Topographically surveying golf courses with a drone is less costly and less disruptive to golfers and orthoimagery offers designers a far more intuitive feel for the existing site with rectified photography. It is a similar story with residential development or most other topographic surveys, but the key to all this is the high spatial accuracy of the data. Have you ever tried to have a game of golf behind someone trying to survey the course using GPS? I have not, but I do know what it is like trying to survey a live golf course: it is actually quite dangerous with golf balls whizzing by my head, but it must be frustrating for players too. Golfers should not have to share their fairways with surveyors nowadays because all of the surveying can now be done from above by a drone, providing better data with 2cm accuracy at a much lower cost. Apart from golfers benefitting from this new technology, golf-course designers also benefit because they can visual the course that they are modifying with much better clarity. Therefore, they can design more sympathetically with the existing course and provide their client with an improved service. The level of detail captured by a drone is incredible with all boundaries, shrubs, bushes, planted areas, inner and outer fairways, land drains, greens, tees, contours, water features, dunes, coastal features etc. As a camera never lies, nothing from the survey is omitted which adds 100% quality assurance to the survey data. The typical area surveyed with one ‘Egret’ drone flight is 150 acres, which can take up to one hour and the accuracy is in the region of 2-3cm. Golf-course surveys up to now have been very expensive to survey due to their vast size and huge amount of detail, but now a drone can survey a golf course in under one hour with little or no disruption to the golfers at a fraction of the price it would take using traditional ground-based survey systems.