How Balfour Beatty Centralised Drone Compliance Across 150+ Pilots

Balfour Beatty is a leading international infrastructure group delivering complex projects across the UK and beyond. The organisation has been using drones for over a decade to support inspection, surveying and asset access across large and often high-risk environments. With drone usage continuing to increase across the business, maintaining safe, compliant and efficient operations at scale became a growing priority.

Craig Matthews, CAA Accountable Manager, is responsible for the oversight of more than 150 drone pilots operating across multiple projects and locations.

As drone operations expanded, compliance management became increasingly complex for the business. Prior to adopting Atoll’s Drone Management System (ADMS), records were maintained using a mixture of paper files, spreadsheets and Word documents. This made it difficult to maintain consistent oversight of pilot activity and compliance status.

Key challenges included:

• Limited visibility of pilot activity across the business
• Time-consuming manual record keeping
• Uncertainty around pilot authorisation and flight permissions
• Lengthy preparation for CAA audits and Operational Authorisation renewals

The Accountable Manager needed a clearer, faster way to understand what pilots were doing and whether operations were compliant at any given moment.

Balfour Beatty adopted the ADMS to centralise drone operations and compliance management across the organisation.

ADMS provided a single platform where pilot records, flight logs, risk assessments, pre and post-flight checks and authorisations could be managed consistently.

A key feature for pilots was Atoll’s Clear to Fly functionality. This removed confusion around where, when and what pilots were authorised to fly. Each pilot could log in and immediately understand their current operational permissions.

For management, ADMS delivered instant oversight. Craig could log in at any time and see a clear, up-to-date picture of drone activity across the business without chasing paperwork or spreadsheets.

The impact of moving to a centralised drone management platform provided many immediate benefits, including:

• Significant reduction in administrative workload
• Clear authorisation guidance for pilots before every flight
• Faster access to third-party assets due to improved compliance confidence

Where CAA Operational Authorisation renewals once required months of preparation, required documentation is now available in a CAA-ready format at the click of a button. This has also streamlined responses to spot-check audits.

Balfour Beatty has also seen efficiency gains across projects, with pilots completing work more quickly thanks to compliant flight logging, risk assessments and operational records being handled within a single system.

“It gives me easy oversight of drone pilots’ operations and uniformity in their compliance methodology. Atoll’s Clear to Fly function has removed uncertainty for our pilots and made ongoing compliance far easier to manage.”

Craig M
CAA Accountable Manager
Balfour Beatty