Did you know? The McNeil Engineering team makes use of a drone in ALTA Land Surveying projects and more, all to the benefit of our clients and customers.

Today we’re sharing more about a subject folks tend to find fascinating. Drones are still a curiosity to many people, who associate them with military use and recreational purposes — and sometimes spying on the neighbors. But for the last three years, the McNeil team has been using drones for ALTA Land Surveying, and so much more. And we’re pretty excited to tell you about it. In fact, it’s a subject (you might say) we could ‘drone on and on’ about.

Why? For one thing, our team makes use of leading-edge technology in the projects we complete for our clients. Staying on the cutting edge isn’t just our job, it’s our passion.

So, how do we use drones to benefit our clients? At McNeil Engineering, we use drones for projects such as:

• ALTA Land Surveying
• Construction Management
• Asset Management
• Volumetric Surveys

The applications are practically endless, as we are finding more ways to use drones regularly. Getting a ‘top level’ view helps us to see things others might miss.

When we first started using a drone, we had a simple quadcopter with a GoPro camera. The drone had to be piloted by a person with a remote control. That worked well to take the higher perspective on client projects.

These days, we’ve taken it even further. This year we upgraded to a more sophisticated drone that is capable of flying on a pre-programmed flight path. We use an iPad to create the flight path and upload the program to the drone. Among the benefits to the new drone is that it can take off and land in the same location.

Just as the U.S. military makes use of drones for inspections, aerial photography and video, and GIS mapping, so too can McNeil Engineering make use of the drones for a variety of applications to the benefit of our clients.

What we do in the laser scanning and land surveying department

Our team also uses drones for mapping purposes. We make use of multi-spectral cameras and laser scanners to create high quality 3D maps.

Our scanning services are used in projects including historical preservation, transportation, mining, forensics and insurance investigations, and horizontal and vertical construction. We can create archival point cloud models, 2D CAD drawings, 3D CAD/BIM models, and more.

And that’s just the beginning. If you would like to know more about the laser scanning and land surveying services we offer, please visit our website here for more information.