Aerial Systems
Buying aircraft is the easy part. What determines whether a drone program survives its second year is everything on the ground: where the video lands, how long it is kept, who can watch it, and whether you can prove any of that to an auditor.
Mentat treats a drone fleet like any other distributed system. Docks, aircraft, and ground stations are inventoried assets with identities and lifecycles. Flight logs and video are pipelines with retention rules. Airspace authorizations and pilot currency are compliance state that expires.
The result is a program that scales from three aircraft to three hundred without a proportional increase in the number of people spending their week moving files around.
What we build
Every airframe, dock, battery, and payload tracked as a managed asset with firmware state, maintenance history, and automated health checks.
Downlink from docks and ground control into a pipeline that handles the burst load of a simultaneous multi-ship launch without dropping frames or context.
Flight logs, mission plans, and recorded video captured as durable records with the metadata a records request or a court proceeding will eventually ask for.
The paperwork that makes a flight lawful, tracked as live system state instead of a spreadsheet someone maintains on the side.
How we get there
Aircraft, docks, controllers, payloads, and the humans authorized to fly them, reconciled into a single source of truth with owners and lifecycle state.
A hardened, encrypted route from field hardware into the platform, sized for peak concurrent operations rather than average load.
Retention schedules, access tiers, geofences, and authorization requirements written as policy that the pipeline enforces automatically.
Dashboards for readiness, alerting on degraded assets, and an audit trail that answers oversight questions without a manual reconstruction effort.
Governance & safeguards
Aerial programs draw scrutiny from oversight bodies, records requesters, and the public. We build the accountability layer as part of the system rather than bolting it on after the first inquiry.
Footage from a routine flight and footage tied to an active matter follow different retention clocks, enforced in code with documented exceptions.
Role-based access down to the mission level, with every view, download, and export written to an audit log the operator cannot edit.
Reporting exports built to support impact-and-use disclosures, flight-count publication, and other transparency obligations agencies increasingly carry.
Built on
We build on established open-source and cloud-native building blocks rather than proprietary black boxes, so the platform stays inspectable, portable, and yours.
Fleet & edge
Data platform
Operations
Related
Scaling a drone program?
We can assess your current fleet, video path, and records posture, then map what it takes to operate at the scale you are planning for.