Oil & Gas
Maritime
Power Gen
Chemicals
Mining
Sewers
Cement
Nuclear
Infrastructure
EN
Wrapping Up 2025 with Flyability!
What an epic year it has been! We’ve attended dozens of tradeshows, released products, and flown in environments that haven’t been seen in decades. Let’s dive into the highlights of Flyability’s 2025 - and give you some insights into what’s coming in 2026.
Optimization: We’re Flying for Longer!
Our hardware team’s mission this year was straightforward: optimize flight time. To achieve this goal, they came up with 2 brilliant solutions.
The High-Capacity Battery
We wanted to expand the available battery-powered flight time, so our extensively tested and researched a solution that could add more flight time without weighing down the drone. The result? Our new high-capacity batteries. This product was launched in June of 2025 and offers up to 50% more flight time per charge. The new battery can fly for over 5 extra minutes when the Elios 3 is equipped the LiDAR Rev 6 payload - and this additional flight time can be greater depending on which payloads are mounted on the drone or not.
The high-capacity batteries don’t just offer more flight time, but more charging cycles too. This prolongs the product’s lifespan and improves operational efficiency. Ready for immediate use, it is supported by all Elios 3 drones!
Learn more about the high-capacity battery
The Tether
Some missions challenge us to go beyond standard battery operations. Whether it’s taking hundreds of UT measurements in a tank or needing to do prolonged, close, visual inspections, our tether is here to make it easier! Our solution is here to help: the tether power unit.
An exciting step in a new direction, the tether offers unlimited flight time to our Elios 3 users. Announced in 2025, this exciting product includes a 50-meter Kevlar-reinforced cable for extended range and flight. The tether power unit also has a backup battery and swivel piece to ensure the cable doesn’t get tangled, and the drone will keep flying in the case of unexpected power loss. It paves the way for intense data collection missions in complex environments, such as UT measurements for class surveys inside a ship hull or tank deformation detection.
You can learn all about the tether power unit on our website!
Autonomy: A bold new venture
2025 was the year of the AI and autonomy explosion - both globally and at Flyability! Our software and firmware teams followed an ambitious roadmap where they aimed to unlock greater autonomy for the Elios 3. Building on the success of 2024, when we launched return-to-signal, we took it a step further in 2025!
Smart Return-to-Home
Our goal is safe, easy data collection with our solutions. That’s why Smart Return-to-Home is such a game-changer! This feature automatically calculates the safest and fastest route back to the home point while also monitoring battery life. The cockpit interface tells you exactly when you need to start flying back and prompts you to trigger Smart Return-to-Home. When engaged, this tool uses onboard autonomy engines and the drone’s 3D livemap to consider the distance covered, the available routes, and the remaining battery as it plots out the best way to return. The result? Easier flights where pilots can focus on the inspection at-hand instead of managing battery life and available flight time.
Smart Return-to-Home combines autonomy with the Elios 3's speed to select the fastest and safest route back
Resume Inspection
Hand-in-hand with Smart RTH comes the “Resume Inspection” feature. So, how does it work? When your drone is completing a large inspection that requires multiple flights - for example, looking at a boiler furnace - you may have to come back for multiple rounds of inspections or gather data on different days. Using resume inspection, you can save the point where your last flight ended to the drone’s livemap. Then, when you’re ready to take off for the next flight, simply select “Resume Inspection” and the drone will autonomously fly back to where the last inspection ended! You can resume data collection without any gaps and cover the entire asset more quickly.
Smart Return-to-Home and Resume Inspection are two examples of how autonomy can be integrated with the Elios 3 while still respecting the stringent safety protocols present in the environments where the drone flies. More is expected to come in 2026, with this area being a key focus for the Flyability team! Stay tuned for more news.
Learn more about the Flyability software suite.
From Product to Solution: our Software Updates
Flyability empowers you with a complete solution, taking you from data collection to reporting through our ecosystem. We’ve been growing our software and analysis capabilities alongside our integrations to unlock more opportunities for our users.
Beyond our own ecosystem, we’ve been offering more support and integrations with third-party software. Whether you want to learn how to take your Elios 3 data and convert it into a Scan to BIM model, or you’d like to share annotated point clouds via Flyability Cloud, we’ve created documentation and ways to do so.
At the beginning of the year, we announced an integration with WinCan Web for the Elios 3, partnering with one of the biggest wastewater software providers in the world. Now, you can use data from your drone and code it for defects using WinCan’s AI system, getting the best of both worlds in the form of accurate data and industry-standard reporting.
The expansion of software capabilities is not just external - Flyability Cloud has reached new heights! Our most exciting addition to the Cloud is the colorization tool, which brings indoor 3D models to life. Colorization generates a textured mesh of the scanned area, extracting insights that were previously hard or impossible to obtain. Thanks to this feature, you can now get more context when looking at your datasets without additional scanning. This is another advancement by Flyability in our efforts to empower you with multiple forms of data and information about every asset you inspect.
We recently recorded a webinar all about colorization, or you can head to our blog to read the detailed feature profile!
The Elios 3: Trusted by Industry Leaders
We pride ourselves on the quality of our solutions - and we love to see it recognized by others. Elios users around the world frequently take to LinkedIn and other social media platforms to shaer what they are achieving with their drones and our team love to see the variety of applications for our technology.
Don’t forget to tag the Flyability LinkedIn account in your posts so we can see what you’re doing and re-post your successes!
2025 saw a tectonic shift in the adoption and acceptance of our technology by some of the most influential companies in the world.
The American Bureau of Shipping, one of the key classification societies that set the rules for safe vessel use in the maritime sector, has spent the last few years rigorously testing the Elios 3 drone and its UT payload. In 2025, they officially accepted it as a form of remote inspection technology (RIT) and updated their classification survey guides to include data collection with RIT like the Elios 3!
In a detailed interview, ABS explained the different missions they undertook with the Elios 3 UT to test its accuracy, efficacy, and durability in tankers, chemical carriers, and other vessels. They hailed the solution’s advancements in safety and efficiency, crediting it as a sign of evolving technology.
Now, service providers can use the Elios 3 to gather data during class surveys and be confident that their results are accepted and recognized by the governing bodies like ABS - an incredible step forward and a breakthrough for Flyability in the maritime industry!
Read the full interview by ABS on the use of UT drones for class inspections
Finally, our last announcement in 2025 was that our drone has been selected as part of a pilot programme by Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) at their Electric Propulsion Manufacturing Centre (EPMC) in the UK.
The public announcement of Jaguar Land Rover's use of the Elios 3 signals a growing cross-industry acceptance of remote inspection technologies
Their pilot programme has seen the Elios 3 cut inspections from 4 hours to just 10 minutes - a 95% improvement! The impressive changes are due to the drone’s access to high and confined spaces, the reduced need for safety procedures and operations, and minimize disruption to surrounding operations. In a press release, JLR highlighted the drone’s collision-tolerant design and LiDAR payload as key contributors to making the drone well-suited to this task.
Read the press release about using the Elios 3 on Jaguar Land Rover’s website.
In 2026, JLR is planning to trial the Elios 3 at a new warehouse space that is the size of 13 football pitches - or 91,800 square meters! This challenging mission will push the Elios 3 to continue delivering above-expectation results, and our team looks forward to testing new features with the JLR team as we collaborate to optimize the inspection and management of these warehouse environments.
What’s coming in 2026?
Well, we can’t tell you everything just yet - but we’ve got a busy year ahead! Our sales team will be on the road at tradeshows around the world, from Australia to Alaska, bringing the Elios 3 closer to you - along with our pilot team completing training sessions across the globe.
Back at HQ, our product and operations teams will be working hard to ship out drones and develop the next updates and features, with some expected to be announced in late Q1 2026 - keep an eye on your inbox for updates!
From the Marketing department, you can expect to see powerful success stories, user testimonials, and regional Drone Days where you can network with and meet other professionals using the Elios 3 from across industries. Don’t miss the first one - our Maritime Drone Days, taking place in Athens in February!
The entire Flyability team would like to thank all of our Elios users around the world, as well as our incredible partners and resellers, for their efforts this year - and we can’t wait to share more successes in 2026!
.png)
