WiseSkys

UAS Safety Culture: Building a Safety-First Operation as a Solo or Small Team

Safety culture is a term most commercial UAS pilots associate with large organizations — airlines, military units, corporate flight departments with dedicated safety officers and formal SMS programs. It sounds like something that doesn’t apply …

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June 11, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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How COA Applications Actually Work — and How FlightDeck Helps You Prepare One

A Certificate of Authorization isn't just a form — it's a structured narrative that has to answer specific FAA questions in specific language. FlightDeck's COA Prep tool builds the framework so you're not starting from a blank page.

June 9, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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Photo QC and Data Delivery: Why Your Upload Process Is Costing You Clients

Flying the mission is half the job. Delivering data that meets client quality standards — every file, every time, with verified completeness — is the other half. And for many commercial UAS operators, the delivery …

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June 7, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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Building a UAS Operations Manual: Why Every Part 107 Pilot Needs One

The FAA doesn’t require most Part 107 operators to maintain a formal operations manual. That’s the wrong reason not to have one. A UAS operations manual is three things simultaneously: your operational bible (the definitive …

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June 5, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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Nearest Airport, Nearest Hospital: The Situational Awareness Data Every Pre-Flight Needs

Most Part 107 pilots know their airspace classification before wheels up. Fewer know the distance and bearing to the nearest airport — or the nearest trauma center. FlightDeck calculates both automatically for every site in your project.

June 4, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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How FlightDeck’s 3-Phase Update Turns Raw Site Data Into a Mission-Ready Project

One of the most time-consuming parts of managing a large commercial UAS project isn’t the flying — it’s the daily overhead of keeping your site list current. Geocoding new addresses. Pulling weather for 80 remaining …

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June 2, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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UAS Incident Reporting: What to Do When Something Goes Wrong

No commercial UAS pilot plans for an incident. But the ones who’ve thought through exactly what to do before one happens are the ones who handle them professionally when they occur — protecting themselves legally, …

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May 29, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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How Automated Photo QC Catches Problems Before Your Client Does

Every commercial UAS pilot has been there — you deliver a dataset, and the client comes back asking why half the photos are soft or why the coverage has gaps. FlightDeck's QC Uploader runs automated quality checks on every image before it leaves your hard drive, so you know about problems before your client does.

May 27, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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LAANC Authorization: A Complete Guide for Part 107 Commercial Pilots

LAANC — the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability — transformed airspace authorization for commercial UAS pilots when it launched. What used to require weeks of manual coordination with FAA facilities now happens in seconds …

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May 26, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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Reading Weather for Commercial Drone Operations: Beyond the Forecast

Weather cancels more commercial UAS missions than any other factor. It also causes more incidents than pilots acknowledge — because many of those incidents start with a pilot who looked at a “mostly favorable” forecast …

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May 22, 2026 — Jeremy Yates

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