Cyberhawk pushes drone inspections to larger scale with FAA BVLOS approval
Cyberhawk is scaling drone inspections after securing nationwide FAA approval for BVLOS operations. The waiver, granted in April 2024, allows the company to fly beyond the visual line of sight across the continental United States. It gives Cyberhawk more room to run longer, more complex missions for industrial assets without repeatedly stopping to reposition crews.
The company conducts more than 100,000 UAS inspection missions a year in more than 40 countries. Its work covers electric grids, power generation sites, oil and gas structures, and capital-intensive industrial construction projects. The FAA waiver targets one of the biggest limits in close visual inspections: the time lost before and after the drone is in the air.
For inspection crews, the major cost drivers are set-up, break-down, and travel between locations. Actual data collection can take about two hours on a good day, while preparation and movement can take up to eight. With nationwide BVLOS authorization, Cyberhawk can fly up to four consecutive miles of distribution or transmission lines from a single takeoff point, rather than setting up and breaking down multiple times to capture the same data.
That change improves the speed of decisions for utilities and industrial operators. If crews can inspect 80 assets in a day instead of 40, customers can find out sooner whether service work is needed or whether an asset can remain in place for another year. Cyberhawk is also using the waiver to support smaller clients through Aviate, a UAS advisory services program that includes pilot training, data collection, and visualization through its iHawk software.
The company is seeking an additional FAA waiver for long-range, large-area surveys, including operations up to 250 feet above a structure. If approved, the company says distance limits would depend more heavily on command-and-control capability, opening the door to far longer missions and broader use of hexacopters, quadcopters, and VTOL fixed-wing drones. The impact is clear: BVLOS permissions can cut inspection costs, reduce exposure for ground crews, and move drone-based infrastructure inspection closer to mainstream industrial operations.