What a PAPI Inspection Actually Costs

The short answer

We quote it, we do not publish it. Not to be coy, but because the honest number depends on your airfield, and a published rate would be wrong for most of the airports that read it. Tell us the airport and you get a figure and a date back.

The planning bands we do put in writing, per PAPI set and per visit, are in the PAPI calibration cost guide .

What you can plan around is the shape of the visit. Our crew arrives with the drones, the cameras and the RTK positioning, and inspects the whole airfield in one go. Budget about an hour on site per runway with both directions measured. Results come back the same day.

What moves the number

How much airfield there is. The PAPI is measured per approach direction, so one runway means two sides and two runways mean four. The same is true of the approach lighting, the edge light rows and the pavement. The second runway costs less than the first, because the crew, the equipment and the travel are already on site.

Where the airport is. We operate through a network of licensed operators with airfield measurement experience, and coverage varies by region. Distance shows up as travel, not as a different inspection.

Whether anything needs re-measuring. If a unit comes back out of tolerance and your maintenance team adjusts it, the verification pass is a fraction of a full inspection. The mission plan already exists and reproduces the same flight path, so the re-check is a comparison rather than a new survey.

Why one visit is the whole airfield

It used to be normal to price a PAPI check on its own. That made sense when the PAPI was the only thing a drone could measure well, but it is no longer the case, and splitting the airfield into separate visits is the expensive way to do it.

Once a crew is on site and coordinated with your tower, the marginal cost of also flying the approach lighting, the edge light rows, the dimming steps, the obstacle protection surface and a pavement scan is small. The travel is paid, the coordination is done, the airfield is already modelled. Three separate visits over a year cost more than one visit that covers everything, and they give you three partial pictures instead of one complete one.

So that is what the service is now. Every lighting system and every paved surface, in one visit.

What you are comparing against

The honest comparison is not against another drone service. It is against a calibration aircraft, which is what most airports have always used.

An aircraft-based check does not close your runway. It flies approaches with the runway open, and in Central Europe it measures the PAPI and the runway lights together in about half an hour of flight time. What it costs you is the transit: ferry to your aerodrome is charged in flight hours at sixty to seventy percent of the measurement rate, which is why those checks are scheduled onto a visit that is already happening for the ILS or the VOR.

So the comparison depends on your field. If a calibration flight is already on your calendar, the aircraft measures the indicators and the runway lights cheaply and you should buy a drone survey for what that half hour does not produce: the approach lighting unit by unit, the arrays rather than a sample, the markings, the pavement, and a record that reproduces next year. If no calibration flight is scheduled, the aircraft arrives carrying its transit both ways and the drone is simply cheaper.

What arrives at the end

A report in your authority’s format, built to ICAO, EASA or FAA, with the measured value for every unit, the exact adjustment for anything outside tolerance, and the photo and video evidence behind each measurement. Formatted for submission, not for interpretation.

See what a visit covers on the pricing page , or tell us about your airfield and we will quote the actual number.