Mission of the Week: The "Quick" 20-Acre Orthomosaic

A grading contractor calls. "Just need a quick 2D orthomosaic of a 20-acre dirt parcel. Should only take you one battery, right?"

He's not wrong about the battery. A modern enterprise quad will map 20 acres at 200 feet in about 16 minutes.

Here's the time that didn't fit on that battery:

• Drive time: 37 miles each way. Call it 90 minutes round trip.
• On-site prep: 20 minutes walking the perimeter, checking power lines, and setting two ground targets.
• Flight: 16 minutes in the air.
• Offload and upload: About 420 photos. Eight minutes to your laptop, roughly 45 minutes up over home internet.
• Stitching: Another hour of your computer doing nothing else.

Total: roughly 3.8 hours.

Quote it at $175 because "it's a 20-minute flight," and the 74-mile round trip costs you $53.65 at the 2026 IRS standard mileage rate of $0.725 a mile. That leaves about $32 an hour before self-employment tax and software subscriptions.

In Rotor Rate, you enter the site address, the deliverable, and your rates. The calculator adds the drive, processing time, and mileage, so you quote the real floor instead of the flight time.

Quote the job, not the flight. The flight is the shortest part of your day. Run your own numbers in the free calculator.