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Layers and Stacks: How We Plan Work at 48 Pegasus

Writer: Jonathan G. Browning
Jonathan G. Browning
Oct 7
4 min read

Updated: Oct 8

We are based in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee, serving properties within 75 miles of Macon County, Tennessee, across Middle Tennessee and South Central Kentucky. That is farm country, lake country, and small-town country. The properties are varied, and so are the people who need to understand them.

This post explains how we think about a job. Not the gear. The plan.


A property is more than a picture

A photo of a house answers one question: what does it look like? The people we work with usually have more questions than that.

  • A seller wants to know what a buyer will see.

  • A buyer wants to know what is wrong with it.

  • A landowner wants to know what changed since last year.

  • A project manager wants to know if the work is on schedule.

One set of photos rarely answers all of those. So we do not start with "what should we shoot?" We start with "what does this person need to know?"


Layers

A Layer is one kind of information about a place. Ground photos are a Layer. Aerial photos are a Layer. So is a floor plan, a property line from the county, a soil map, a flood map, or a set of dated progress photos.

Each Layer is useful on its own. They get more useful when they line up. An aerial photo with the parcel boundary drawn on it, next to a soil map of the same area, tells a buyer more than any of the three alone.

Much of that information already exists in public sources. The work is pulling the right pieces together and checking that they match what is actually on the ground.


Stacks

A Stack is the package that comes out of a job: the Layers a specific person needs, arranged in a way that makes sense to them.

A listing Stack might be ground photos, a handful of aerials, a simple site map, and a short video. A land Stack might lean on aerials, parcel and soil maps, and seasonal photos. A progress Stack is the same set of angles, shot again and again, with dates.

The point is that the deliverable fits the question. Nobody needs four hundred photos. They need the right forty, organized.


Notebook with a handwritten checklist and a pen next to a cup of tea

Before anything leaves the ground

Aerial work comes with rules, and we treat them as part of the plan, not an afterthought.

At 48 Pegasus, flights are handled by licensed FAA Part 107 remote pilots. The FAA's page for Certificated Remote Pilots including Commercial Operators lays out what that certificate takes: learn the Part 107 rules, pass the Unmanned Aircraft General knowledge test at an FAA-approved testing center, complete FAA Form 8710-13 through IACRA, and register the drone.

For any site where aerials are part of the plan, a pre-flight check includes:

  • Airspace. The FAA's B4UFLY page describes approved apps that show controlled airspace, special use airspace, critical infrastructure, airports, national parks, military training routes, and Temporary Flight Restrictions.

  • Land rules. State parks and federal lake property have their own rules on top of the FAA's.

  • Neighbors and people. Who will be outside, and where.

  • Weather and light. Wind, cloud cover, and where the sun will be.

If a site does not work for a drone, we say so and plan the job around ground work instead.


How we write and report

We try to keep everything plain:

  1. Dates on every file.

  2. Labels that say "approximate" when something is approximate.

  3. No edits that change what a property actually is.

  4. A short summary of what was documented and what was not.

That is also how we want to write this blog. Practical, local, and sourced. When we cite a rule or a number, we link to where it came from.


Why this part of Tennessee

Home is Macon County. The Macon County government site is a good starting point for county offices and links to the cities of Lafayette and Red Boiling Springs. It is a place where a lot of property information still lives in someone's memory or a folder at the courthouse. Making it visible, organized, and easy to share is the job we want to do well.


Practical takeaways

  1. Start a job by asking what the client needs to know, not what to shoot.

  2. Treat each kind of information as a Layer, and line them up.

  3. Package Layers into a Stack that fits the person using it.

  4. Check airspace, land rules, people, and weather before any aerial work.

  5. Keep deliverables dated, labeled, and honest.

If you have a property or project and want to talk through what you need to know about it, contact 48 Pegasus, serving properties within 75 miles of Macon County, Tennessee, across Middle Tennessee and South Central Kentucky.


Sources

Photos: cover by Alex Reynolds / Unsplash; inline by My Profit Tutor / Unsplash. Free to use under the Unsplash License.

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