Aerial Surveying: A Practitioner's Guide to UAV Photogrammetry, LiDAR and Reality Capture for Infrastructure (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798199173964)

A picture isn't a survey. The difference is the accuracy report.

Much of what is sold as "aerial survey" in the UK is not survey at all - it is aerial photography, drone videography, or unverified 3D models that look impressive and are metres from the truth.

A real aerial survey carries a guarantee: tied to a national coordinate framework, accuracy measured against independent check points, signed off by a chartered professional. The difference is the difference between a deliverable you can build from and one that costs you a re-survey, a planning challenge, or worse.

Written by a Chartered Surveyor, not a drone evangelist

Philip M. Angell MRICS runs an RICS-regulated chartered surveying firm in the UK. He has captured 70 km of Development Consent Order reservoir sites by fixed-wing UAV, monitored Reservoirs Act 1975 embankments to millimetre tolerance, flown river-catchment flood modelling at sub-50 cm bare-earth accuracy, and audited industrial-scale quarries from the air over multi-year programmes.

This book is the methodology - the discipline that distinguishes survey from picture, written for the people who commission it, do it, and depend on it.

Inside, you will learn:

• The RICS Measured Surveys (3rd ed.) accuracy bands - how to specify the band the work needs rather than the best the technology offers
• UK datums in plain English - OSGB36 via OSTN15, Newlyn ODN via OSGM15, and why skipping either transformation makes the survey systematically wrong
• When to choose photogrammetry, when to choose UAV LiDAR, and when to fly both - with the multi-return principle that recovers bare earth beneath vegetation
• Fixed-wing VTOL versus multirotor - the crossover at 20 hectares, and why DCO-scale work is flown fixed-wing for capture-geometry consistency
• Ground Control Points versus independent check points - the distinction most accuracy claims get wrong, and the protocol that produces a defensible figure
• Confined-space inspection with collision-tolerant drones (Flyability Elios) - how the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997 make every avoided entry a real cost and risk reduction
• Reservoir and earthworks deformation monitoring - measuring change at the limit of the method, where mm signals demand identical epoch-to-epoch discipline
• How to commission a survey: the five decisions that shape every brief, and how to read the accuracy report to tell a survey from a picture

For the people who need to know:

• Civil engineers, drainage and flood-risk consultants, BIM and design teams commissioning topographic surveys they will build from
• Developers and planning consultants commissioning DCO-scale surveys that must serve EIA, FRA, BNG and design at once
• Asset managers (water, drainage, transport, energy) commissioning inspection of confined and difficult-to-reach assets
• RICS APC candidates on the Geomatics pathway preparing for technical questioning on measured survey, accuracy bands, datums and aerial methodology
• Practising surveyors and geomaticians wanting a structured account of UAV photogrammetry, LiDAR and reality capture in current UK practice

What this book is

A practitioner's guide written from inside the discipline. Every chapter is grounded in standards - RICS Measured Surveys (3rd ed.), CAP 722, the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997, the Reservoirs Act 1975, PAS 128 - and illustrated with eleven hand-authored vector diagrams drawn from real UK engagements.

An aerial survey is a measurement, and a measurement is only as good as the evidence it is right. This book is the discipline that earns the signature on the bottom of the page.

Read it. Sign for it.