What a weekly flight actually catches
Seven days is the right cadence for construction intelligence — long enough to see real progress, short enough to catch problems before they compound. Here is what one week of drone footage will actually surface on your site.
A single weekly flight is enough to answer the three questions every owner and GC asks on a Monday morning: what moved, what stalled, and what needs a decision this week.
Progress you can trust
A weekly orthomosaic is the only record that settles "is trade X really at 80%?" without a site visit. The imagery is timestamped, repeatable from the same altitude and flight path, and stitched into a single comparable map. Week over week, you see what was installed, what was demobilized, and what simply did not change.
That matters because most subcontractor progress reports are verbal or written, and they drift. Seven days of drift is manageable. Thirty days of drift is where the owner finds out the steel erection they were billed for at 90% is actually 68%.
Problems that compound quietly
Three categories of site issues tend to hide in a four-week gap between site visits:
- Water that is not supposed to be there. Standing water in a slab-on-grade area, pooling near a trench, or grading that sends runoff toward a foundation. In a weekly flight this shows up as a dark patch that was not there seven days ago; in a monthly one it shows up as a liability claim.
- Staging that is choking a trade. Material drops in the wrong zone, a laydown yard that grew past its fence, a crane swing radius that is now blocked. These are easy to rearrange on a Tuesday and expensive to litigate after a delay.
- Work installed without the right sequence. Ductwork closed up before the inspection, concrete poured before a required soil compression test, MEP roughed in a zone still marked "structure in progress." A weekly aerial record is the cheapest way to catch sequencing errors while they are still reversible.
The decision cadence
A good weekly report is not a data dump. It is three to five observations tied to a decision the PM can make that day — approve the revised laydown plan, flag the subcontractor who is behind, move the inspection request up. That is the difference between intelligence and photography.
That is also the shape of the Corvus report: one flight, one PDF, three to five decisions. Every Monday. Before the OAC meeting, not after.