construction companies, other businesses, seeing increased drone use

As one more sign of their growing popularity, the Federal Aviation Administration has just released figures showing that the agency has received more than 50,000 applications in the last year allowing for the authorized use of drones.

The FAA’s Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capacity program was launched last November and has since seen the use of drones at some five hundred airports nationally.

Those airports include the Albuquerque International Sunport, the Centennial Airport in Denver, the El Paso International Airport, and the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

The LAANC program is designed to buttress the safe integration of drones into airspace across the country, using a combination of flight restriction data and unmanned aircraft system facility maps, among other instruments.

Construction industry statistics, meanwhile, reveal that drones are increasingly being used at job sites to compile aerial data.

According to the 2018 Commercial Drone Industry Trends Report, published earlier this year, drone usage has exploded in the real estate, agriculture, and mining industries, all of which have reported increases ranging from 118 percent to 198 percent.

But the greatest usage was recorded in the nation’s construction industry, with a 239 percent jump from 2017 to 2018.

The report, issued by the San Francisco-based company DroneDeploy, additionally indicated that drones were mostly being used in preconstruction and site planning, as well as in bid processing and job site risk mitigation.

By Garry Boulard

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