Outsourced Drone Inspections Until Automation
Director of UAS Operations at NV5 on navigating the DJI ban to build a compliant drone fleet
This shows why utility drone work stays outsourced until the workflow is simple enough to be almost foolproof. Pole and line inspection is not just handing over a flying camera. It means safely flying close to energized hardware, capturing the right angles, and doing it at wildfire inspection scale. When SCE needed more than 100 crews a year for California pole work, failed internal deployments pushed the work back to specialist contractors with trained pilots.
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The labor mismatch is the core problem. Linemen are trained to build and repair grid equipment, not to fly around poles and wires without crashing. In utilities, drones only save money when the operator can reliably collect usable imagery on the first trip.
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Utilities already use drones and helicopters heavily in wildfire programs, but the work is operationally intense. SCE says it inspects overhead equipment from the ground and air, and its 2026 to 2028 transmission manual says annual aerial inspections are performed mainly via drones in high fire risk areas.
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The exception is fixed site work like substations. New docked systems from vendors like Skydio can fly repeatable routes, read gauges, inspect fence lines, and return to charge, which reduces the skill required compared with hand flying around long distribution circuits.
The next step is not every lineman becoming a pilot. It is more utility inspection moving into constrained, automated setups where the drone launches from a dock, flies a known path, and feeds data straight into asset systems. That shifts in house adoption toward substations first, while large scale pole and corridor inspection remains a contractor led service business.