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Stacy Witbeck standardizes DroneDeploy reality capture across 86 rail and transit sites | ConstructionMagazine.ai
Stacy Witbeck standardizes DroneDeploy reality capture across 86 rail and transit sites
DroneDeploy's Sept. 2 to 9, 2026, case study and X post put the rail contractor's program at 86 sites, 5,594 flights and 1,974 ground walks, all captured by in-house Part 107 pilots on one stack. The figures are vendor-reported.
DroneDeploy said on Sept. 9, 2026, in a post on X, that Stacy Witbeck has put 86 rail sites on its platform, logged 5,594 drone flights and 1,974 ground walkthroughs, and ground-mapped a corridor from a truck sitting on the rail. The post linked to a case study the vendor published the previous week. Together they describe a company-wide standard rather than a pilot program. One Operations Technology group at the Alameda, California, contractor issues the drones, licenses the pilots and sets up every new project on the same reality capture stack. Aerial imagery and ground walkthroughs land in the same account, and the counts the vendor released cover both.
Every figure in this story comes from DroneDeploy's blog and its social post unless stated otherwise. Stacy Witbeck has not published the numbers independently, and ConstructionMagazine.ai has not audited them. They are still worth reading closely, because the vendor released fleet-level counts that most case studies leave out: pilots, maps, overlays, external collaborators and 30-day activity.
AI-assisted illustration.
Who Stacy Witbeck is
Stacy Witbeck was founded in San Francisco in 1981 and is headquartered in Alameda, California. The company is 100 percent employee-owned and ranks No. 6 among mass transit and rail contractors on the ENR list, according to the DroneDeploy blog. The same source says the firm has built more than 650 miles of track and counts the Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles among its signature projects. It has been a DroneDeploy customer since 2020, so the counts below cover roughly six years of use.
Rail work has a shape that makes it a stubborn reality capture problem. A corridor can run for miles, cross dozens of property lines and utility crossings, and sit next to live traffic on one side and active track on the other. What the company needed was a way to capture the whole corridor often, from the air and from the ground, and to hand that record to owners and designers without a data specialist in the loop each time.
The blog lists 86 sites. Brendan Coburn, project management lead at Stacy Witbeck, rounds that to "over 80 sites" in his quote, which suggests the count was still climbing when the case study was written. The flight total stands at 5,594, with 507 of those in the 30 days before publication. Pilots uploaded 72,678 images in that same 30-day window, which works out to about 143 images per flight by this magazine's arithmetic. The program has produced 1,048 maps and 1,204 overlays, and the ground capture side has logged 1,974 walkthroughs. The blog does not say how many of those walkthroughs took place in the last 30 days, so the ground side cannot be paced against the aerial side.
The people counts matter more than the flight counts for anyone thinking about copying the approach. DroneDeploy reports 110 pilots at the company, hundreds of analysts and editors who work with the data but do not fly, and 540 external collaborators. That last group includes owners and design partners who view or mark up captures in the platform rather than receiving exported files. The blog puts the analysts and editors in the hundreds without giving a precise count, so the pilot figure is the only internal staffing number firm enough to benchmark against.
Stacy Witbeck reality capture program, cumulative counts as reported by DroneDeploy (vendor-reported, early Sep 2026)
A few of these figures need care. The 30-day counts are a snapshot at whatever date the vendor pulled its dashboard, and the blog does not state that date. The 86-site figure almost certainly includes completed projects as well as active ones, and the blog does not break out how many sites are flying today. Anyone using this as a benchmark should treat it as a cumulative count.
One group, one drone, one license
The standard itself is simple, and Sam Stone, operations technology manager at Stacy Witbeck, describes it in a few sentences.
Someone achieves their Part 107 license, we then issue them with DJI’s Mavic 3 Enterprise drone with an RTK antenna, and we get pretty darn accurate data out of the box. All the project teams love it. It's one of the easiest tech initiatives I've pushed in this role.
Three decisions sit inside that quote. First, the pilot pool is internal. The company licenses its own field staff under the Federal Aviation Administration's Part 107 rule rather than contracting flights out, which is how the pilot count reached 110. Second, the hardware is fixed. Every pilot gets the same DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise with a real-time kinematic antenna, so the Operations Technology group supports one aircraft, one firmware track and one capture workflow. The RTK antenna ships as part of the standard issue rather than as an upgrade for selected crews, according to Stone's description. Third, positional accuracy comes from the RTK receiver on the aircraft rather than from a dense ground control layout on every flight. Stone's phrase for the result is "pretty darn accurate data out of the box," which is a field manager's judgment rather than a survey-grade claim. The blog does not publish an accuracy specification or a check-shot comparison.
Stone also calls it "one of the easiest tech initiatives I've pushed in this role." Reality capture programs usually stall on adoption rather than on technology. A single kit, a single license path and a single place to put the data remove most of the reasons a project team would decline to take part. Stone says the project teams love it, and Coburn says they really like it, which is the closest the blog comes to an adoption measure.
How a Stacy Witbeck employee becomes a producing pilot, as described in the DroneDeploy blog
1Employee earns FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate
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2Operations Technology group issues a DJI Mavic 3 Enterprise with RTK antenna
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3Pilot flies aerial capture and logs ground walkthroughs on the project
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4Imagery uploads to the company DroneDeploy account
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5Analysts and editors build maps and design overlays
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6Owners and design partners view and mark up the record as external collaborators
Ground capture from a truck on the rail
The detail DroneDeploy led with on X is the ground-mapping run. On a progressive design-build project, the team ran ground capture from a truck sitting on the rail and drove the corridor.
We essentially ground-mapped 30 miles on a truck sitting on the rail. They just drove. And the designers reference it as they are literally building design.
The blog does not name the project. What it does describe is the use case: a progressive design-build delivery, where design and construction overlap, and where the designers were referencing the ground capture while producing drawings. A 30-mile ground record of the existing corridor, captured in a single drive, gives a design team the actual condition of the track bed, crossings and adjacent structures without waiting on survey crews or field visits. It is also a record a drone cannot produce on its own. Ground-level imagery shows the underside of platforms, the face of retaining walls and the condition of rail hardware that an aerial orthomosaic flattens. The vendor counts 1,974 ground walkthroughs across the program, and the blog does not say whether a 30-mile drive is logged as one walkthrough or many.
What the archive gets used for
The blog labels two images from the program. One shows the ESFV Spreading Grounds, and another shows a design overlay on Van Nuys Boulevard. The blog does not explain either label beyond the caption, so this story does not attach them to any specific contract. The overlay count is the more telling figure. With 1,204 overlays against 1,048 maps, the company is layering design files onto captures more often than it is producing new base maps. That is what the Van Nuys Boulevard image shows: a drawing set placed on top of current imagery so a superintendent or an owner's representative can see where the work sits against the plan.
Stone describes the historical side of the same archive.
We look at the historical flights all the time, what equipment was on site on a given day, what it looked like, how it changed. We're using that all the time.
For a rail contractor, that record has two audiences. Internally, it answers what was on site and where. Externally, it is a dated, geo-referenced answer to an owner's or a neighbor's question about the state of the corridor on a given day. The 540 external collaborators on the account are the people who can go look for themselves rather than ask.
From pilot program to company standard
We've successfully launched DroneDeploy on over 80 sites and the project teams really like it. Sam is putting the infrastructure in place so any new project can get up and running.
Coburn's second sentence is the operational claim of the story. The infrastructure Stone has put in place goes beyond the software. It is the license path, the standard kit, the account structure that lets a new project appear with the right collaborators attached, and a support desk of one group that every superintendent already knows. The blog does not say how long a new site takes to stand up, how pilots are scheduled across 86 sites, or how the company handles project closeout and archive retention. Coburn's phrase is that any new project can get up and running, which reads as a claim about setup time even though the blog attaches no figure to it.
Stone's own summary of the vendor choice is short.
DroneDeploy's software is better. I'm confident saying that.
That is an opinion from a satisfied customer quoted in the vendor's own case study, and it should be read as one. The blog does not name the alternatives Stone compared against or describe the evaluation. The more durable evidence is the usage. A program logging 507 flights and 72,678 images in a 30-day window is a working program, whichever platform it runs on.
What to ask before standardizing reality capture on one platform
Stacy Witbeck's program is a useful template because the vendor published enough detail to interrogate it. A contractor considering the same move should put these questions to its own operations technology lead and to the vendor before signing a company-wide agreement.
Who owns the pilot pipeline? Stacy Witbeck licenses its own field staff under Part 107 and reached 110 pilots. Ask how many of your people are willing to sit the exam and who pays for study time.
What does accuracy mean on your projects? RTK on the aircraft was enough for this company's field managers. Ask whether your owners and survey partners will accept it, and on which deliverables, before dropping ground control.
How will ground capture be collected? The 30-mile run needed a truck on the rail and a design team ready to consume the output. Ask which corridors you can drive, who will use the record, and how it gets tied to the aerial data.
How many external seats do you need? The 540 collaborators on this account are owners and designers. Ask what the license terms are for external users and who controls what each of them can see.
What happens at closeout? The blog says nothing about archive retention. Ask how long the record stays accessible after the job ends, in what format you can take it with you, and what it costs to keep.
What is the 30-day baseline you would measure against? A vendor case study gives one snapshot. Ask for your own dashboard export at 90 days and compare it against the counts published here.