Having spent many years in the utility industry prior to the sUAS venture, Dusty Birge brings a unique background of operational understanding in the electric utility space. In less than 2 years, his team has implemented drone-based maintenance optimization strategies at over 2 dozen utilities across the United States. Understanding the innerworkings of how utilities make decisions, his rapid success was driven by solutions to reduced data bottlenecks, and automated internal decision making.

Over 15,000 inspected poles and over 300 substation flights later, Dusty sold his enterprise in January 2019 to a holding’s entity for national scalability and standardization across electric utilities.

By request, Dusty has presented at FLIR’s InfraMation 2018, RMEL, NREA, CREA, FEC and other utility entities regarding how to optimize the inspection data collected from sUAS (not referring to ortho’s and LiDAR).

Multiple utilities have redesigned their internal maintenance processes due to the excessive savings, time and financial, as a result of internal workflow optimization while working with Dusty and his team.

Long term success isn’t driven from the drone, it’s about what kind of decisions you can make from the data that’s collected, and which processes can be improved and automated.