Monthly progress aerials on a six story build in Class D airspace, $650 a visit plus mobilization

Before you argue about the waiver, find out whether the footage does double duty. If your lender's inspector would accept a monthly aerial as supporting documentation on a draw, that $650 is buying two things. Most construction lenders insist on their own inspection report regardless, so ask in writing before you count it as an offset.

$650 times 14 is $9,100, plus the $1,200 mobilization, so $10,300 before a single reshoot. Price cancellations first. Wind in the twenties, rain, and low ceilings all kill a flight, and a progress series that wants a consistent sun angle has a narrow window each month. Whether a scrubbed visit bills at full, half, or nothing belongs in the quote, and so does who decides it's scrubbed.

Class D three miles out is not the same as denial. LAANC authorization is automated and comes back in seconds against a published altitude grid. The squares near the runway ends can be capped at 0 or 100 feet while the square you need may sit at 200 or 400. Pull the actual grid for your parcel. If your ceiling is 200 and the building tops out at 75, you have working room the whole way up. If the square reads 0, LAANC won't approve it and the further authorization route runs on FAA timelines measured in weeks, which reshapes your whole schedule. Confirm the current process with the FAA rather than taking the pilot's summary of it.

The over-people piece is usually smaller than the proposal makes it sound. People directly participating in the operation, briefed and aware, are treated differently from uninvolved people, and the normal answer is a site brief plus a flight path that stays off the occupied areas. A waiver for flight over uninvolved people is slow enough that nobody schedules a monthly series around getting one.

Settle file retention now rather than at month eleven. If this series ends up in a delay or defect argument, downscaled exports from a sharing link are much weaker than the originals with timestamps and GPS intact, and pilots delete archives to free storage.

Fourteen months of the same frame from the same GPS point is worth more to you than fourteen attractive videos. Ask him to fly a saved waypoint mission and repeat it exactly, most of the mission apps will do it. Then the stack of stills actually reads as a sequence.

Grading and drainage are the things worth documenting most carefully. Both change within a week, and an overhead shot at the same altitude each month is the only cheap record of what the site looked like before a neighbor complains about where the water went.

Whose insurance covers him over an active site? Either he carries his own aviation liability and names you, or he ends up folded into somebody's policy as a sub, and I'd want that written down before mobilization gets paid.