Bang For Your Buck: Drone services in the construction industry

Drone videography is typically associated with the creative industry where footage is needed for outdoor nature shoots or cinematic filming.

But the drone industry is also utilised in the construction industry, where footage is taken to capture data, assets.

Drone Cult Chief Executive Officer, Amir Hamzah Abdul Halim said they started off with creative work for almost two years before getting involved with providing their service to the construction industry.

“In construction work, we covered the the progress report, data mapping and there are a lot of inquiries that required a lot of planning.

“We often have to pre-plan the routes our drones have to fly,” he said.

Established in 2015 in the creative side, Drone Cult was later approached by a construction company to provide drone services for them.

He said it was giving them more challenges than to work within the creative industry.

For them, it was all about understanding the clients’ needs and the data that they were unfamiliar with.

“When we first started, I guess the most challenging thing was to figure out how to do things because this is an industry that we’re not familiar with - mostly construction work that we are focusing on right now,” he said.

They started during the times where people were still unfamiliar with the drone technologies and he found that more drone services are provides to the industry compared to years ago.

Speaking to Sinar Daily on the Bang For Your Buck programme, he observed the competition of the drone services increased in the present days.

“Nowadays there are a lot of commercial drones, very easy to fly. And I guess the common stereotype is that it's an easy job to do.

“It's not really the case but most of the time in more serious situations like industrial works, construction worlds and progress reports, things like that are difficult,” he said.

As they were open to risk due to working at the construction site, all drone pilots in the company were Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) certified.

Compared to working in the creative side, they were required to follow the standard operational procedure as they had to wear the safety boots, safety vest and top helmets for protection.

For Amir, he would love to contribute working with the agriculture industry in the future as they rarely receive requests from that industry before.

“But, I can see that there's a lot of growth here in Malaysia for agriculture. Hopefully we can get into it in the future,” he said.