The operator's craft beneath the regulation — planning, capture, processing and delivery, with the honest decisions the rules don't teach you.
The operator's craft beneath the regulation — planning, capture, processing & delivery.
Not a manual. Not a marketing piece. The honest, sometimes uncomfortable answers Ken would give if you sat down for a coffee.
The thinking that separates operators who get repeat work from operators who don't — judgement under pressure, not the latest sensor.
Drawn from years of live work in rail, infrastructure and complex urban environments — pre-flight to processing to professional delivery.
Pre-flight go/no-go, abort criteria, delivery handover — lifted straight from the working notebook. Print them, paste them, ship them.
The thinking that comes before the flying. Decision-making under pressure, what good capture looks like, why processing is quality control — not a rescue tool.
The stakeholder brief, airspace and site checks, TOAL selection, the assumptions that quietly kill good work, and the go/no-go framework that goes wider than "can the drone fly".
What you're really monitoring, when to pause or abort, the margins nobody talks about, automation overrides, and the environmental conditions operators underestimate.
Reading the early signs of failure, QA as the most important step, professional handover — and the difference between visually impressive and operationally trustworthy.
Stories, patterns and hard-won lessons from the work itself: corridor mapping in a rail environment, when the conditions won't cooperate, why stopping was the right decision, and the habits that keep operators getting paid for the long run.
"The regulations tell you what you're allowed to do. Experience tells you what you should do. This book is mostly about the second one."From the introduction
Order now in paperback — and read it the next time you're staring at a brief that doesn't quite add up.
PAPERBACK · 90 PAGES