All posts by Juan B. Plaza
Safety is Paramount in Aerial Drone Mapping
As the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prepares to release its ruling covering uncrewed aircraft flights beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) in the National Airspace (NAS) the entire industry is holding its breath preparing for a new era of certainty and expansion. Aerial photogrammetry will be one of the immediate beneficiaries of this new policy...
Space Mapping
A satellite set to launch in 2024 will scan the Earth’s surface every 12 days. What does that mean for geospatial professionals? During the recent South Florida GIS Summit, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that blew my mind in terms of potential for the...
Is High-Precision GNSS Coming to Your Smartphone?
We have seen over the past four decades how our traditional profession of making maps went from obscurity to mainstream to widely adopted, everyday reality. When I attended university for my geodesy degree in the early 80s everyone who had a car also had a road map in the glove compartment—from a basic road grid...
The Wide World of Drone Upstarts
With congested airspace in the U.S. and Europe, to see how drones will integrate with society we have to look at some creative drone upstarts emerging in less populated nations. In our last article we touched on the ramifications of a clear regulation of uncrewed flights beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) in the USA and...
Embracing the Drone Revolution
Surveyor business models changing in the BVLOS era Over the past few months, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), working with the drone industry, academia, and general aviation membership organizations such as AOPA (www.aopa.org) and NBAA (www.nbaa.org), has been able to advance the cause of uncrewed flights beyond visual line of sight of the operator (BVLOS). ...
The Challenge of Channeling Water
From the Romans to the Everglades, the art of directing water flow has never been easy For thousands of years impromptu land surveyors tried, sometimes successfully, to force water to flow in a direction it did not want to go. This was done to help grow crops in areas where water was not abundant enough...
