Planning a flight

A flight plan is the ground you want covered, turned into lines to fly.

Open Flight plans and click New. Draw a shape on the map — a rectangle, or a polygon if the paddock is not one. Give it a name that means something in six months' time.

The aircraft matters

Pick the drone you are actually flying. The platform uses its camera — sensor size and focal length — to work out how much ground each photograph covers, and everything else follows from that: line spacing, how often to trigger, how many frames the flight will take.

If your aircraft is not in the list, add it under Drones with the sensor width, focal length and image dimensions from its specification sheet. Getting these wrong does not produce an error; it produces a flight with gaps in it.

Altitude and resolution

Higher is faster and coarser. Lower is slower and finer. The number that matters is ground sample distance — how much ground one pixel covers — and the plan shows it as you change the altitude.

At 100 m with a typical drone camera you get somewhere around 2–3 cm per pixel. That is enough to count trees, measure a stockpile, or find a gully. It is not enough to read a tag on an ear.

Work backwards from the question. If you want to detect something 30 cm across, you want it to be more than a handful of pixels wide, so you want a GSD of a centimetre or two, so you want to fly lower — and accept more frames, a longer flight and more battery changes.

Overlap

Two numbers, and they are the difference between a reconstruction and a folder of photographs.

• Front overlap — how much each frame shares with the one before it along the line. Default 75%.
• Side overlap — how much adjacent lines share. Default 70%.

The platform will not accept front overlap below 60% or side overlap below 50%, because below that reconstruction fails rather than degrades.

Raise both over ground that is featureless (water, bare sand, a uniform crop) or that changes shape (tree canopy in wind). The reconstruction works by matching the same visible detail across frames; where there is little detail, it needs more frames to find it in.

Heading

Lines run at the heading you set. Set it along the long axis of the area — fewer turns, less battery spent not photographing anything. Over a slope, flying along the contour rather than up and down it keeps the height above ground more constant, which keeps the resolution more constant.

Fly it nadir

Point the camera straight down. The platform discards frames shot more than ten degrees off vertical, at every stage — the browser screener as you upload, the job runner before reconstruction, and the footprint maths. Past ten degrees the assumption that the ground under a frame is a flat rectangle stops being honest, and a wrong footprint is worse than a missing one.

Obliques on the same card are fine. They will be set aside, not rejected, and the survey will tell you how many.

What the plan does and does not promise

It promises coverage: fly these lines at this height with this trigger interval and the ground in the shape you drew will be photographed with the overlap you asked for.

It promises nothing about safety. Airspace, terrain, obstacles, exclusion zones, weather, people below, and whether you hold the approvals to be there are yours. The platform does not know where the powerlines are. Nothing it produces is an authorisation to fly.

Signing off

A plan sits in draft until somebody approves it. Approving requires the pilot, administrator or owner role, and — for a pilot — a remote pilot licence recorded against their account. See People and access.

That is a record for your own operation, not a regulatory clearance. It exists so that when somebody asks who signed off the flight over the highway, the answer is in the system rather than in a memory.

Getting it to the aircraft

Export the plan and load it into your controller or flight app, or read the lines off the screen and fly them manually. The platform does not connect to the aircraft and does not want to: the moment software claims to fly for you, the question of who is responsible gets murky, and it is not murky.