Inspecting an Airfield With No Internet At All

The question that comes up first

Airfields are not offices. Plenty of them have a terminal building with decent bandwidth and a runway threshold two kilometres away with none. Others have connectivity but rules that keep operational data inside the perimeter.

So the first question is usually some version of: does this thing need the internet?

No. The whole loop runs on the airfield if you want it to.

What on-site actually means

In the on-site model, a field laptop serves a local network on the airfield. The drone sends footage to the field hub over that network, the hub passes it to the laptop, and the laptop does the work. Capture, processing and report generation all happen there. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload to.

The hardware bar is deliberately low. Any modern laptop will do. There is no dedicated GPU, no workstation, and no rack of anything in a hut by the runway.

What you get at the end is the same regulatory-grade report the cloud model produces, built to ICAO, EASA or FAA tolerances, with the same photo and video evidence, within minutes of the last pass.

When the cloud is the better answer

The offline model is not the recommended one. It is one of two, and the right choice depends on the airport.

Running on AWS buys things a laptop cannot: heavier 3D reconstruction, historical trend analysis across campaigns, and managed access control with roles and multi-factor authentication. If your airport wants to compare this year’s angles against the last four years, that history has to live somewhere.

The link does not need to be good. Any usable connection works, including 4G or 5G from the field, because the upload happens after the flight rather than during it.

Two models, one measurement

The part worth being clear about: the deployment model changes where the computation happens and nothing else. Same computer-vision core, same tolerances, same report format, same evidence. An authority receiving the protocol cannot tell which model produced it, because there is nothing in it to tell them.

That is deliberate. Deployment is an infrastructure decision, and infrastructure decisions should not leak into measurement results.

How to pick

Two questions settle it in most cases.

If there is no usable internet at the airfield, or your data rules keep operational data on site, run on-site on the local network.

If you want managed scale, role-based access and inspection history across campaigns, run on AWS.

If the answer is somehow both, that is fine too. Deployment is agreed per airport, and TarmacView is not tied to a single hosting shape.

The technology page lays both models out side by side, or you can ask us about your airfield directly.