The Park Dubai is A.R.M. Holding’s redevelopment of the historic Jebel Ali Racecourse — a five square kilometre site masterplanned by BIG, being built out in phases from 2026. AirTech reports on it every month, with a drone survey and an automated 360 tour captured from the same positions each time.
A site too big to photograph and too slow to remember
Five square kilometres under phased construction is not a site anyone can hold in their head. Walking it takes a day, by which point the earliest thing you looked at has moved on. Photographs taken on foot are unrepeatable — nobody stands in exactly the same place a month later, so this month’s picture and last month’s are of the same place but not the same view, and the difference between them is as much about where the photographer stood as about what the contractor built.
The requirement on a development like this is not better photographs. It is the same photographs, month after month, so that change is the only variable.
The same flight, every month
Progress capture runs as an automated waypoint mission. The aircraft flies the same route at the same altitudes and triggers at the same coordinates on every visit, so each month’s imagery registers against the last. What changes between two sets is the site, not the survey.
That makes the reporting cycle straightforward rather than interpretive. Earthworks volumes come out of the surface. Progress against programme is visible plot by plot. And because the whole area is flown as one consistent snapshot rather than assembled from several days, a phase that moved and a phase that did not are directly comparable.
The monthly 360 tour
Alongside the survey we capture a full 360 panoramic tour of the development — and we capture it automatically, from stored positions, on the same cadence.
Each viewpoint is shot as a bracketed set and merged, stitched, seam-corrected and levelled, then published as a navigable tour. Because the capture positions are stored rather than chosen on the day, the tour is repeatable: you can stand at the same point in month three and month twelve and look in the same direction, and the only difference is the build.
That turns a 360 tour from a marketing artefact into a record. A project director can walk a junction they have not visited since the last report. A consultant can check what a plot looked like before something was covered up. Neither has to be on site, and neither is relying on somebody having thought to photograph the right thing at the time.
What it delivers
- Monthly drone survey of the full site, flown from identical waypoints
- Orthomosaic, surface model and volumes, comparable month to month
- A navigable 360 tour captured from stored positions on the same cycle
- Everything in the AirTech Portal, where any two dates can be compared directly
- A single dated record covering the whole development rather than per-contractor fragments
Why automation is the point
On a build running to 2026 and well beyond, the value of a monthly record is entirely in its consistency. A capture programme that depends on who was available, what the weather did and where they chose to stand produces a library of photographs. One that flies stored waypoints and shoots stored viewpoints produces a time series — and a time series is the thing you can actually measure against.
