Inspection Is Taiwan's Furthest-Along Drone Application — Because It Routed Around BVLOS
I assumed inspection was blocked by beyond-visual-line-of-sight rules the way logistics is. It isn't. Bridge, transmission tower, and high-speed rail viaduct inspection are all running with hard numbers: one bridge went from 8 inspectors, 4 vehicles and 2 days to 5 people, 1 vehicle and half a day with no traffic control at all, at 60% of conventional cost; high-speed rail crews covered at most 700 metres a day on foot and now save 3–5x; a private power plant cut headcount by three quarters and cost by half with no outage required. The reason is that all of these are segmented, fixed-point tasks completable within visual line of sight. What BVLOS actually blocks is continuous long-range routes, not 'inspection' as a category.