Aging pavement is one of the biggest challenges facing small regional airports. Agencies like ALDOT need a full view of runway conditions without shutting down operations or relying on partial inspections. These airports often operate with limited staff and tight scheduling windows, so minimizing disruption is essential. Luverne Municipal Airport has served its region for years, but time and Mother Nature have made the runway increasingly difficult to fully evaluate. Traditional inspections rely on sampling short stretches of pavement and extrapolating the rest. For ALDOT’s UAS team, this created an opportunity to modernize the process and capture full surface data at a level of detail that manual methods could not achieve
The Luverne project marked the first time ALDOT deployed the IF800 Tomcat paired with Sentera’s 65R camera for dedicated pavement analysis. The goal was to capture the entire runway at high speed and low altitude while producing imagery detailed enough for gNext to perform automated pavement assessments, including crack mapping, patch analysis, and vegetation detection.
The results delivered far more clarity than expected.
ALDOT’s UAS program is among the most active in the country, operating more than 4,000 flights per year. They needed a system that was stable, efficient, and built to handle frequent missions at scale.
The IF800 Tomcat offered:
Paired with the Sentera 65R, the aircraft was positioned to deliver engineering-grade pavement imagery in a single mission. Finishing the mission in one pass reduced site time and eliminated the need for re-flights, which ALDOT sees as a major operational advantage.
“We were flying over 30 mph at 100 feet, and the data was phenomenal. I was blown away that a global shutter could capture pavement detail that clearly.” — JD D’Arville, ALDOT
At Luverne, ALDOT designed the mission to focus on the runway, taxiways, and apron. They flew:
Despite the higher airspeed, the 65R’s global shutter captured clean, crisp imagery with no motion distortion.The dataset produced a ground sample distance (GSD) just under one quarter inch, meeting the team’s expectations and opening the door to reaching ⅛ inch GSD during future inspections.
This demonstrated that a multirotor platform can deliver the clarity and consistency required for detailed airport pavement assessments.
Once back at the office, the team imported the IF800 dataset into gNext. Using the runway asset toolset, gNext automatically identified key features and conditions, including:
The software generated visual overlays and structured reports that translate raw imagery into actionable insights for engineers, planners, and aeronautics staff.
D’Arville noted the ability to detect cracking within patched regions was especially valuable, giving a level of clarity far beyond what traditional inspections typically capture. Detecting cracks inside patched regions provides airport engineers with an earlier warning of potential problem areas that may fail sooner than expected.
The Luverne dataset provided ALDOT with:
Based on these results, ALDOT plans to use this workflow at additional airports as part of its ongoing pavement assessments, providing aeronautics teams with a consistent, data-rich way to monitor pavement health year after year.
The Luverne project demonstrates that the IF800 and 65R pairing provides the clarity required for engineering-grade pavement inspection. These insights provide ALDOT with a repeatable method that is deployable across airports of different sizes, yielding consistent results.
“That was our first test with the IF800 at Luverne, and we were blown away by the results. Based on what we saw on this project, we plan to use that drone and 65R payload for pavement work every time we fly an airport.”— JD D’Arville, ALDOT
ALDOT plans to continue expanding this workflow into 2026 and beyond, with more airports already scheduled for evaluation using the IF800. As each new project is flown, the agency will build a growing pavement history for airports across the state. With data captured at consistent altitudes, speeds, and sensor settings, gNext becomes a comparative library that helps aeronautics staff evaluate trends over time, track early signs of deterioration, and see how different sections of pavement respond to weather and use. This supports smarter planning and more efficient maintenance strategies, since decisions about resurfacing or rehabilitation can be made with a full runway view instead of relying on sampled sections alone.
The Luverne Airport project highlights how a compact, reliable system like the IF800 paired with the Sentera 65R and gNext analysis tools can support runway assessment work with clear, repeatable data. It serves as an example of how this combination can be applied to small-airport inspections, offering a consistent and efficient workflow that can scale to similar infrastructure projects.