No Pilot Required: Skyports and HOCHTIEF Are Surveying a German Bridge From Spain

Somewhere in Germany, a massive bridge is being built. Somewhere in Spain, a drone pilot is watching it happen in real time — without leaving the office. That’s not science fiction. That’s the DJI Dock 2 doing its thing, as Heliguy reported.

Skyports Drone Services has partnered with construction giant HOCHTIEF to deploy a fully-automated drone-in-a-box solution for BVLOS surveying of the Rheinbrücke Leverkusen bridge project in Germany.

The flights are planned, launched, and monitored remotely from Skyports’ Remote Operations Centre (ROC) in Madrid. No boots on the ground. No pilot standing in the rain next to a bridge. Just data, delivered weekly, on autopilot.

Meet the Hardware Making It Happen

At the center of this deployment is the DJI Dock 2 paired with the DJI Matrice 3TD — a purpose-built combination for exactly this kind of mission.

The Dock 2 itself is a compact, weatherproof drone-in-a-box station that weighs just 34 kg (75 lbs) and carries an IP55 rating, meaning it shrugs off dust and rain without complaint. It handles charging, pre-flight checks, and launch sequences autonomously.

Once the drone is back, it lands itself, charges itself, and gets ready for the next mission. The Dock 2 is essentially a tireless drone operations manager that never calls in sick.

Paired with the Matrice 3TD, you get a serious aerial survey platform. The 3TD brings a 48 MP wide-angle camera, a tele camera, and a thermal imaging sensor — all aboard a drone that can fly for up to 50 minutes per charge with RTK-powered centimeter-level positional accuracy. For a bridge construction project that demands precise, repeatable data week after week, that’s not overkill. That’s exactly the right tool.

What’s happening on-site: the Dock 2 sits permanently at the Rheinbrücke Leverkusen site, launching automated BVLOS missions on a weekly schedule. The collected data gets processed through DroneDeploy, generating both 2D orthomosaics and detailed 3D models of the construction progress. HOCHTIEF’s teams can track exactly what’s been built, what’s changed, and whether anything looks off — without anyone having to physically walk the site with a clipboard.

Weekly Surveys, Zero Guesswork

The Rheinbrücke Leverkusen is a major infrastructure project expected to wrap up by 2028. It involves extensive earthworks, demolition of the old bridge, and new construction on both the east and west banks of the Rhine. That’s a lot of moving parts across a long timeline — and a lot of opportunities for things to fall behind schedule.

Previously, progress monitoring was mostly manual and subjective. Some drone surveys had been done, but they were infrequent and required on-site personnel every single time. That approach doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t give you the consistent, comparable week-over-week data you need to manage a project this complex.

The automated weekly cadence changes that entirely. Each survey produces a fresh 3D model of the site, giving HOCHTIEF a layered, time-stamped picture of construction progress. Earthworks volumes can be measured precisely, billing data can be verified, and any deviations from plan can be caught early — before a small problem becomes a costly delay.

Alex Brown, CEO of Skyports, framed it clearly: large infrastructure projects face constant pressure to deliver on time and on budget. Automated drone surveys give construction teams data visibility they’ve never had before, without the logistical overhead of putting pilots on-site every week.

DroneXL’s Take

Strip away the press release language: this deployment is a proof of concept for something the construction industry has needed for a long time. The ability to run BVLOS drone surveys from a city in a different country — with consistent, survey-grade outputs — is a significant operational shift.

The DJI Dock 2 and Matrice 3TD combination is doing serious work here. RTK accuracy, thermal and visual imaging, autonomous charging, and DroneDeploy integration in a package that can sit on a German riverbank for weeks and just… work. That’s the promise of drone-in-a-box, finally delivered in a real-world infrastructure context.

It also hints at where things are going. The newer DJI Dock 3, paired with the Matrice 4TD, pushes the envelope further still — longer flight times up to 54 minutes (about 4 more minutes than the 3TD), IP56 weatherproofing, faster 10-second takeoffs, and a thermal camera with infrared super-resolution up to 1280×1024. As BVLOS regulations mature globally, deployments like this Leverkusen project will look less like pioneering experiments and more like standard operating procedure.

For now, the takeaway is simple: a drone is surveying a German bridge on autopilot, the data is better than anything they had before, and nobody had to stand in a hard hat watching it happen. That’s a win for the industry — and a preview of what automated infrastructure monitoring looks like at scale.

Photo credit: Heliguy, DJI.