emerging technology law since the new and emerging technology was something called the internet in 1992 and it is the same every time; it is the technology that can do all kinds of amazing things. You can build these apps, you can build software but getting end users to actually adopt is a good trick and it takes time. Another part of insight #4 that I found fascinating Colin, which really hits the nail on the head is that it gives us some hope that, yes, there is this upward trend in revenue compared to last year’s number. There is less people making under $50,000 and more people making more than $50,000 than last year and there is an increase in a number of employees on average. Is there a tipping point Colin where the market demand moves from slow growth to rapid growth? If so, what triggers do you expect will drive a more dramatic increase in demand.
Colin: Well, so let me start by this. In saying, we believe this is the number one misconception in the drone industry. We have said this for a while. We even said this all the way back in 2015. We said that number one misconception is how fast it will grow and which sector will grow and which ones will lag. The answer to your question directly, no we do not see a tipping point anytime soon in the future. That is for lots of reasons. We think growth will continue to be incremental, but not expediential. I know a lot of people point to beyond visual line of sight as the soon to be in flexion point where we will all of a sudden see on you PIC roles, we don’t see it that way and to be clearer, a few of us have been making this clearing call for years now. It has nothing to do with drones or the technology itself. It has more to do with the way in which the businesses adopt new technology and you should know this. This is not the internet and it is not a consumer or business to business or business to consumer play. No one disagrees that consumer and professional drones they represent this great new emerging market; they do. And drone forecast they abound, we currently track 84 independent companies that provide market forecast. We look at them and buy them; we scrutinize them and each one of them rejects this growth for the drones or unmanned aerial systems sector. It is nothing short of phenomenal. Some of these are built on some really questionable methods and, at the time they were written, there was no historical sales or really no reliable market data on which to create proper forecast. We think the proper way to do it is to access and look at individual industries and look at it ground up. That is what we do. It is sort of our nature the market is to really look at industrial demand and look at the economics but also looking beyond the economics, we think there are some triggers that will drive increase demand. Again, most of these are out of the control of the drone service providers or drone vendors. The triggers would include a variety of factors. This is probably number one; it has to do with how digitized is the particular industry and what is their technology adoptions. What is the business risk aversion that a particular industry or particular business itself may have. We still think there is concerns about the invasion of privacy. No technology or advancement in regulations is going to change that. I will give you a couple of examples: one of them is one we looked at early on; everyone thought that agriculture was going to be this big and huge drone adoption. However, when we looked at it, we looked at the agricultural sector. We looked at what was really triggering drone use and the use case itself. When you go beyond crop scouting, you are now into crop vigor and you want to do a crop vigor analysis, and farmers have been doing crops vigor analysis for a long time, and people when talking about this end process where you fly a drone, it would take a near NBVI image of a field and you would be able to know what area of the field needed a particular prescription. Then you would apply that to your variable rate sprayer, and you could save a lot of money via imagery the drone captured on the back end by the variable rate you were pushing the prescriptions onto your field. The problem is that variable rate technology adoption is low. It depends which survey you look at. Anywhere from only 15 to maybe as high as 20% of farmers that live in the USA have adopted the variable rate technology. In other parts of the world, it is even lower. Therefore, that is one example where you know the key, the thing that would create any kind of optic, really is around the adoption of digitization. Is the farmer a digital farmer and then if they are, have they adopted some kind of variable rate technology, well that is not high at the moment. Then we look at the other things, we look at McKinsey study. McKinsey Global Institute looks at all the industries; they look at how much they have adopted the digital technology for things like their assets, and their business processes and labor. When you look at that chart, you can see clearly how the industries line up, so for example you find that information and communication technology sector that is way up in the list because they have adopted technology from the very beginning. That would be one of the things why you would see the success of the internet operating within peoples’ IP businesses. You look at that same list though and you look at who is at the bottom; at the bottom is construction and agriculture and that is not a surprise to us and you look at construction the way things are done traditionally. Construction is: someone creates a paper plan, throw it over the wall, and give it to the builder. With agricultures we talked about, it’s really not a digitized operation, not yet. There is a lot of technology available but overall adoption is not as high. Oil and gas that is somewhere in the middle. They have some firms that are very technology driven but a lot of them will operate under traditional methods that is especially in the area of assets maintenance. They are operating where they are outsourcing that or to contractors and those contractors, they are happy with the way the contractors operate and they operate under the terms of services and terms of agreements that are tied very much to the way the businesses operate legally and the regulatory restrictions around how something needs to be and how often it needs to be inspected. We look at this and you put in the context of drones. Drones are digitalization enabler and so for adoption to take place on a large scale, the industry itself would need to be either widely digitized or on a path to digitalization. Therefore, that is how we look at it. We look at it in terms of the context of the industry.
Enrico: Interesting. Isabella, what kind of thoughts, questions do you have regarding these market sectors?
Isabella: I really enjoyed the examples along with giving and kind of comparing that the different sectors are growing at different rates based on how they see drones fitting into their day-to- day tasks and what they need to accomplish. I think as we see a greater knowledge and more wide broad understanding of what drones are capable of, that growth we might see an uptake in adoptions and drone technology and then we might see a faster rate of growth in the drone industry. However, I agree that for now I think it is going to remain growing at a slow and steady pace. We are still discovering new applications in drone technology and the hardware has made jumps and leaps in the past five years. Now we are focusing a lot, you will see, throughout the industry, people are focusing a lot more on what the software can do leading us into realizing that drones have been digitized to the ability not just the physical machine not to go up into the size and pictures of but the data what can we do with that and how can we meet the different needs of these different sectors. I found that really interesting as well and hope to look forward to seeing an increase in the growth rate of the industry, I think it will take off, but it will take some time.
Enrico: Colin, here is a question that it is going to probably be on the minds of our listeners who are starting out. If you were launching your drone service business today and you had some resources so that you could partner-up, you could make the investment you need in the technology, what would be the sector that you personally would go after?
Colin: Me personally, I think the most promise is in firms that are able to contract out for large work where there is a higher profit margin, that is not a volume play. We think there is a volume play if you are drone based, or you are a droners IO and you are selling packages to commercial end users, and using pilots on demand, that is a volume play, but for individual Part 107 pilots, we think the best way, which we discussed earlier, was to really specify a particular industry. We look at the DSPs who have done some things specifics and look at companies like Measure, Sky-Future, Cyberhawk, and Droneview. They are offering industry specific services, so for Sky-Futures, it is oil and gas; for Cyberhawk, same thing, it is oil and gas; and Droneview it is surveying and mapping. Each one of those comes with its own individual sets of overhead that is required for businesses to make money and do it repeatedly. I look at DroneView as DroneView Technologies is one of the companies that have been pretty successful to hang in there and build a large drone service business because they tried everything first, now they are down to really looking at surveying and mapping. They are looking at mining and aggregates and looking at particular industries where they have some in house expertise. They go for contracts where they know they can make a profit and that takes time, that takes somebody and takes some business development, somebody inside the business who can really know how to write and navigate a contract otherwise you can lose all of your margins in the extra time and overhead that it takes to meet the customer’s data requirements. If I was a model like anybody, I think I would model what drone you have, but with the caveat of saying that a lot of it comes from experience and experience over time and it just does not happen over night.
Enrico: Yeah. Isabella, same completely unfair question. If you were going to launch your own business today, what direction would you go in?
Isabella: That is really a very difficult question, but I think it is a good one; a question many people have in mind. I see a lot of maturity in the aerial photography sector, in the real estate sector and I also think those are fairly easy to get into. I am not sure which ones, which specific sector I would pick, but I think if I was just starting out, I would lean towards one of those more mature sectors where you might find more standards in place or processes. Some of the newer or less mature uses might just have a little more leg work but you get what you put in so I would encourage anyone to see what their current skills line up with or interest, and to take a good look at the maturity of the industry and what the challenges might be in that particular sector.
Enrico: One of my favorite quotes is that the number one differentiator in any of these new and emerging technology spaces is perseverance. Right? The good news is the costs to be a service provider is relatively low that you do not have to do it fulltime right now that you can build your skills over time, get information and start to understand the market and start to see the opportunities and grow over time and be prepared to take advantage of the opportunity when it comes. If you were going to be or looking to make a quick buck, this is not the sector for you. You need to have that long-term view. Colin, where can people obtain the 2018 Drone Market Sector Report and how much does it costs to get a hold of this? And before you answer, just let me say this to people who are building their drone businesses, you need to understand that it is more than just buying a drone, you are building a business, you need information, you need expertise, you need to develop a business plan that is going to take you from here to there. To have this kind of information available to you is going to give you the insights you need to run in a particular direction and how much time is wasted going in the wrong direction or multiple directions. You have to pick a path and stick to it. You want to be on the right path so you want to do it from a foundation of information. Colin, where can people get this report?
Colin: They can get the report itself on my website Droneanalyst.com. Under the research tab; when you click on that research tab you will see that there are several tabs for both the free reports that we have, the ones I mentioned earlier, the industry specific ones. We have them dated all the way back to 2015. This report itself, which gives you really the current state of the market will really give you a leg up on your competition, is $16.50 for a single user license and $24.50 for an enterprise license if you are a larger firm and you have people across the country, that report comes with 60 minutes of free consulting and again that is available at Droneanalyst.com/research. We also have a blog that we write and you can keep up-to-date with the latest research.
Enrico: You are also @ColinSnow on Twitter, and that is a good place to find you as well or is there another Twitter handle?
Colin: That one is dead; the one that I use is @droneanalyst. I use that one.
Enrico: Isabella, where can people find you online and tell us a little bit more about what you folks can offer to pilots and service providers in this space.
Isabella: Absolutely. We offer flight-training classes in 20 different states across the U.S. where a certified drone pilot will meet with you in person and introduce you to DJI software and drones. We also have an online Part 107 crash course, which will prepare you to take the aeronautical knowledge test and help you along your way to become a certified remote pilot. You can learn all about this on UAVCoach.com and we are also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @UAVCoach. I encourage anyone considering starting a drone business and starting from the very beginning with regards to their certification to check it out.
Enrico: We know from Colin’s research that about 50% of the folks in that study had been in the business for less than a year. So this is like most emerging technology sectors, it is the new people who come into the business that really help spurn growth, expertise, niches. It is great if you have been around a long time, but do not be afraid get in the business, and do not be afraid to evolve that expertise. There is still plenty of time; this market is still maturing. We will see you next time. Isabella and Colin, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Colin: Thank you for having us.
Isabella: Thank you for having us.
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Skylogic Research Resources:
- Order the 2018 DRONE MARKET SECTOR REPORT. Click Here.
- See more resources and free resources below.
UAV Coach Resources:
- Receive regular email updates on breaking news, industry events, interviews with drone leaders and product reviews. Click Here.
- Obtain Drone Training for recreational and Part 107 Operations. Click Here.
- Book a personal or small group flight training class with one of our expert drone coaches. Click Here.
Additional Skylogic Research Resources:
Free Drone Industry Segment Reports from Skylogic Research:
- Public Safety and First Responders – Five Valuable Business Lessons Learned About Drones in Public Safety and First Responder Operations – In this June 2017 industry-specific Skylogic Research report, we examine the most important trends and strategies in this commercial drone market sector. FREE. Get the report here.
- Asset and Infrastructure Inspection – Five Valuable Business Lessons Learned About Drones in Asset and Infrastructure Inspection – In this June 2017 Skylogic Research industry report, we examine the most important trends and strategies in this commercial drone market sector. FREE. Get the report here
- Mining and Aggregates – Five Valuable Business Lessons Learned About Drones in Mining and Aggregates – In this May 2017 Skylogic Research industry report, we examine the most important trends and strategies in this commercial drone market sector. FREE. Get the report hereTop 40 Drone Data Services – In this August 2018 Skylogic Research report we list the top software applications and data services for processing drone images. FREE. Get the spreadsheet report here.
- Construction – Quick-Start Guide to Drones In Construction – In this April 2018 Skylogic Research industry report, we provide guidance and industry-specific resources that will help you kick-start your practice. Our goal is to help drone-based service providers and business users maximize the value that drones can bring to operational groups. FREE. Get the report here
- Energy – Quick-Start Guide to Drones In Energy Inspection – In this June 2018 Skylogic Research industry report, we provide guidance and industry-specific resources that will help you kick-start your practice. Our goal is to help drone-based service providers and business users maximize the value that drones can bring to operational groups. FREE. Get the report here
- Infrastructure – Quick-Start Guide to Drones In Public Infrastructure – In this July 2018 Skylogic Research industry report, we provide guidance and industry-specific resources that will help you kick-start your practice. Our goal is to help drone-based service providers and business users maximize the value that drones can bring to operational groups. FREE. Get the report here
- Agriculture – Five Valuable Business Lessons Learned About Drones in Agriculture – In this April 2017 Skylogic Research industry-specific report we look at recent datapoints that show what works and what doesn’t for growers, agronomists, and precision agriculture service providers. FREE. Get the report here
- Construction – Five Valuable Business Lessons Learned About Drones in Construction – In this March 2017 Skylogic Research industry-specific report, we look at how drones and drone technology are being used by the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. In the report, we demonstrate what drone operators have learned about what works and what doesn’t. FREE. Get the report here
- Agriculture – Truth about Drones in Precision Agriculture – In this June 2016 Skylogic Research report we look at how drones have been used as remote sensing devices in agriculture thus far, review competitive and traditional approaches using incumbent technology, discuss the opportunities and challenges posed by the technology itself, outline the lessons learned, and discuss what’s next for drones in agriculture. FREE. Get the report here
- Construction and Inspection – The Truth about Drones in Construction and Inspection – In this July 2016 Skylogic Research report we show how drones have been used successfully in construction and infrastructure asset management as aerial image and data capture devices thus far, review competitive and traditional approaches using incumbent technology, discuss the opportunities and challenges posed by the technology itself, outline the lessons learned, and discuss what’s next for drones in this industry. FREE. Get the report here.
- Public Safety and First Responders – The Truth about Drones in Public Safety and First Responder Operations – in this July 2016 Skylogic Research report we detail the major use cases and discusses the challenges and lessons learned by police and search & rescue teams including the lessons offered by Gene Robinson, head of Unmanned Aircraft Operations for the Wimberley Fire Department, from his work in the aftermath of the 2015 Texas Memorial Day floods FREE. Get the report here.
- Drone Delivery – Drone Delivery: By The Numbers – This October 2014 Skylogic Research study polled consumers on package delivery by drones. It probes the maximum amount they would be willing to pay and determines under what circumstance would they need something so quickly that they’d pay top dollar for it. FREE. Read research here.