After Lahaina, Hawaiian Electric Bets on Drone Inspections

Two and a half years after a downed power line sparked the fire that killed 102 people and erased most of Lahaina, Hawaiian Electric is flying drones over every island it serves, as Maui News reported.

The utility has contracted three separate inspection firms across Maui County, Molokai, the Big Island, and Oahu, all targeting the same problem: finding infrastructure defects before dry season arrives and the wind picks up. Inspections run weekdays from roughly dawn to late afternoon and are expected to continue through June 2026.

The Scope of the Program

This isn’t a single-island pilot. Hawaiian Electric has divided the statewide work among three contractors, each handling different geography. Cyberhawk, a Scotland-founded drone inspection firm with a nationwide FAA Beyond Visual Line of Sight waiver, is covering Molokai and the Big Island.

ProEnergy is handling Maui proper, where inspections run through June. Osmose, a utility infrastructure specialist, is working Oahu. All three are operating alongside Hawaiian Electric’s own staff, flying poles and power lines in areas the utility has designated as elevated wildfire risk.

The Cyberhawk work is worth noting specifically. The company holds one of the few nationwide BVLOS waivers issued by the FAA, granted in April 2024, which lets its pilots conduct longer and more complex missions without strict visual line-of-sight constraints.

Its proprietary iHawk platform runs AI models against the inspection imagery to flag defects, categorize severity, and generate prioritized repair lists the same day data is collected.

That’s the part that matters most operationally: a lineman who knows exactly which poles need immediate attention before he drives out is a fundamentally different workflow than the traditional ground-level inspection approach.

What the Drones Are Actually Looking For

Utility pole inspection from the air isn’t glamorous, but the failure modes it catches are specific and dangerous. Inspectors are looking for cracked crossarms, conductor clearance violations, corroded hardware, vegetation encroachment, and the kind of subtle wear that’s essentially invisible to a crew member standing on the ground looking up.

In Hawaii’s trade wind environment, these defects matter more than in most US service territories because the wind doesn’t stop. Equipment that’s marginal in calm conditions fails in a sustained 60-mph gust, and when it fails near dry grass in August, the consequences are not abstract.

Hawaiian Electric has been explicit about the role its equipment played in the 2023 fire. Investigators confirmed a downed power line ignited the Lahaina blaze. The utility didn’t de-energize lines despite red-flag warnings that day, a decision that became the core of the litigation.

The settlement that followed ran to $4 billion total, with Hawaiian Electric’s share at approximately $2 billion, to be paid over four years without passing the cost directly to ratepayers. That number is the practical context for the current inspection program. Drones cost a fraction of what a single negligence settlement costs.

The Broader $450 Million Safety Strategy

The drone inspections are one component of a larger 2025-2027 Wildfire Safety Strategy that the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission approved in January 2026. The total projected cost is approximately $450 million, including $137 million budgeted for 2025 alone.

More than half the planned spending, roughly $180 million, is directed at Maui County, which the utility designates as its highest wildfire-risk territory.

The program goes well beyond aerial inspection. Hawaiian Electric is undergrounding about 2 miles of overhead power lines in critical Lahaina safety zones as a pilot project, with the goal of informing a broader undergrounding plan.

The utility is also adding weather stations and AI-assisted camera systems aimed at eventually covering 100 percent of high and medium wildfire-risk areas. A dedicated wildfire watch office, staffed by a meteorologist, is monitoring weather conditions around the clock.

The company is also building out a real-time wildfire risk model to inform its Public Safety Power Shutoff decisions, the protocol under which a utility can proactively cut power during extreme fire-weather events rather than wait for a line to fail.

A $95 million federal grid resilience grant received in 2024 is helping offset some of the cost. Customers are still likely to see monthly bills rise between $1 and $5.50 depending on island, as the PUC has approved securitization bonds to spread the financing.

DroneXL’s Take

Let’s be straight. This is a utility company using drone technology because it had to, not because it wanted to. Hawaiian Electric is carrying a $2 billion liability payment, a rebuilt grid in West Maui, and a court-approved safety strategy as direct consequences of what happened on August 8, 2023.

The drone inspection program didn’t exist at scale before Lahaina. It exists now because the alternative — continuing to find infrastructure problems through ground-level visual checks and hoping for the best — already produced the deadliest American wildfire in over a century.

The Cyberhawk BVLOS waiver and iHawk AI platform are genuinely useful tools here. The ability to inspect a pole, flag a defect, and get a repair crew on it the same day compresses a response timeline that historically ran weeks or months.

That’s real. But the honest part is that none of this replaces the fundamental judgment call that utilities have to make under red-flag conditions: when the wind is blowing and the grass is dry, do you shut the power off or leave it on? Drones can find the compromised hardware. They can’t make that call for you. Hawaiian Electric didn’t make it correctly in 2023, and 102 people died.

For the drone industry, this story matters as a template. Hawaiian Electric’s statewide rollout, funded partly by a federal grid resilience grant and backed by PUC approval, is the kind of institutional adoption that turns drone inspection from a vendor pitch into standard practice.

The utilities that still rely primarily on ground crews to find defects on 50-year-old infrastructure aren’t operating in a different industry. They’re operating on borrowed time.

Photo credit: Hawaiian Electric, Wikipedia, iHawk.ai