Infrastructure Inspection: How Drones Are Transforming Canadian Utilities

The Challenge of Traditional Inspection

Canada's critical infrastructure spans some of the most remote and challenging terrain on the planet. Thousands of kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines cross boreal forests, pipelines traverse the Rocky Mountain foothills, and aging bridges connect communities across vast distances. Traditionally, inspecting these assets has meant deploying manned helicopters at thousands of dollars per hour, sending technicians on dangerous rope-access climbs up towers and bridges, or conducting slow, labour-intensive ground-level walkarounds. These methods are expensive, time-consuming, and — most critically — they put workers at significant risk.

For many Canadian utilities and transportation departments, the cost and complexity of traditional inspections has meant that assets are inspected less frequently than they should be. Deferred inspections lead to undetected corrosion, vegetation encroachment on power lines, and structural degradation that could have been caught early. The result is higher long-term maintenance costs and increased risk of failure.

The Drone Advantage

Drones are fundamentally changing this equation. Commercial RPAS platforms equipped with high-resolution cameras and specialized sensors can inspect infrastructure at a fraction of the cost — operators routinely report 80 to 90 per cent cost reductions compared to manned helicopter flights. Beyond cost savings, the safety improvements are transformative. No workers need to be suspended at height on a transmission tower or bridge pylon. No helicopter crew needs to fly low-level sorties along a pipeline corridor in marginal weather.

The data quality is often superior as well. Drones can fly closer to structures than manned aircraft, capturing centimetre-level detail that reveals hairline cracks, insulator damage, and early-stage corrosion invisible from a helicopter. The speed of data collection means more assets can be inspected in the same time window, enabling utilities to move from annual inspection cycles to quarterly or even monthly monitoring of critical components.

Key Applications Across Canada

Infrastructure inspection is one of the largest commercial drone verticals in Canada, and the applications are broad. Power line inspection is perhaps the most established use case — utilities like BC Hydro and Hydro-Québec oversee transmission networks spanning tens of thousands of kilometres, and drones equipped with visual and thermal cameras can identify hotspots in electrical connections, damaged insulators, and vegetation threats along corridors far more efficiently than ground crews.

In Alberta and British Columbia, oil and gas pipeline monitoring relies increasingly on RPAS to detect leaks, erosion, and third-party encroachment along pipeline rights-of-way. Provincial transportation departments use drones for bridge and highway inspection, capturing detailed imagery of deck surfaces, expansion joints, and substructure elements that would otherwise require lane closures and under-bridge inspection vehicles. Cell tower inspections and dam monitoring round out the picture, with drones providing rapid, repeatable assessments of structures that are inherently difficult and dangerous to access by hand.

Technology Driving the Shift

The sensor technology powering inspection drones continues to advance rapidly. High-resolution RGB cameras capture visual detail for defect identification and documentation. Thermal imaging sensors detect hotspots in electrical equipment — a failing connection on a transmission line radiates excess heat long before it becomes a visible problem. LiDAR enables precise 3D modelling of structures, generating point clouds that engineers can measure and analyse without returning to the field.

Multi-sensor payloads that combine all three modalities in a single flight are becoming standard for enterprise inspection teams, dramatically increasing the value of each sortie.

BVLOS: Unlocking Linear Infrastructure

Transport Canada's Phase 2 regulations, which introduced the Level 1 Complex (L1C) BVLOS certification, are a game-changer for infrastructure inspection. Power lines, pipelines, and rail corridors are inherently linear — they stretch for kilometres in a single direction. Under visual-line-of-sight rules, operators had to reposition launch points every few hundred metres, turning what should be a continuous survey into a stop-and-go exercise. L1C certification enables longer, uninterrupted flights along linear corridors, slashing the time and cost required for comprehensive inspections.

How RPAS WILCO Supports Inspection Teams

Inspection teams face unique operational challenges that go beyond simply flying a drone. Every sortie generates terabytes of imagery that needs to be catalogued, linked to specific asset locations, and made available for engineering review. Compliance documentation must satisfy both aviation regulators and the regulated industries being served — a power utility's internal audit requirements are often as demanding as Transport Canada's.

RPAS WILCO provides the operational backbone for inspection programmes. Mission planning tools support linear corridor flights with waypoint sequencing optimised for infrastructure surveys. Flight logs are automatically linked to specific assets and locations, creating a searchable history of every inspection. Compliance documentation — from pilot certifications to maintenance records — is maintained in a single audit-ready system. For organisations running multi-aircraft, multi-pilot inspection programmes, Enterprise fleet management ensures every crew member, drone, and mission is tracked and compliant across the entire operation.