Drone Insurance?

[Jonathan]

Full Disclosure: I am a SkyWatch affiliate but was a customer for some time before I became one so this is the perspective of me as a customer.

I generally recommend SkyWatch (https://go.onelink.me/Lo5F/droneac) for a few reasons:

• Monthly plans are a good middle ground for those who are just starting out in the industry. A month of coverage is not much more than a couple of hours (if you buy it hourly) so if you plan on flying for more than 2 hrs/month, the monthly plan makes more sense. Plus, some clients (especially bigger ones) will require a longer term policy, hourly deals won’t cut it. Annual plans are crazy expensive if you are just testing the waters of the drone world and don’t have >$1000 to put out. They also offer hourly or annual policies but I think most people are best off with the monthly plan.
• App is very easy to navigate and increasing coverage, adding aircraft, or adding additional insureds is quick and easy. With my old coverage, I had to send an email and wait 24hrs for them to respond and validate the updates/changes. They were fairly responsive but everything just seemed to take longer than it needed to. Here it happens almost immediately and I don’t need a third party to provide a quote or process paperwork, it all happens in the app.
• Discounts the more you fly (and the safer you fly). They offer discounts as you fly more often and you can even share your flight logs with them to get additional discount. This might not be a great idea if you tend to fly low, fast, or recklessly…You can save up to 30% after 6 months of claims free flying and another 25% if you have a solid flight safety score. Overall, you could save over half off their normal pricing once you’ve been with them for a few months, that’s pretty good.
• Great customer service. While I haven’t had to make a claim yet I have heard from others that their claim process is simple and they payout without much fuss. I have had nothing but great interactions with their team and they have been responsive and helpful anytime I have had questions.

I was also resistant to trust an app with my insurance but I’ve been super glad that I did.

[mavic_leader]

Thanks for the response!

I looked at Verifly, Skywatch, and a few other local brokers and ended up going with SkyWatch based on what I read here as well as other Facebook groups.

It was super easy to set up the monthly coverage and the app is pretty user friendly. I haven’t had to add an additional insured yet, but it looks like that will be pretty easy too. Now I just need to upload my flight logs to see if I can get a discount…better find some of my ‘safest’ flights.

Does anyone know what kinds of things they look at when trying to determine if a flight is ‘safe’ or not for the discount?

[Jonathan]

Skywatch has an article that explains their discounts in a bit more detail :

https://faq.skywatch.ai/hc/en-us/articles/360029424631-About-SkyWatch-AI-s-Safety-Score-

Basically, they look at things like altitude, battery, speed, and ‘flight zones’ when determining how ‘safe’ a flight is for discount purposes.

When planning flights through their app, you can see the ‘risk’ level designated to the area you want to fly indicate by the hourly rate shown in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. (see image)

This risk (and price) goes up when you are operating in controlled airspace or over major roads, so I would recommend uploading flights that are 200-300 ft, in Class G / sparsely populated areas, where you fly at a reasonable speed and don’t drain your batteries too low.

If you don’t have any flights like that in your log, it might be worth going and doing a few before you upload 🙂