On 15 September DroneDeploy posted on X that HOCHTIEF gets a fresh survey of the A1 Rhine Bridge every week without sending anyone to site. A docked drone lives on the bridge until 2028, the post says, and a pilot connects remotely, flies it, then moves on to another job. The detail behind that sentence sits in a DroneDeploy blog post from July by David Sadeghi: HOCHTIEF is rebuilding the A1 Rhine Bridge at Leverkusen against a 2028 deadline, a DJI Dock 2 sits on the bridge for the duration of the build, and once a week a Skyports pilot in Madrid, about 1,000 miles away by the vendor's count, oversees a fully automated flight beyond visual line of sight over the whole site. The imagery lands in DroneDeploy as 2D maps, topographical maps and 3D models.
Both of those are vendor sources describing a vendor's customer, and this article treats them that way. What is confirmed across DroneDeploy's post, its blog and a Skyports announcement from March is the arrangement itself: the contractor, the bridge, the dock, the weekly cadence, the remote pilot and the 2028 date. What no source publishes is a number. There is no cost per survey, no hours saved, no count of flights completed, and no accuracy figure for the maps. The one HOCHTIEF voice in the DroneDeploy blog, project manager Philip Schulze, calls the service cost-effective without saying against what.
https://x.com/DroneDeploy/status/2099894244353954128
Collecting data with drones will be a key factor in improving efficiency, accuracy, and decision-making on our HOCHTIEF construction sites. - Philip Schulze, Project Manager, HOCHTIEF, DroneDeploy blog, July 2026
What sits on the bridge
The hardware is a DJI Dock 2, a weatherproof box that houses a drone, charges it between flights and opens on command. According to the DroneDeploy blog the dock stays on the bridge for the whole build, and the flight itself is automated: the drone follows a pre-planned survey route over the site while the Skyports pilot in Madrid supervises from a remote operations centre. Skyports' March announcement says the flights are beyond visual line of sight and weekly, and that the maps and models go to HOCHTIEF through DroneDeploy. Neither vendor says which drone model is in the dock, how long a full-site flight takes, or how many flights have been completed since the service began.
The blog describes what the arrangement replaced. Before the dock, a pilot had to be physically on site, the flight was limited to what the pilot could see, which capped how much of the bridge one flight could cover, and getting a pilot to Leverkusen on a given day was a scheduling problem in its own right. Those are the vendor's characterisations of the prior approach, not HOCHTIEF's, and the blog does not say how often the site was flown before the dock arrived.