Site Scan - Mission Planning from the office

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07-16-2020 12:06 PM
COSPNWGuy
Occasional Contributor II

We almost exclusively plan our drone flights ahead of time in the office. We very rarely perform ad-hoc missions in the field. We have to carefully review many factors and don't rush mission planning. In addition, our LAANC requests can sometimes take many days for approval and it doesn't make sense to only request LAANC through the field app. Almost all of our flights are in controlled airspace. It would be nice to have mission planning feature parity between the native field app and the web app. Obviously, any mission plans created in the office would need to be synched and displayed on the device once you do reach the field and are ready to fly.

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6 Comments
JeremiahJohnson_Esri

Currently you can plan basic area or crosshatch flights in the browser using the Site Scan Manger web application. However, the best way to preplan flights is actually using the iPad in the office! That way you have access to all of the flight modes, 3D flight tools, and overlays. There is also LAANC capabilities within the app so you can submit right away.

The flight plans are saved to the cloud, so anyone within your organization with an Operator privilege can execute it, even if they are using a different iPad than was used to plan the flight.

COSPNWGuy

Hi Jeremiah Johnson‌. I appreciate the comment, though I have to disagree some as not having feature parity between the web app and the native app proves logistically challenging. When I talk about the "office", I am also talking about home offices. We only have one iPad, but everyone has access to a PC. Sometimes the person planning the mission might not necessarily be the pilot. We keep the iPad with the UAV. It becomes a pain having to to shuttle a iPad back and forth for full mission planning capabilities (particularly when everyone is working from home in this Covid world). Obviously, we could buy more iPads, but that's hard to justify on the cost side. As someone very (very!) interested in purchasing Sitescan, I would appreciate feature parity. This gives us the best value and flexibility for mission planning. Honestly, the product becomes confusing when functionality doesn't match. The web app should have all the same flight modes\tools and LAANC authorization as the IOS app.

JeremiahJohnson_Esri

Understood.

I guess I should have mentioned at the beginning is that feature parity is on the roadmap. There is some backend architecture work going on currently on the web side that has to be completed before implementing features that are required for the advanced flight planning the iPad provides today.

Stay tuned! 

COSPNWGuy

That's excellent news! Thanks for clarifying. Your initial response seemed that maybe this wasn't something you were thinking about. Glad this is not the case. Very happy this is on the roadmap!!!!!!

NicoBonnafoux
Status changed to: Under Consideration
 
AngelaGray

I too just want to add we also only have 1 iPad and multiple pilots with our own laptops. Flight planning within Manager with our Portal layers and other REST services is needed on our laptops.  Glad to hear it is on the road map.