You can buy the drones near-off-the-shelf and fit payloads. Same...

You can buy the drones near-off-the-shelf and fit payloads. Same same. It will happen one day, once the business model makes sense.

I imagine a ScanEagle would cost more than a Cessna.

I must admit, would love to see NEA adopt LIDAR. Given the cost of the flights it seems a bit of a no-brainer to add the scanner to the pod. Then again, scanners aren't cheap.

Where lidar excels is vegetation penetration and canopy analysis.

Also delivers very fast turnaround 3D product via point clouds. Pretty much just download from the drives.

There would be plenty of customers that would use point cloud data.

Then with their storage and AI workloads, classified clouds would seem an easy stretch.