Skyports Uses BVLOS Drones to Survey HumeLink West Construction Project

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices is using auto­mat­ed beyond visu­al line of sight (BVLOS) drone oper­a­tions to sur­vey the HumeLink West trans­mis­sion project in New South Wales, Aus­tralia, pro­vid­ing con­struc­tion teams with reg­u­lar aer­i­al data with­out requir­ing pilots to be on site.

The sys­tem uses a DJI Dock 2 installed at the Mara­gle sub­sta­tion con­struc­tion site. It con­ducts auto­mat­ed sur­veys every two weeks, with flights remote­ly super­vised from Sky­ports’ Remote Oper­a­tions Cen­tre in Lane Cove, Syd­ney, more than 350 km away.

HumeLink West forms part of Transgrid’s wider HumeLink project, which involves approx­i­mate­ly 140 km of new 500 kV dou­ble-cir­cuit trans­mis­sion lines and two sub­sta­tions. The infra­struc­ture is intend­ed to strength­en Australia’s elec­tric­i­ty net­work and sup­port the inte­gra­tion of renew­able ener­gy.

Accord­ing to Sky­ports, the remote­ly oper­at­ed sys­tem can sur­vey up to five times more area in a day than con­ven­tion­al on-site drone sur­veys. The air­craft rou­tine­ly oper­ates over dis­tances of approx­i­mate­ly 8–10 km, com­pared with the typ­i­cal 0.5–1 km range cit­ed for visu­al line of sight oper­a­tions.

Remote sur­vey­ing also reduces the need for per­son­nel to access dif­fi­cult ter­rain and active con­struc­tion areas. The result­ing aer­i­al data is processed using DroneDe­ploy, which pro­duces two-dimen­sion­al and three-dimen­sion­al site mod­els and tracks changes over time. Con­struc­tion teams can use the infor­ma­tion to mon­i­tor progress, iden­ti­fy poten­tial issues and plan work.

The deploy­ment fol­lows a 12-month sur­vey­ing cam­paign in which Sky­ports used LiDAR-equipped drones to map ter­rain and mon­i­tor veg­e­ta­tion clear­ance along the trans­mis­sion cor­ri­dor.

Oper­a­tions are autho­rised under a Broad Area BVLOS Drone Approval issued by Australia’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Safe­ty Author­i­ty (CASA). The approval allows Sky­ports to self-autho­rise qual­i­fy­ing BVLOS flights in eli­gi­ble remote and sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas, sub­ject to the approval’s con­di­tions.

Sky­ports said the project is the first in Aus­tralia with­in the CIMIC Group to be autho­rised for ful­ly remote BVLOS drone oper­a­tions. The com­pa­ny also plans to expand its net­work of auto­mat­ed drone-in-a-box instal­la­tions across Aus­tralia, although fur­ther deploy­ment loca­tions have not been spec­i­fied.

Thomas Sleightholm

Thomas is a con­tent writer for eVTOL Insights, cov­er­ing all aspects of the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem. Got a sto­ry for him? Please send an email to editorial@evtolinsights.com

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