THE COMPLETE
AERIAL IMAGING
PLATFORM
Hardware, software, and calibration — engineered as a single system for the modern aerial surveyor.
VJ
NADIR
A wing strut-mounted, fully gimbaled camera pod for Cessna 172, 182, and 206 series aircraft. Clamps to the interplane strut in under 15 minutes — no airframe modifications, no drilling. The 3-axis active gimbal isolates the sensor from all aircraft movement: vibration, turbulence, pitch, roll, and yaw have zero effect on image geometry.
- Cessna 172 / 182 / 206 wing strut clamp — tool-free install and removal
- 3-axis active gimbal — ±30° pitch/roll, ±180° yaw — maintains true nadir lock
- IMU-coupled stabilization: rejects turbulence, prop vibration, and coordinated turns
- Accepts Sony Alpha, Phase One iXM, and Micasense Altum sensor families
- Heated enclosure — certified to −30°C operation
- Shutter trigger sync via VJ Orbit — ±5 ms precision regardless of aircraft heading
- Gimbal holds nadir lock through standard coordinated turns between flight lines
- Power: 12V aircraft bus via strut-routed cable — 34W including gimbal motors
- Weight: 2.4 kg including gimbal and optics
VJ
ORBIT
Import a KML polygon, compute optimized flight lines, then fly. VJ Orbit continuously computes actual camera footprints in real time using a pre-cached DEM — accounting for terrain variation and off-axis flight. Stray off a flight line? Every frame is still captured and projected. When you land, Orbit shows you exactly what was covered and where the gaps are.
- KML polygon import — paste or load, flight lines computed instantly
- GSD-locked altitude: enter target GSD, Orbit solves for altitude over terrain
- Pre-cached DEM integration — camera footprint computed per-frame using actual ground elevation
- Off-line-of-flight capture: every shutter trigger inside the AOI adds to coverage, regardless of heading
- Live coverage heatmap — green (covered), amber (marginal overlap), red (gap) — updated in real time
- Persistent gap tracking — missed areas stay flagged until a subsequent pass covers them
- Re-fly path generator — at end of mission, computes minimum additional flight lines for gap fill
- VJ Nadir gimbal-aware footprint: accounts for true sensor orientation from gimbal telemetry
- Integrated Test Pattern waypoint at mission start — calibration before first AOI frame
- Export: KML coverage, GeoTIFF footprint mosaic, Pix4D / Agisoft project files
- Runs on iPad, Windows, and macOS — works offline with cached map tiles and DEM
TEST
PATTERN
V1
The physical ground truth instrument the entire VJ Aerial system is built around. 24×36 inches of precision-printed reference data — GSD grids, color patches, grayscale ramp, fiducials, and scale bar, all sized for resolvability at your target GSD.
- GSD checker grids: 7 cm, 10 cm, and 20 cm square sizes
- 24 color reference patches — each minimum 7 cm wide × 10 cm tall
- 8-step linear grayscale ramp, 0→255
- 4 corner fiducials + center nadir target
- Physical scale bar — 100 cm in 10 cm increments
- VJ Orbit integration — auto-waypointed at mission start
- 24×36" matte print, rigid mount — field deployable in 60 seconds
VJ
TRACS
Sweep any area of sky and see who's in it. TRACS queries the Flightradar24 API for every aircraft inside your mission area, then lets you pick which contacts belong on your status board — callsign, altitude, speed, track, and squawk, refreshed live while the imaging mission runs.
- Area sweep — every aircraft inside your bounds, discovered in one pass
- Pick your traffic — one tap adds a discovered contact to the status board
- Live board: callsign, registration, type, altitude & trend, GS, track, squawk
- Follows boarded aircraft by registration even after they leave the scan area
- Emergency squawk alerting — 7500 / 7600 / 7700 flagged instantly
- Signal-loss & staleness detection with clear board states
- 85,000-airport database on the map — runways, frequencies, elevation per field
- FAA VFR sectional chart overlay — official FAA tiles, one tap
- Self-hosted service (server-held FR24 key) or plain browser with your own key
- Demo mode with simulated traffic — try it with no key at all
VJ
PROCESS
Imagery becomes product. Upload a survey and VJ Process builds a georeferenced orthomosaic and elevation model from the frames' own camera positions, then searches every frame for what you are looking for — people, vehicles, aircraft — and hands back a ranked list of candidates, each cropped from the frame it came from so a person can clear it in seconds.
- Orthomosaic, surface model and terrain model as cloud-optimised GeoTIFF
- Map tiles served straight onto the TRACS map — no desktop GIS needed to look
- Detection tiled at the scale the model was trained on, so small objects survive
- Every candidate cropped from its source frame and ranked by confidence
- Ground position from camera geometry and terrain, not the frame centre
- Honest about resolution — a job is told when its GSD is too coarse for what it seeks
- Cost estimated before anything runs, from measured throughput rather than guesswork
FIVE PRODUCTS.
ONE SYSTEM.
Each product is useful alone. Together they form a closed loop — from mission planning to calibrated imagery — that no other platform delivers. And while the loop runs, VJ TRACS keeps the airspace picture live.
NOTHING
ELSE COMES CLOSE
| Capability | VJ Aerial | Drone platforms | DIY / ad-hoc | Enterprise aerial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cessna-native camera mount | ✓ Purpose-built | ✗ Wrong platform | ✗ Improvised | Proprietary only |
| Physical GSD calibration target | ✓ Engineered | ✗ None | ✗ Unmeasured | Varies |
| Color calibration in the scene | ✓ 24-patch standard | ✗ Post only | ✗ None | Add-on cost |
| Integrated mission planner | ✓ Orbit + Nadir sync | ✓ Drone-only | ✗ Manual | Proprietary |
| Auto-calibration waypoint | ✓ Every mission | ✗ N/A | ✗ N/A | ✗ Manual |
| Open sensor compatibility | ✓ Sony, Phase One, Micasense | ✗ Vendor lock-in | Camera-dependent | ✗ Closed system |
| Field-deployable calibration | ✓ 60 seconds | ✗ No equivalent | Hours | Lab only |
| Manned aircraft workflow | ✓ Native | ✗ Different FAR | Possible | ✓ Yes |
The aerial imaging industry has been building better cameras, better drones, better algorithms. Nobody was building a better system.
VJ Nadir gets the camera off your lap and onto the aircraft. VJ Orbit gets the aircraft on the right path. Test Pattern V1 makes the ground tell the truth.
Together they form something that didn't exist before: a closed loop from mission intent to calibrated deliverable — built for the people who fly Cessnas and need to be right.
BUILT BY
PILOTS WHO
NEEDED THIS.
VJ Aerial wasn't founded in a boardroom. It was founded in a cockpit — by two CAP mission pilots who kept running into the same problem on aerial photography sorties: no standardized way to calibrate what the camera was seeing. One brought 29 years of Silicon Valley infrastructure engineering. The other brought a decade at a national weapons lab and a front-row seat at the fusion energy revolution. Between them: every system, every product, every line of code is built by people who've shipped things that actually matter.
SQ 156
"One of us spent a career making sure nuclear experiments were calibrated to the ground truth. The other spent a career making sure networks never lost a packet. We both fly the same Cessna on SAR missions, and we both kept coming home with imagery we couldn't fully trust. That stops now."
READY TO
FLY RIGHT.
Tell us what you fly and what you need — a survey, a search, a camera pod, or a look at the software. It lands in our inbox, not a marketing list.