Aerial mapping since 1991

Aeroptic brings together two legacy organizations: Flight Landata, founded in North Andover in 1991, and GeoVantage, founded in 1998. They shared a simple notion: leverage decades of global experience with the most advanced, government-grade aerial remote sensing technology, and we could dramatically improve on the traditional aerial imagery methods used to respond to natural disasters, monitor natural resources, and track infrastructure development.

Over the years we’ve been owned by many large and well-respected parent companies, including KeyW, Jacobs, Amentum, Lockheed Martin, and now IntelinAir. Throughout, we’ve been the same team, operating out of the same location in North Andover, Massachusetts, about 20 miles north of Boston.

Built for military operations

We (as Flight Landata) were part of the original BuckEye team for the USACE Army Geospatial Center. We started with our own hyperspectral sensor, and soon transitioned to provide the aircraft, pilots, sensor operators, logistics, and EO sensor technology. Our Aeroptic camera system was BuckEye’s standard through 2019, when we dedicated ourselves to commercial work. For years we supported overseas mapping operations for the U.S. Army on a continuous basis, flying high-altitude, wide-area missions from austere locations. That work set our standards: equipment had to be reliable, data had to be right the first time, and we had to be able to deploy anywhere.

It also shaped our technology. Flying long distances while holding high accuracy drove deep investment in our own inertial navigation system and in-house radiometric and geometric calibration, so our imagery maps accurately without ground survey points. Our D3 mapping system collects 8 cm imagery at about 400 square kilometers per hour from 18,000 feet.

Applied to commercial work

From there we took the same technology to commercial mapping projects around the world. Commercial work pushed us toward cost efficiency and a flexible supply chain, which led to the GeoPod: a compact pod that mounts to several classes of Cessna aircraft and turns them into mapping aircraft, with RGB, thermal, multispectral and lidar variants.

Milestones

• 1991 Flight Landata is founded in North Andover, Massachusetts.
• 1998 GeoVantage is founded.
• 2006 Joins the original BuckEye team for the USACE Army Geospatial Center as Flight Landata.
• 2006 Deploys a hyperspectral camera system to Iraq.
• 2011 KeyW acquires Flight Landata.
• 2013 Begins contributing to the Open Geospatial Consortium’s GMLJP2 standard, defining methods for georeferenceable imagery.
• 2014 Selected by the Open Geospatial Consortium for Testbed 11, editing its engineering report on harmonizing standards for remote sensing imagery.
• 2015 Introduces the Aeroptic D3 camera to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ BuckEye program.
• 2016 Acquires GeoVantage, formerly part of John Deere Agri Services.
• 2017 Deploys a sensor system with a 30,000-pixel swath in commercial oil and gas operations.
• 2017 Deploys a combined RGB, VNIR hyperspectral and LWIR thermal sensor for commercial agriculture.
• 2019 Moves from BuckEye to dedicated commercial work.
• 2022 Collects imagery of most U.S. and Canadian roadways for a Fortune 25 company in support of autonomous vehicle guidance.