Pipe rack bents, vessels, an exchanger train and eight thousand four hundred spools cut in a fab shop nine hundred kilometres away. On a plant the model has to match the metal — Ground Reality registers the built condition every night, so a spool that will not fit is found in the yard instead of at height.
Capture · Mission 20
The sheet above is a drawing of this. 10 capture waypoints, and every finding called as the aircraft reaches it — scroll sets the target, the mission keeps its own pace, and the page waits for it.
Sector · Industrial plants
Thirteen metres of clear air between the pipe rack and the vessel train, flown down the middle of it at nine and a half metres off the deck — under the fin-fan bank, under the relief header at plus twenty-six. Then the lit flare, the steam blow, and the machine goes where the aircraft cannot: into the under-croft, reading spool tags off the steel and measuring a bent that is forty millimetres off the model.
A spool arrives, goes up on the rack, and stops 40 mm short because the bent steel was erected to an older revision. It comes back down, the crew stands, and the fab shop re-cuts.
The rack is captured and registered against the coordination model every night. Steel that has moved reads as a measured delta against revision before the spool ships — flagged from 25 mm, at the bent it happened on.
Inspecting a live rack at twenty-six metres means scaffold, a permit, a spotter and a hot-work window. Most of it gets deferred to the next turnaround, which is exactly where the surprises are.
Robots and docked drones run the rounds instead: thermal, RGB and 360 along the rack, the exchanger train and the flare line, four times a day, with no permit and no climb.
Piping progress is reported in spools erected. The estimate was priced in diameter inches and the payment is made in tested systems, and the three numbers have never once met.
Installed quantities are tracked against estimate by crew and by system — spools set, welds made, joints hydro-tested — so the earned-value line is a count off the record instead of a foreman's judgement on a Friday.
8,400
Spools tracked from the fab shop to hydro test
0
Clashes that reached the field after nightly registration
14 H
From the night scan to the as-built reissued to the fab shop
The program runs on the unit's own clock — the permit board, the day shift's 17:30, the shutdown window. Nothing on this list needs a scaffold, and everything on it lands on the record the fab shop reads.
4×/day, permit-free, on the unit's rounds
Thermal, RGB and 360 along the rack, the exchanger train and the flare line. The rounds that used to wait for scaffold, a spotter and a hot-work window run four times a day instead, with nobody at height.
ROUNDS 4/DAY · EL +26M · CLIMBS 0Daily at 17:30, on the day shift's close
The unit is captured and registered against the coordination model every night. Steel that has moved reads as a delta at the bent it moved on, and the model holds the metal to within 6 mm.
0.9CM · REGISTER ±4MM · DELTA ≤6MMAs the dressing moves, two loops per pass
C-201 — Ø3.6 m, 14.0 m tan-to-tan — is orbited platform by platform, so dressing progress is read off the shell instead of claimed from the ground.
C-201 · 0.6CM DETAIL · 96 STATIONSInside the window, unit down, no permit
When the unit comes down, the scan goes in: registered to ±4 mm by 23:55, with every delta at the fab shop before the next spool is loaded on a truck.
SCAN 22:40 · REGISTERED 23:55 · FAB SHOP 06:20No. The robot runs the rounds — thermal, RGB and 360, four times a day along the rack and the flare line — and the dock flies the rest. A rack at twenty-six metres gets inspected with zero climbs and no permit to write.
ROUNDS 4/DAY · EL +26M · CLIMBS 0The rack is registered against the model to ±4 mm every night. Bent 14 read 40 mm off revision — past the 25 mm tolerance — and the fab shop had the delta by 06:20, before the spool was on the truck. It went up once, and fit.
BENT 14 · Δ40MM · TOL 25MMA scan at 17:30 every day, registered to ±4 mm, holding the model within 6 mm of the metal — and when a shutdown window opens, the as-built is reissued within 14 hours of the night scan.
SCAN 17:30 · DELTA ≤6MM · REISSUE 14HThe mission is planned against surveyed boundaries — the unit limit and the flare's radiant exclusion at R 40 m — and flown to the permit on the record. The same pass that read the rack flagged hot work in bay 3 with no gas test on file.
EXCLUSION R 40M · PERMIT 4412As a count off the record, daily: 6,820 of 8,400 spools set, 98.2% of welds radiographed, 41 of 68 systems hydro-tested — tracked against the estimate by crew and by system, not judged on a Friday.
SPOOLS 6,820/8,400 · RT 98.2% · HYDRO 41/68Zero, after nightly registration. The last pass read the tray at +12.00 against line 6 and it read clean — the argument happens in the model, at a desk, instead of at height with a crew standing.
CLASHES 0 · TRAY +12.00 VS LINE 6Read overnight on a unit like this one: the 17:30 scan, the shutdown-window registration, the weld and hydro counts, and the permit board. Three of the 27 profiles wake up to it.
06:40 · UNIT 400 · RACK BENT 14
SEQUENCE
Bent 14 reads 40 mm off revision on last night's registration. Hold spool deliveries for that bay — the fab shop has had the delta since 06:20, so the re-cut ships before the crane is booked and goes up once.
CITES: SCAN 22:40 · REGISTER 23:55 · MODEL REV
07:30 · UNIT 400 · MODEL
BIM VS BUILT
The as-built holds the metal to 6 mm: last night's registration landed ±4 mm, the tray at +12.00 checks clean against line 6, and nothing on the unit has drifted past the 25 mm tolerance.
CITES: SCAN 17:30 · MODEL REV · TOL 25MM
05:55 · UNIT 400 · APRON
HAZARD
Hot work in bay 3 has no gas test on file — flagged from the pass, inside the flare's R 40 m radiant exclusion. Nobody climbs the rack to prove anything today; the rounds run four a day instead.
CITES: FLIGHT PASS · PERMIT 4412 · BAY 3
Overlay capture on the model; drift caught while it's cheap
REV C VS BUILT · Δ FLAGGEDThermal/RGB/360 asset rounds by robot
ROUNDS 4/DAYInstalled quantities vs estimate, by crew
QTY VS EST · DAILYStructured gates that catch it while it's fixable
GATES/PHASE 12One calendar for every autonomous capture on the portfolio
MISSIONS ON A CYCLEFigures are a specimen record, drawn to the platform's own conventions.
Send us a unit boundary and the coordination model — we will scan one window, register it to ±4 mm, and hand back the as-built with every delta named at its bent.