You may know Airbus as that Boeing competitor that also makes planes, but the European company is in fact an defense and aerospace giant that makes helicopters, satellites, and drones, and now it’s using its aircraft not just to move people, but to give those on the ground a whole new view from the skies.

A year-old effort called Airbus Aerial will seek to serve climate modelers, farmers, city planners, engineers, first responders, and anybody else who needs a a particular view of the world. The company combines data from observation satellites (of which Airbus is the largest global operator), manned planes with cameras slung underneath, and drones, to get to the places others can’t reach. Airbus Aerial packages it all up, and presents it neatly to the customer, via a cloud-based interface.

“It’s a very complex thing to just say ‘I need satellite data’,” says Jesse Kallman, president of the company. “You need to know which satellites, and the intricacies of acquisition and resolution.”

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Say a utility company wants to take a closer look at remote power lines. Airbus aerial could start off pulling data from its two constellations of satellites, Spot and Pleiades. To include a closer look, it might contract with a local company to run a plane or drone flight over the area. Imagery in hand, it would mesh the macro and the micro, then send it off to the company. (This week at the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver, it announced a partnership with DroneBase, an international network of professional drone pilots.)

After Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in September, the young Airbus offshoot went to work. Insurance companies used the results for initial inspections of neighborhoods, to figure out which homes were totally destroyed, and process claims more quickly. Other customers have requested detailed images to check on the health of distant railway tracks, or oil and gas pipelines.

Airbus Aerial has also just started mapping the runways at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, the world’s busiest airport, a job that required clearance to fly in Class B airspace—the busy bits of sky that airlines use for landings and takeoffs. Airport officials had asked the company to survey the south runway, to see if drones could cut down on the time-consuming work of driving up and down the tarmac, checking for debris that could damage any aircraft, inspecting lighting, and checking signage.

For this job, the company used Sensefly’s eBee Plus fixed-wing drone, which flies autonomously at speeds between 25 and 68 miles per hour, capturing images of the ground below at a resolution of 1 centimeter per pixel. After the drone flies the length of the runway, the results are checked and compiled into a report for airport officials afterwards, including 3-D mapping to show bumps and cracks, and GPS data to locate things like busted lights. Meanwhile, the airport doesn’t have to pause flights to let some eyeball-using human drive back and forth.

Drones are poised to take on more projects like these, and make more of an impact in our lives. The FAA is due to announce within the next couple of weeks which five pilot projects, submitted by public agencies and private drone operators, it’s selected for trial runs. They’ll be given broad permissions to operate outside the existing rules, without requiring a time-consuming and difficult process of getting an FAA waiver every time they want to fly beyond a ground pilot’s visual line of sight, or at night, or over crowds. Airbus Aerial is involved with several of those proposals for similar mapping and inspection projects.

Companies are also jostling for the chance to make commercial deliveries, a vision Amazon first promised back in 2013. Instead of helping people shop, California-based Zipline wants to deliver blood to rural hospitals around Reno, Nevada—the same sort of thing it’s already doing in Rwanda.

The coming years will be about figuring out where drones can be useful, and where they’re just airborne pests. Airbus Aerial hopes that by combining its aerial data into the bigger picture, it can take off for the former.

True Skies