What This Looks Like in Practice
No ladder. No fall protection. No three weeks waiting for a roofer to fit you in.
A drone roof inspection covers a 50,000-square-foot commercial flat roof in one flight battery. Every parapet, every HVAC penetration, every drain, every patch from the last decade is documented — at four-times the resolution of a person walking the surface, with thermal data from the same gimbal that visible-light cameras can't produce. The deliverable is a PDF that goes to the property manager, the insurance adjuster, the tenant who's complaining about a stain on their ceiling, and the roofer who's bidding the repair. One flight. One report. Four audiences.
The Pacific Northwest is a uniquely productive region for this. Wet seasons run roughly October through May. Saturated insulation glows on thermal against the cooling roof skin every time the building loses heat after sundown. The Willamette Valley's overcast diffuse light is also ideal for visible-light condition surveys — no harsh shadows hiding hairline cracks, no sun-glare blowing out white flashing. The job that's a fight in Phoenix is straightforward in Eugene.
What We Use
The aircraft.
Roof work is a thermal-and-visible split job. The fleet covers both well.
DJI M30T
Primary roof platform — 640×512 radiometric thermal and a 200× hybrid-zoom 48 MP visible camera on the same gimbal. Both datasets from one flight. IP55 rating handles the marine layer and the occasional drizzle that defeats lighter aircraft. 41-minute flight time covers most commercial flat roofs in a single battery.
Mavic 3 Pro
Hasselblad 4/3" sensor flying the high-detail visible-light pass. 5.1K HDR video and 20 MP RAW stills. For pre-purchase reports, insurance documentation, and high-resolution condition surveys where image quality is the deliverable.
Mavic 4 Pro
When image quality is paramount and the deliverable is a presentation-grade walkaround video — flagship 4/3" Hasselblad, 6K/60 HDR, three lenses (28/70/168 mm equivalent), 100 MP stills. Used for marquee commercial properties, listing-bound media, and architectural documentation.
Coverage Area
Where we fly.
Same-day default: Eugene, Springfield, Junction City, Cottage Grove, and immediate Lane County. KEUG Class D airspace is daily-familiar territory. Every roof inside the LAANC grid is a routine authorization, not a learning curve.
Next-day default, same-day on demand: Corvallis, Albany, Salem, and the rest of the Willamette Valley. Eugene to Salem is 70 minutes. Eugene to Corvallis is 45.
Reachable for scoped missions: Oregon Coast properties (Florence, Newport, Coos Bay) — particularly relevant for post-storm surveys after winter Pacific systems. Cascade-foothill properties on a per-mission basis.
For multi-property portfolios across Oregon, route-batched scheduling makes a multi-site week cost less than four single-site days.
Mission Stories
Field-grounded reading.
Reading material that frames the service the way the operator does. Not content marketing — actual missions, written after the deliverable.