A Day in the Life of a Raad Drone Pilot with Dylan Gorman
Taking on a Raad solar mission, drone industry leader Dylan Gorman provides an inside scoop to what it's like being a Raad pilot",
Read More →Many drone experts discuss how the drone services industry is limited by hardware, flight skills, or regulatory clarity, but an often neglected limiting factor is coordination.
In this interview with Drone U’s Rob Burdick and Raad's CEO Teej Ragsdale dive deeper into why the industry’s growth has been throttled by a high refly rate, fragmented operators, and a lack of standardization (just to name a few). Rob and Teej discuss how all of that changes when drone services are treated as a networked system rather than a collection of independent jobs.
Raad’s model is built around a simple premise: enterprises don’t want drone flights, they want outcomes. They want imagery delivered on time, consistently, across geographies, with quality controls, standardized outputs, and zero operational friction. That requires orchestration: dispatch, compliance, QC, data processing, and delivery, handled at the platform level.
The conversation explores how Drone Services Networks (DSNs), when configured correctly, can radically expand the addressable market for drone work. Instead of pilots competing race-to-the-bottom for local jobs, networks like Raad enable national and global contracts, repeatable revenue, and higher-value missions that individual operators could never service alone.
Teej and Rob also discuss the second-order effects of this shift: why enterprise buyers will increasingly prefer managed aerial intelligence over ad-hoc flights, how pilots benefit from abstraction away from sales and admin work, and why the GDP contribution of drone services could grow by orders of magnitude once coordination bottlenecks are removed.