Airdata UAV
Simplifying and Scaling Compliant Drone Operations

Drones are moving from a novel way to capture data to an integral part of daily business operations. The benefit of using drones versus traditional, manual data collection methods is huge and achieved pretty easily—in terms of cost, time, safety, integrity, and accuracy of data.

Through analyzing flight logs, Airdata UAV provides valuable insights and recommended actions to allow Enterprises to scale their drone operations, meet maintenance, safety and compliance requirements, as well as improve business workload effectiveness.

“We are seeing Enterprises more reliant on the data drones are collecting, creating an increasing need for reliability and repeatability of drone operations. CIOs have to deal with scaling up their operations and managing large volumes of data in a safe, compliant, and effective manner, which is where Airdata UAV comes in,” describes Eran Steiner, Founder and CEO of Airdata UAV.

Steiner started his career over 20 years ago as a pilot in the Israel Air Force, and later shifted his focus to military drones. After his military service, he led various engineering teams in the Enterprise software market. Steiner identified the opportunity to extract intelligence from drone flight logs, as “flying computers,” similar to how log analysis has increased the predictability of computer servers in meeting Enterprise business endeavors.

“Initially, I founded the company to provide drone pilots with crash prevention information. It is very difficult to understand what is going on in the air from the ground, as camera stabilization technology is so good you will not know if the drone is struggling or shaking. A warning might pop on the screen, but you may miss it if your eyes are on the drone or checking if there are people nearby or potential obstacles, such as power lines, in the area. We are improving on the pilot experience to allow pilots to focus on flying. We automated the data collection from the drone flights to ensure that pilots can focus on their job without having to waste time in writing details down manually in a traditional logbook, reducing manual errors and data inconsistencies,” says Steiner.

“With my enterprise software experience, I was amazed at the amount of data the drones were collecting and saw a real opportunity to create an Enterprise offering which took our solution beyond the individual pilot to a broader operation and the ability for the organization to leverage multiple drones across pilots. We streamlined the data collection and ‘back-office’ time spent manually recording data, and eased pilot’s ability to learn from past recorded flights in order to “optimize flight performance” and for operators to properly maintain their drones,” adds Steiner.

“The Airdata team’s background is diverse and based on years of experience with enterprise software and data center solutions such as Splunk, Citrix, Oracle and Intel. We also love to fly drones,” Steiner proudly claims.

“After becoming the leading drone log analysis company with more than 7 million flights uploaded to date, processing an average of 15,000 flights a day, and with high-resolution data stored per each flight, we are best positioned to detect when real issues arise. We are growing steadily and are now serving more than 100,000 active users. Furthermore, the ability to harness data from over 250,000 drones in the Airdata system helps delivering a very comprehensive level of analytics.” says Steiner.

The cutting-edge Airdata platform can help CIOs scale drone operations to improve enterprise business processes, while keeping the operation safe, compliant, and effective

“Regulatory auditors are impressed by the wealth of data provided by us as this kind of detailed information is not even available for manned flights,” explains Steiner. For example, one of Airdata’s enterprise customers in the mining industry was looking to get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to expand their drone operations. Since they were already using Airdata, the audit of their operations and approval for expansion took only days instead of months. “They were able to do so with the confidence that they would be successful in the expanded use of drones around their various operations,” adds Steiner.

Additionally, for many IT departments the Airdata platform assists with issues of control and governance, in terms of understanding where and how the data is collected, and ensuring that their drones are being properly maintained, so that they can be deployed safely when needed. Moreover, the high-resolution data collected by Airdata enables in-depth analysis and safety tracking while also helping customers with regulatory compliance.

“Our goal is to provide CIOs and their organizations a solution where all their drone related data can be easily managed in one place, such as pilot, aircraft, flight, environmental and sensor data, especially in a large scale operation from a data, security, and latency perspective. The cutting-edge Airdata platform can help CIOs scale drone operations to improve enterprise business processes, while keeping the operation safe, compliant, and effective,” concludes Steiner.

With a primary focus on data analytics, Airdata understands how to prevent critical drone failure especially when drones are shared by multiple pilots. “With such unique functionality as our wind analysis and our innovative battery analysis and management, we can identify issues with the mission-critical battery and alert to help avert a potentially catastrophic crash,” adds Steiner.

Airdata has recently released the capability for customers to upload the high-resolution sensor data. Steiner envisions that this will open new opportunities for drone operators across multiple use cases. They also have more work in the pipeline on pre-flight planning and real-time video streaming across multiple flight apps.

“We see the effect of these new features on utility, mining, and oil and gas companies, with how they can be more proactive in terms of assessing potential issues with their infrastructure. It’s a Big Data challenge for CIOs as they now have much higher resolution data that can be trended over time,” adds Steiner.

“Airdata will continue to help drone operators improve their enterprise business processes, as well as stay compliant and safe with a robust, cutting edge, and user-friendly technology,” concludes Steiner.