The Interior Department has to cover a lot of ground to meet its mission, and in the years ahead, officials expect to lean more heavily on drones to manage the 500 million acres of land under their purview.
The agency logged 10,342 unmanned aircraft flights last year, using drones to monitor wildlife, survey federal lands, respond to natural disasters and conduct a wide variety of other activities. By 2025, officials expect that figure to more than triple to 35,724 flights, according to an internal document published last week.
The projection, based on input from all nine Interior components, shows leaders fully embracing a technology that until recently remained largely in the experimental phase. Between 2006 and 2016, the agency’s drone program never exceeded 750 annual flights.
Unmanned aircraft offer Interior a cheaper, faster and safer way to conduct operations in the field, particularly those that involve collecting data on federal land, according to Interior officials. Drones can complete data collection missions in one-seventh of the time and at one-tenth of the cost when compared to human personnel, officials said, and because many of those operations occur on rugged terrain, they also help keep employees out of harm’s way.
Last year, officials estimated drones saved the agency some $14.8 million. Those cost-savings will only increase as the aircraft become more prevalent in Interior’s day-to-day operations, Mark Bathrick, director of the agency’s Office of Aviation Services, told Nextgov in April.
Unmanned aircraft have also yielded some unanticipated benefits, he said, like enhancing the agency’s ability to
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