In-Flight Monitoring

The Monitoring screen is your live view of every drone tied to the active account. It's where a chief pilot or operations lead watches multiple aircraft at once. It's also where you'll see live status changes that the drone or the portal flags during a mission.

When to open Monitoring#

Open Monitoring when:

• You're a chief pilot or ops lead coordinating two or more aircraft.
• You want to see live status changes while the active operator stays focused on the controller.
• You're investigating an in-flight incident in near-real time.

If you're the sole operator flying one drone, you'll rarely look at Monitoring during the flight itself — your eyes belong on the aircraft and the controller. Use Monitoring as a coordination tool for multi-drone operations.

What you'll see#

The Monitoring page shows every drone in the active account as a card with:

• Status: Active / Inactive / Blocked
• Readiness: Ready to Fly / Fly with Caution / Do not Fly / Offline
• Coverage: total acres covered (recent)
• Activation date

A search bar filters drones by serial number; status filters narrow the list by readiness.

Monitoring screen with multiple drone cards in different readiness states

Live status changes#

The most useful thing about Monitoring is that readiness changes propagate live. If a drone in flight develops a critical issue — motor failure, battery imbalance, overheating — its card transitions to Do not Fly within a few seconds of the controller reporting the fault.

When that happens, the chief pilot's job is to:

1. Confirm the operator is aware (radio / phone).
2. Coordinate an emergency descent and landing.
3. Capture the incident details (when did the status flip? what was the fault?) — this is automatically logged but easier to interpret if you know the timestamps.

What Monitoring does not do#

To set expectations clearly:

• Monitoring is not a remote controller. You cannot send commands to a drone from this page.
• It does not stream first-person video.
• It does not show GPS position on a map in real time. Per-flight GPS routes are available after the flight, on the Flight Log tab. Live map position is in the controller app itself.

When the badge flips#

What to do when you see a card flip from Ready to a worse state:

• Ready → Fly with Caution: usually a non-critical alert (e.g., compass calibration recommended, weak GPS). Note it, finish the current pass, return to base sooner than planned.
• Ready → Do not Fly: critical fault. Pause the mission. Coordinate immediate landing. Do not relaunch until the cause is identified.
• Active → Offline: telemetry link lost. Possible causes: ground station out of range, battery on the controller, radio interference. The drone itself may still be flying its planned route. Recover the link before you do anything else.

After landing, every status change is captured in the Activity section of the drone detail page so you can reconstruct the timeline.

Next#

• Post-flight & reports — turn the mission's telemetry into a PDF deliverable.
• Drone offline — what to do when a drone disappears from Monitoring.