National Highways
Like Network Rail, National Highways have thousands of miles of linear infrastructure that require around the clock management.
Different to Network Rail, NH don’t have internal teams of drone pilots. Instead, Tier One Construction companies who manage large Highways projects (Kier, Balfour Beatty etc) have their own drone teams and deploy drones widely across the highways network.
Problem
- Before dronecloud, they had no single view or knowledge of where drone operations were happening across their network.
- The process to apply for approval for a drone operation via their GG104 process was taking days or weeks to turn around.
Solution
National Highways make full use of the Dronecloud platform to gain a complete and clear map based view of all the drone operations happening over the highways network.
Dronecloud and National Highways worked closely to understand their existing risk assessment procedures, GG104, and incorporated much of the process into the dronecloud workflow. This has made approvals and notifications of drone flights almost instant.
Sub-contracted organisations working directly for NH can make use of the “Networks” feature. NH can invite organisations to be linked to the NH account and follow a customised workflow. When a linked organisation wishes to carry out a drone operation for highways, the workflow makes the process quick and provides additional project specific information the NH drones team need.
In addition to the “network linked” organisations being able to quickly submit drone flight notifications to the NH team, we also provide the public with a free ability to publish flight notifications should they also wish to fly near the network.
National highways can now control all drone operations and the planning workflows through a single platform.
Impact
By adopting Dronecloud to manage all drone operations across the organisation, NH have been able to quickly and safely increase the use of drones for a huge range of operations. NH are now seeing 1000s of drone flights conducted safely over their network each year.
Allowed the development of drone policy to improve and advance the use of drones for NH.
