Airborne response inks new utility inspection contracts
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Although the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season fortunately has reached its peak without any major tropical storms hitting Florida, utility companies in the state are continuing to rely on companies that use UAS assets to conduct inspections to provide data that speeds up disaster recovery efforts.
Airborne Response recently announced that it was awarded drone inspection service contracts by two electric utility customers serving millions of central Florida residents. The unnamed midsized utilities join a number of other Florida power companies, including the largest electric utility in the state, to contract for such service from Airborne, a wholly owned subsidiary of Safe Pro Group (NASDAQ: SPAI).
“You’ve got a patchwork quilt of different energy and power companies with Florida Power and Light (FP&L) being the largest,” Airborne founder and president Christopher Todd said in an interview. While many of the larger Florida utility companies were early adopters of the drone inspection service the company provides, “The smaller companies took a little bit longer to scale up their programs and really, they played it safe. They don’t have the resources of some of the larger companies” he said.
The two most recent contracts represent a trend for mid-size municipal utilities, of “wanting to finally, for lack of a better word, get into the game and start having drones at their disposal to come in and help restore power when a hurricane comes through,” Todd said.
Under the new contracts, Airborne will “provide disaster response and aerial imagery capture services to inspect and assess possible storm damage to power grid infrastructure following major storms including hurricanes,” according to the company statement. In addition, upon the customer’s request, Airborne agrees to provide non-storm related “blue sky” condition assessment services for the utilities.
As part of the agreements, Airborne, which deploys a fleet composed of both Chinese-manufactured drones and non-Chinese drones, agreed to use only those UAVs that comply with Florida’s prohibition against the use of drones from foreign countries of concern for government-related contracts.
Todd, who also heads the nonprofit association of drone responders, Airborne International Response Team, launched Airborne in 2016 to specialize in using drones for emergency response to disasters that impact public safety and critical infrastructure.
“By 2017, we had secured one of the first drone response contracts with a major utility,” he said. That same year, Hurricane Irma struck Florida. The powerful and slow-moving storm made landfall on Cudjoe Key, and made its way northward through central Florida and into other southeastern U.S. states, leaving a path of destruction in its wake.
“We worked very closely with that utility and that was really the benchmark year that allowed us to discover how drones can be used for disaster response, especially with power-restoration activities,” Todd said.
Dan Erdberg, CEO of Safe Pro Group noted that the current hurricane season potentially could be one of the most active storm seasons on record for South Florida. In June, scientists at the U.S. Commerce Department’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) predicted that that there was a 60% chance that the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30, would be an above-average season.
As of September 9, at the midpoint of the season, there has been only one major Atlantic hurricane that threatened the U.S. Hurricane Erin. While Erin, a Category 5 storm never made direct landfall on the U.S. coast, it brought dangerous conditions such as rip currents along the Eastern Seaboard.
He said the contract that Airborne has with utility companies throughout the state help ensure that Florida’s power customers will be prepared for the second half of the storm season. “Chris has done a phenomenal job at building out an organization that can scale and provide the state of Florida the resources that it needs to ensure that the civilians have critical power and communications,” Erdberg said.
Todd said the relationship with Safe Pro, which acquired Airborne about two years ago, has given the subsidiary company the corporate backing it needed to prosper in a highly competitive environment.
“Some of these companies tend to come and go, but we’ve got a proven track record,” he said. “Unlike a lot of smaller drone companies that might not have the resources that we have as a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ, we are able to ensure that we’re going to be around for a while.”
Careful preparation key to response
Under Airborne’s contracts, when a hurricane appears to be on track to impact their service area, a utility will alert the company to prepare to launch its post-disaster response. Airborne will place the needed resources, typically a drone and an operator, in position to be on standby for deployment in the aftermath of the storm.
The type of drone-related equipment dispatched to a pending disaster scene largely depends on the needs of the utility customer, Todd said. “There’s usually minimum specs on the drone. Sometimes it’s just RGB-visual. Sometimes they want thermal capabilities and sometimes they want the advanced thermal capabilities with radiometric and everything else.”
In addition, as in the case of Airborne’s two most recent contracts, the drone’s country of origin is often a big factor among Florida’s utility companies for selecting a drone contractor.
“If it is a public company affiliated with the government side, we need to use Blue UAS-type or NDAA- compliant drones that fall within the purview of the Florida legislator as approved drones,” Todd said.
He added that this restriction has proven to be less onerous for his company that it might be for some smaller competitors, because under Safe Pro’s corporate leadership, Airborne has been transitioning away from the use of DJI drones. The company’s fleet now also boasts Skydio and Parrot drones that meet the requirements of its most demanding customers.
Post-disaster, the company’s response is largely determined by location and the extent of damage the disaster had caused.
“It really depends on what the storm does,” Todd said. “We may need to fly thermal missions. We may need to do tower inspections. They may need us to map staging areas. There’s a wide variety of missions that can emerge from the storm, but it really depends on what the storm does and how fierce it is.”
In addition to providing visual inspection services, Airborne has begun offering more comprehensive damage analysis fueled by artificial intelligence (AI).
“We’re definitely looking at how we can incorporate AI image-recognition and artificial intelligence to help the utilities map the damage, identify where there’re anomalies, where there’re defects, and to provide for a quicker restoration,” Todd said. “The whole key to this is getting the grid back up and running as quickly as possible.”
Read more:
- Airborne Response Onboards Over 100 Drone Pilots to Help Combat Rapid Intensification Threat from Hurricanes
- How AI and Drones Are Revolutionizing Utility Inspections: The Drone Radio Show
- Drone Insights from the Biggest Names in Energy and Telecom
Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
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