On the morning of Feb. 3, 2026, a small team from Censys Technologies stood at their Daytona Beach headquarters and watched a fixed-wing drone the size of a large model airplane climb into the Florida sky. Over the next two and a half hours, that aircraft—a Sentaero 6 equipped with light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology and a 45-megapixel camera—would travel 83.4 miles across some of the most heavily regulated airspace in the state, inspecting 77.7 miles of high-voltage transmission corridor (Figure 1) between Daytona Beach (DAB) and Mims.

No helicopter. No multi-day ground survey. No army of contractors. Just one drone, a laptop running a ground control station, and a crew that had spent 21 hours planning every second of the flight.

Read more in Power Magazine here.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.