Overheard two L.A. foremen arguing about a drone that got stuck in a tree

I was at a job site last week in Santa Monica and one foreman was yelling that the drone guy should have used a longer tether, while the other one kept pointing at his phone saying the mapping data was already uploaded. Neither of them actually had a ladder tall enough to reach the branch (it was like 40 feet up). They ended up calling a tree service to get it down, which cost like $200 and killed an hour of concrete pouring. Has anyone else had a drone go rogue on a mapping run and end up in a weird spot?

2 comments

2 Comments

ellis.rose8d ago

Tree service is the real MVP here honestly. Concrete delays are brutal though, that $200 sounds cheap compared to a bad pour. Always happens when the drone decides to find the one branch that's too high for a ladder.

robert_hayes8d ago

Read a piece in a trade magazine about a crew in Texas that lost a drone in a pecan orchard for two days. They had to rent a lift truck to finally get it down. That $200 tree service call is actually a bargain compared to losing the drone and the data on it. Mapping drones are great until they find a branch that wasn't on the site survey. These things happen more often than people want to admit, especially with new operators.