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Live video from a drone used to be treated as a bonus. Useful when it worked, but rarely central to the workflow. For public safety teams, corporate security operators and critical infrastructure owners, that has changed completely. Live video has shifted from a peripheral capability to the connective tissue between sensors, dispatchers and decision-makers.

Operators are being asked to do more with less, across more sites, with stricter accountability. A control room cannot wait for a written situation report when the camera is already airborne. What it needs is the camera feed, the map, the dispatch ticket and the response unit in one place. Increasingly, on one screen.

This is the problem AirHub is built to solve.

Why live video streaming sits at the centre of operations

Three forces are pulling live video to the heart of drone operations.

Time compression. In Drone-as-First-Responder programmes such as the one running with Dubai Police, response targets are measured in tens of seconds. A live feed is the decision surface the dispatcher uses to triage, the ground unit uses to approach safely, and the supervisor uses to commit resources.

Multi-sensor verification. A single alarm is noise. An alarm paired with a confirmed visual is an incident. The faster a control room can corroborate sensor data with imagery, from a drone, fixed camera, bodycam or ground robot, the more credible the response becomes.

Accountability and institutional learning. Every feed that is streamed can be archived for after-action review, evidence chains and training. Live video is operational in the moment and becomes institutional knowledge afterwards.

Controlling DJI Dock operations from the drone operations centre

AirHub operates as a Drone Operations Centre (DOC). Within the DOC, an operator can plan a mission, dispatch a DJI Dock, watch the take-off and stream the live feed back to the same screen, all without anyone travelling to the site.

For critical infrastructure owners, this changes the cost equation of inspection and surveillance. A perimeter that used to require a physical patrol can be checked from the dock on a schedule, on a sensor trigger, or on demand from the control room. The video sits next to the mission plan, the airspace map, the geofence and the compliance log.

The same architecture serves public safety. A dock placed on a precinct roof becomes a permanent eye in the sky. When the call comes in, the operator launches autonomously, the feed appears in the DOC, and ground units see the same picture from their mobile devices on the way to the scene.

From the field to the control room: RC to operations centre

The reverse direction matters just as much. When a pilot is on scene with a remote controller, the control room needs that live feed too, without forcing the pilot to manage a second device.

AirHub solves this in two ways.

The first is the DJI RC Application for Android, which runs natively on supported DJI controllers and pushes the live video stream from the aircraft into the AirHub platform in one step. The pilot stays focused on flying. The DOC sees what the pilot sees.

The second is open protocol support: RTMP and RTSP. Both are industry-standard streaming protocols and both are fully supported inside AirHub. Any drone, camera or device capable of producing an RTMP or RTSP stream can be ingested into the same operational view. No proprietary plug-in. No vendor lock-in.

The practical result is that an incident stays in one place. The pilot, the operator and the commander are looking at the same frame at the same time.

VMS integrations

For most security and critical infrastructure clients, the control room already runs on a Video Management System. Genetec Security Center and Milestone XProtect dominate that landscape. Asking a security operator to leave their VMS to look at a drone feed is the wrong approach entirely.

AirHub is built to make drones behave like any other camera inside the VMS. Because AirHub streams over open protocols, drone feeds, whether from a DJI Dock under autonomous control or from a pilot in the field, can be exposed into a VMS System. The operator works in the VMS they already know, sees the drone alongside the CCTV, and triggers actions in the workflow they already trust.

This is also where SecHub, AirHub's hardware-agnostic counter-UAS and sensor-fusion layer, plays a role. SecHub brings detection, assessment and response together and feeds the same VMS, so a control room watching a perimeter receives both the drone view and the intruder view in one operational picture.

Beyond drones: bodycams, CCTV and ground robotics

The deeper point is that RTMP and RTSP are video protocols, not drone protocols. Any device that speaks them can be brought into the same workflow.

That opens three immediate possibilities.

Bodycams. Officer-worn cameras streaming over RTMP from the field give the control room the human perspective alongside the aerial one. When the drone shows the wider scene and the bodycam shows the approach, the supervisor has the complete picture.

Fixed CCTV. Cameras at infrastructure sites already produce RTSP. Bringing them into AirHub or into a SecHub-connected VMS removes the artificial wall between drone video and site video.

Ground robotics. Quadrupeds, UGVs and tethered sensors increasingly carry their own cameras. Treating those streams the same way as a drone stream means operators are not learning a new tool every time a new platform arrives on site.

This is what a single operational picture looks like in practice: orchestrating every relevant feed into the workflow the operator already trusts.

What this means for your operations

For a public safety chief, this translates to faster response times and stronger evidence chains. For a critical infrastructure owner, fewer truck rolls and quicker anomaly resolution. For a head of corporate security, one VMS rather than a stack of separate viewers.

The underlying shift is the same across all three: live video is the layer through which every other decision flows. AirHub, SecHub and our VMS partners exist to make that layer reliable, sovereign and operator-friendly, from the dock on the roof to the controller in the hand, and into the screens the control room is already watching.

Want to see how AirHub connects live video across your entire operation? Book a demo and we will walk you through it.

Summer is a different kind of test for professional drone operations. The missions do not change. The expectations do not lower. But the pressure goes up considerably.

More flights per day. More pilots active simultaneously. More decisions that need to happen quickly and without ambiguity. For teams in public safety, security, and critical infrastructure, the busy season is precisely when the gap between a well-structured drone operations management system and a reactive one becomes visible.

Over the past few years, working with operators across Europe and beyond, I have seen the same pattern repeat itself. Teams that struggle in summer are rarely underskilled or underequipped. They are under-organised. The hardware is fine. The pilots know what they are doing. The problem is the infrastructure around the operation: how missions are planned, how compliance is tracked, how situational awareness is maintained when multiple things are happening at once.

This piece looks at the three pillars that determine whether a drone programme holds up under pressure: safety, compliance, and operational efficiency, and at what having the right systems in place actually means in practice.

Why summer puts drone programmes under pressure

The increase in operational tempo during the busy season means managing more variables simultaneously, across more locations, with more people involved.

Search and rescue teams ramp up coverage during outdoor activity season. Public safety organisations deal with festivals, large-scale events, and increased demand for aerial support. Critical infrastructure operators intensify inspections of power lines, waterways, and transport networks before autumn. Security teams expand their patrol coverage.

For each of these organisations, the challenge is the same: how do you maintain the same standard of safety and compliance when the volume of operations increases significantly? The answer lies in having systems that scale with you.

Staying safe: situational awareness at operational pace

In a low-tempo operation, safety is relatively straightforward to manage. A mission is planned, a pilot is briefed, a flight is executed. There is time to review, adjust, and respond.

In a high-tempo environment, that margin shrinks. Multiple missions may be active at the same time, across different locations, with different pilots, different hardware, and different airspace constraints. The risk is that the overall operational picture becomes fragmented, and that no single person has full visibility of what is happening across the fleet.

This is where real-time situational awareness for drones becomes a structural requirement.

A drone operations centre that aggregates live telemetry, video feeds, and mission status into a single view gives command teams the oversight they need to intervene early, coordinate effectively, and respond to changing circumstances without disruption. When an incident develops in the field, the team managing operations from a central point needs to see it as it unfolds, not after the fact.

The organisations running the most demanding drone programmes, including law enforcement agencies and critical infrastructure operators we work with, treat situational awareness as a core operational requirement. It shapes how they design their command structures, how they staff their operations centres, and which technology they deploy.

Staying compliant: managing compliance as volume scales

Drone compliance is easy to manage at a small scale. A single pilot with a single drone in a single location can keep track of flight logs, certifications, and airspace authorisations without much infrastructure. Scale that to ten pilots, thirty drones, and operations across multiple sites or countries, and the picture changes entirely.

The regulatory framework does not relax because you are busy. High-tempo operations attract more scrutiny. Regulators, insurers, and client organisations increasingly expect professional drone operators to demonstrate that their compliance processes are robust and auditable, not just adequate on a quiet day.

Centralised drone fleet management is the practical answer to this challenge. When flight logs are recorded automatically, pilot certifications are stored and tracked in a single system, and airspace authorisations are linked directly to mission planning, compliance becomes a by-product of normal operations rather than an additional administrative burden.

The value of that approach became clear when one of our customers, Waterschap Zuiderzeeland, went through a formal regulatory audit. Every record was in order. Every flight was logged. Every pilot certification was traceable. The audit closed positively because their day-to-day system made them audit-ready by default.

That is the standard professional drone operations should be held to, especially during the periods when the pressure is highest.

Staying efficient: one platform for fleet management, compliance, and coordination

Operational efficiency in drone programmes is often discussed in terms of flight time, coverage, or data quality. Those things matter. The efficiency that determines whether a programme scales well is organisational: how quickly can a team plan a mission, assign a pilot, authorise a flight, and get a drone in the air with full confidence that everything is in order?

In many operations, that process still involves multiple tools. A planning application here, a logbook spreadsheet there, an email chain for airspace coordination, a separate system for pilot records. Each handoff between tools is a potential point of failure, and the cumulative overhead adds up quickly when flight volumes are high.

A unified drone operations platform eliminates that overhead. Mission planning, fleet status, pilot compliance, live operations, and post-flight reporting all sit within the same system. The administrative and coordination work that used to consume significant time becomes largely automated, and the team can focus on the operational decisions that actually require human judgement.

This is particularly important for organisations managing mixed fleets, where different drone types and different pilot qualifications need to be matched correctly to the right mission type. Doing that manually at scale is error-prone. Doing it through a platform with the right logic built in is reliable.

What the best-run operations have in common

Across the programmes we work with, the ones that hold up best under peak-season pressure share a few consistent characteristics.

• They invested in their operational infrastructure before the busy season, not during it.

• They treat compliance as a continuous process rather than a periodic exercise.

• They have a single operational view covering their entire fleet, rather than a patchwork of tools that each cover part of the picture.

• They have command teams with genuine situational awareness, which means they can respond to what is happening in real time.

None of this requires a large team or a large budget. It requires the right platform and the discipline to use it consistently.

Preparing for the season ahead

If your drone programme is heading into a period of increased operational tempo, the time to review your systems is before the pressure arrives.

The questions worth asking are straightforward. Can you run a compliance audit on your fleet right now and be confident in what you find? Do you have a single view of all active missions and pilot status? Can a new mission be planned, authorised, and assigned without touching multiple systems?

If any of those questions create doubt, that is a useful signal.

AirHub's Drone Operations Centre is built specifically for professional organisations managing complex, high-volume drone programmes. It covers mission planning, UAS fleet management, live operations, compliance tracking, and reporting in a single platform, designed for environments where the stakes are high and the margin for error is low.

Book a demo to see how it works in practice.

Frequently asked questions

What is drone fleet management?
Drone fleet management refers to the systems and processes used to oversee all aspects of an organisation's drone programme, including hardware tracking, pilot certification, mission planning, flight logging, airspace authorisation, and compliance reporting. Effective fleet management is essential for professional drone operators running high-volume or multi-site operations.

How do drone operators stay compliant during high-tempo operations?
The most reliable approach is to automate compliance as much as possible through a centralised platform. When flight logs are recorded automatically, pilot certifications are tracked in one place, and airspace authorisations are integrated into the planning process, compliance is maintained as a by-product of normal operations rather than requiring additional administrative effort.

What is a drone operations centre (DOC)?
A drone operations centre, or DOC, is a centralised command and management environment from which an organisation manages its drone programme. It typically provides real-time situational awareness across active missions, fleet status visibility, and coordination tools for pilots and command teams. AirHub's DOC is designed for professional organisations operating in public safety, security, and critical infrastructure.

How does situational awareness improve drone operations?
Real-time situational awareness allows command teams to see the full operational picture across all active missions simultaneously. This enables faster, better-informed decisions during incidents, reduces the risk of coordination failures in multi-pilot environments, and gives organisations the confidence to scale their operations without losing oversight.

What is the difference between drone fleet management software and a standard flight planning app?
A flight planning application handles the preparation of individual missions. Drone fleet management software covers the full lifecycle of an operation, from pre-mission planning and authorisation through live operations and post-flight compliance reporting. It also manages the organisational layer: pilot records, hardware status, certifications, and audit trails across an entire programme.

Recently, the Dutch government announced its first framework agreement with a European cloud provider. The message behind that decision is clear: Digital sovereignty has moved from policy discussion to active procurement criterion.

For organisations operating drones in security, public safety, critical infrastructure and defence, that shift matters. And it raises a question that more and more procurement teams are starting to ask: where is your drone software actually built, who controls the data, and what does that mean for drone data sovereignty in high-stakes operations?

The market reality

The drone software market is growing fast. So is the number of platforms competing for the attention of serious operators. But when you look at the landscape of enterprise-grade drone operations software, the picture is striking: almost every significant player is non-European.

That matters for European organisations in ways that go beyond preference. Data processed through non-European platforms may be subject to foreign jurisdiction. Operational data from police forces, border protection agencies, energy companies and defence-adjacent organisations can carry significant sensitivity. Livestreaming of incident response, security monitoring or infrastructure inspections adds another layer of sensitivity. Video feeds from active operations represent some of the most time-critical and confidential data an organisation handles. This is especially relevant for organisations managing counter-drone operations, where detection feeds and security video must remain within a trusted operational environment. Routing that data through infrastructure outside European jurisdiction carries risks that many organisations have not yet fully considered. Choosing software built outside Europe means accepting that the infrastructure underpinning your missions sits outside your regulatory control.

AirHub is different. As a European drone company, we have built a drone operations platform in Europe, funded by European investors, and operating under European law. That is the foundation of how we build and how we operate, and it shapes every decision we make.

What European means in practice

Being European means that your operational data stays within the European legal framework. It means that the software underpinning your drone missions is not subject to foreign surveillance legislation. It means that when Europe sets new standards for data governance, interoperability or security, we are already building to meet them, because they apply to us too.

It also means that we understand the operational environments our customers work in. The Belgian Police, Dutch Customs, Portuguese Bombeiros, and infrastructure operators across the continent are not edge cases for us. They are our core market. These are precisely the public safety organisations that need GDPR compliant drone software as a baseline requirement, built to operate within European law from the ground up.

This includes organisations deploying drone-in-a-box solutions across Europe, such as DJI Dock, for automated, persistent monitoring of critical sites. For these deployments, where a drone operates autonomously and continuously captures sensitive operational data, the question of where that data is processed and stored is especially acute.

Thomas Brinkman, co-CEO and co-Founder of AirHub:

"There is a clear and growing need for trusted software in mission-critical drone operations. European organisations are increasingly asking not just whether a platform works, but whether they can trust who built it, where their data goes, and what framework governs it. As a European company, we are built to answer those questions."

Funded by Europe, built for Europe

AirHub's recent €4.4 million Series A round was backed entirely by European investors: Keen Venture Partners, RunwayFBU, Lumaux and LUMO Labs. The funding is being used to further strengthen the AirHub Drone Operations Center and expand into MilHub and SecHub, two new products designed for defence and security operations That reflects a growing recognition in the European investment community that sovereign, trusted technology for security and critical operations is a strategic priority.

Keen Venture Partners, whose €200 million European Defence Space and Security Fund is Europe's first dedicated defence fund, sees AirHub as part of a broader effort to strengthen European technological independence. Giuseppe Lacerenza, Partner at Keen Venture Partners, described AirHub as "well positioned to become an important software player" as Europe increases its focus on resilience, security and technological autonomy.

Thomas Brinkman:

"This funding helps us accelerate AirHub's growth as a European software company serving organisations that operate in high-stakes environments. We see a clear need for trusted, mission-critical drone software that helps teams execute drone missions securely, effectively and at scale, while strengthening Europe's ability to rely on its own technology in critical operations”

The conversation is shifting

The Dutch government's move toward European cloud infrastructure is one signal among many. Across Europe, procurement teams, policymakers and operational commanders are reconsidering their technology dependencies. Europe's new drone and counter-drone action plan makes this shift explicit, placing data sovereignty and trusted technology at the centre of European resilience strategy. The question of where software is built, who owns the underlying infrastructure, and what legal framework governs the data is moving from the margins of procurement discussions to the centre.

For drone operations specifically, this shift is long overdue. Drones have become embedded in policing, border protection, infrastructure security, emergency response and increasingly in defence-adjacent operations. The software that runs those missions deserves the same scrutiny as any other critical operational technology.

AirHub was built with that scrutiny in mind, because it is the right foundation for the work our customers do.

If you want to understand what European drone operations software looks like in practice, book a demo with our team.

Frequently asked questions

Is AirHub a European company?
Yes. AirHub is headquartered in the Netherlands and operates under European law. The company is funded entirely by European investors and builds its software in compliance with GDPR and European data governance frameworks.

Why does it matter that drone software is European?
Drone operations in public safety, security and critical infrastructure generate sensitive data, including livestreams, flight logs and operational patterns. Software built outside Europe may be subject to foreign jurisdiction and surveillance legislation. Choosing European software is a step toward ensuring that data governance, legal oversight and compliance requirements align with the EU framework, rather than being subject to foreign jurisdiction.

What sectors does AirHub serve?AirHub serves public safety organisations, security providers and critical infrastructure operators organisations across Europe and beyond. Customers include Dubai Police, Belgian Police, Portuguese Bombeiros, Dutch Customs, Shell and Boskalis.