Heights, wire clearances and span lengths, read off a measurable 3D of each pole and checked point by point against the drone’s own LiDAR. Open a pole in a browser, read the numbers, and repeat along the line. Nobody climbed and no road was closed.
An owner needs heights, clearances and span lengths for every pole on a line, and the line has thousands. Sending a crew to each one is slow and expensive, and photographs on their own give a picture rather than a measurement. The question was never whether a pole can be photographed. It is whether anything on the resulting record can be trusted enough to act on.
A distribution line is thousands of near-identical structures spread over open country, most of them reachable only on foot or from a track. Everything an owner has to decide about it depends on dimensions, and gathering dimensions is the part that costs real money. So inspection is rationed, the record ages between visits, and the gap between what is on file and what is standing in the field widens quietly.
How close the growth has come to the conductor decides where a cutting crew goes next. That decision is usually made from a patrol note or an estimate from the ground, because the alternative is measuring it properly on every span.
Crews are dispatched span by span, so a figure attached to a whole circuit is not actionable. A figure attached to a span, with the date it was read, is.
Reaching a pole is a vehicle, a track, a landowner and most of a day. Once somebody is there, measuring is quick. That is why anything that answers the question without the journey changes the arithmetic.
Each crew knows what they did. Nobody holds the current whole, which is how two teams in one business end up planning from different versions of the same line.
Pole heights, crossarm heights, span lengths and the clearance under the lowest wire, read off the 3D instead of off a crew’s day.
The closest vegetation to the wires on each span, so the next flight shows what has grown back rather than starting again.
Each one is stated as agreement with the LiDAR rather than asserted on its own. That is what lets somebody outside the team argue with it.
Two of the eight were reported as needing a re-flight rather than shown inaccurately, which is more useful than eight poles where nobody can say which two are wrong.
A record is worth what it lets somebody decide. These are the decisions this one supports, and none of them is made by the model: each is a person deciding, with measurements in front of them instead of an estimate from the ground.
Every figure on this page says what kind of figure it is. That is the whole of why it can be used.
The lowest the wire gets at mid-span, and how close the nearest growth comes to it, for every span on this stretch. 2 of the 7 carry vegetation inside 3 m of the conductor. Read on 10 November 2026 from a scan flown on 18 October 2024, which is the gap every one of these figures has to be read with.
| Span | Lowest wire at mid-span | Closest vegetation to the wires | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Span 1 | 9.63 m | 6.66 m | clear at 3 m |
| Span 2 | 9.37 m | 4.66 m | clear at 3 m |
| Span 3 | 6.55 m | 2.51 m | growth inside 3 m |
| Span 4 | 5.84 m | 3.17 m | clear at 3 m |
| Span 5 | 7.65 m | 1.86 m | growth inside 3 m |
| Span 6 | 6.46 m | 5.13 m | clear at 3 m |
| Span 7 | 7.63 m | 4.56 m | clear at 3 m |
Read from the drone LiDAR and from our 3D of the same poles. The LiDAR is the reference. Distances in metres. The line is not identified and nothing here locates it.
The check behind every figure above: the drone’s own LiDAR laid over our 3D of the same pole. Half the points agree within 8 cm and nine in ten within 28 cm, over 143,547 points. Before that fit, positioning alone placed the pole to about 1.0 m.
An engineer confirms before a decision. These figures are good enough to see with, compare with and plan with. They are not good enough to settle anything.
Everything is stated as agreement with the LiDAR. The LiDAR’s own accuracy belongs to its vendor.
These are good enough to see with, compare with and plan with. They are not good enough to settle a boundary, a clearance breach or a claim.
It describes the line as it was scanned in October 2024. Vegetation in particular has moved, which is why every figure carries its date rather than being presented as today.
The obvious thing to put here is crew visits avoided. Nobody measured that, so there is no figure for it and we are not inventing one.
Captured by Airweb’s drone pilot network. The flying is theirs and the reading is ours. Their logo is their own, shown on a dark panel of ours so it is legible here.
No. It is for an engineer to confirm before any decision rests on it. Where a surveyed figure exists, the surveyed figure wins. What this does is put a measurement where there was previously an estimate from the ground.
On the pole we checked in full, half the points sit within 8 cm of the LiDAR and nine in ten within 28 cm. Along the line, the poles that passed are typically within 10 to 25 cm. Those are agreements with the LiDAR, not absolute accuracies: the LiDAR’s own accuracy is its vendor’s to state, not ours.
Because a measurement with nothing to check it against is an opinion with a decimal point. Positioning alone places a pole to about a metre. Fitting it to the LiDAR the same aircraft collected is what takes it to centimetres and makes the numbers worth printing.
The flights we had would not place them to the same standard, so they were reported as needing a re-flight. Publishing eight numbers where six are checked would have made the whole record worth less, not more.
They describe the line on the day it was scanned, 18 October 2024, and they were measured from that scan on 10 November 2026. Growth has moved since. That gap is why every clearance figure on this page carries its date, and why the value of this is in repeating it rather than in any single pass.
We do not know and we will not put a figure on it. Nothing about time or cost was measured on this job. The obvious claim would be crew visits avoided, and we would be making it up.
One routine drone flight per pole, flown by pilots who already fly them, and the LiDAR from the same aircraft. No ground markers, no road closure and nobody climbing. If you already hold suitable footage and LiDAR, we will look at that first.
This line is wood. The method does not care what the pole is made of, but we would want to see footage of the structure before saying what reads well on it. Lattice and narrow steel are harder, because there is less surface for the flight to see.
You do. The flying is the partner’s and the reading is ours, and what we hand over is yours to keep and put in front of an engineer.
Tell us what it is and what you need to know about it. We will say whether this would answer it, including when it would not.