Coverage · St. John
Construction survey on St. John, around the Park.
Most of this island is national park, and that single fact reorders the whole job. Before airspace, before terrain, before access, the question is where a crew may legally set up. We answer that at proposal, not on the ferry.
Start here
Two permissions, from two different bodies.
This is the thing worth knowing before anything else about surveying on St. John, and it is the part most often waved at rather than explained.
A flight needs airspace and it needs ground. On most sites those come from the same place and nobody thinks about it. On St. John they do not. The FAA governs the airspace. The National Park Service governs the land it administers, and it restricts launching, landing, and operating unmanned aircraft from those lands and waters.
The practical consequence is specific rather than vague: a St. John parcel can be entirely unproblematic in airspace terms and still stop a crew, because there is nowhere lawful within reach to put the aircraft in the air. So the first planning question here is not the flight. It is the setup position — somewhere on non-park ground, with line of sight to the work, from which the mission can actually be flown.
There is also something absent that shapes this island: St. John has no airport. The controlled airspace that dominates scheduling on St. Thomas and St. Croix simply is not the constraint here. Part 107 still governs every flight — see capabilities — but the binding question is the ground, not the tower.
We resolve the launch position during scoping and state it in the proposal. That is the whole difference between a job that goes ahead and a crew that has crossed on a ferry to stand at a boundary and look at the work.
Access
On a steep private road,
the survey is the access study.
A great deal of St. John construction is reached by a driveway somebody built for a car and is now being asked to carry a concrete truck. Whether it can is a survey question, and it is much cheaper to answer before the design than during the pour.
- Grade along the route, measured. Not the grade somebody remembers, and not the grade the plat implies. What the ground actually does over the length of the approach.
- The radii the switchbacks really have. A turn that works for a pickup and fails for a low-loader is the single most common way a St. John delivery goes wrong.
- Cut and fill for the access itself. On these gradients the driveway is frequently a larger earthwork item than anyone budgeted for, and it is measurable up front.
- Where a crew and a truck can physically stop. Staging is a real constraint here rather than an afterthought, and it belongs in the plan.
Villa and resort sites
Small, steep, and closely bounded. On these parcels the argument is rarely about the building and almost always about what else has to fit beside it.
- What competes for space
- Cistern, septic field, pool, retaining, parking and turning
- What settles it
- A measured existing surface, at design stage rather than during construction
- Where the neighbour matters
- Dated record of adjacent condition before you mobilize
Getting to your site
Everything arrives by water.
The office is at Red Hook, which is the closest point on St. Thomas to Cruz Bay, so St. John is the nearest of the other islands to us by some distance. It is still a crossing. Crew travel by ferry; anything that needs a vehicle travels by barge, and barge slots run to their own schedule rather than to a construction programme.
So a St. John job is booked rather than called out. That is not a hedge, it is the timetable: the crossing has to be planned, and pretending otherwise would only relocate the problem to the day it matters.
The practical upside is that a single crossing can carry a lot of work. Where several parcels, an access study, and a progress capture are due in the same window, scoping them onto one trip is materially cheaper than three. If you have more than one thing in view, say so at the scoping call and it gets planned that way.
What we do here
Four disciplines, one crossing.
Because the trip is the fixed cost, the sensible St. John scope usually bundles more than one.
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/01
Drone Survey
Existing ground on a steep, bounded lot, and the access that serves it. On this island those two are usually the same commission, because the driveway decides whether the design on the parcel is buildable at all.
Drone survey services → -
/02
Aerial Mapping
Canopy is the complication. Tree cover is heavier here than on the other two islands, which is exactly where a surface built from imagery reads high, so the bare-earth model needs ground shots through the gaps and the deliverable says where.
Aerial mapping services → -
/03
360° Job Walkthrough
Owners who are almost never on island, and a build programme that is hostage to barge dates. A dated interval record is how an absent owner verifies progress without flying in, and how a delay sequence gets established afterwards.
360° walkthrough services → -
/04
Scan to BIM
Villa retrofit where the drawings, if any, came with the purchase and bear an uncertain relationship to the structure. Scanning measures what is standing, which on this stock is the only defensible place to start a renovation.
Scan-to-BIM services →
By site type
What each St. John job turns on.
Almost every scope here is decided by one of three things: where the crew may stand, whether the access works, or what the canopy hides.
| Job | The governing constraint | How it gets handled |
|---|---|---|
| Park-adjacent parcel | Where the aircraft can lawfully leave the ground | Launch position resolved at scoping and named in the proposal |
| Steep driveway or private road | Grade, turning radii, and what a delivery vehicle can do | Corridor capture along the route; cut/fill for the access itself |
| Villa lot | Everything competing for a small, steep footprint | Measured existing surface, plus adjacent condition before mobilizing |
| Resort or multi-building site | Phasing around an operating property | Interval capture agreed with the operator around guest activity |
| Heavily wooded parcel | Canopy hiding the ground from the camera | Ground shots through the gaps; deliverable states which areas are which |
| Renovation of an existing villa | Drawings that may not match the building | Scan first, model at a stated LOD, design from measured geometry |
Questions we get
About working on St. John.
How does the National Park change a flight plan here?
It moves the first question from where the site is to where a crew can legally stand.
Two separate permissions govern a flight, and on St. John they come from different bodies. The FAA controls the airspace. The Park Service controls the ground, and it restricts launching, landing and operating unmanned aircraft from the lands and waters it administers. So a parcel can be entirely straightforward from an airspace point of view and still need the launch point worked out before anything is scheduled.
In practice that means finding a setup position on non-park ground with line of sight to the work, and planning the flight profile around it. It is a solvable problem on most sites and an expensive surprise on the ones where nobody asked in advance.
Can you survey a parcel that borders Park land?
Yes. A great many St. John parcels do, and it does not stop the work.
What it changes is the setup and the flight profile rather than the deliverable. Your parcel is your parcel; the constraint is about where the aircraft leaves the ground and how the mission is flown, not about whether your boundary can be surveyed. Send the parcel with the scope and the launch position gets resolved as part of the proposal rather than on the day.
How does the equipment get to St. John?
By ferry from Red Hook, and by barge where a vehicle has to come with it. Either way the crossing is scheduled, so a St. John job is booked in advance rather than called out.
Construction layout and staking runs with survey crews mobilized from the mainland, working Trimble total stations. It has to be scheduled in advance and it is priced against that mobilization. It is not an on-demand local call-out, and we will not describe it as one. How it is scoped sits on the drone survey page.
Can you survey a driveway or private road before it is designed?
That is one of the most useful things we do on this island, and it is worth commissioning before the design rather than after.
On a steep private access the survey effectively is the access study. Existing grade along the route, the radii the switchbacks actually have, the cut and fill a given alignment would cost, and whether a concrete truck or a low-loader can physically make the turns. Answering that from a measured surface early is considerably cheaper than answering it with a stuck vehicle later.
Do you work on villa and resort sites?
Regularly, and the constraint is almost always the lot rather than the building.
Villa parcels here tend to be small, steep, and bounded closely by neighbours, which puts pressure on where a cistern, a septic field, a pool, or a retaining wall can physically go. A measured surface settles those arguments at design stage instead of during construction. Where the building already exists and is being altered, scanning it is the honest starting point rather than trusting whatever drawings came with the purchase — that is scan to BIM.
Across the water
Neither of the others works like this.
The Park constraint is unique to St. John. Both of the other islands trade it for a control tower.
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St. Thomas
Twenty minutes away by ferry and a different problem entirely: controlled airspace over much of the developed ground, a dense historic core, and hillside lots reached by single-lane switchbacks.
Construction survey on St. Thomas → -
St. Croix
Forty miles south and the inverse of this island: open parcels measured in acres, corridors measured in miles, and an industrial south shore where the access question is an operator, not a boundary.
Construction survey on St. Croix →
Tell us about the site.
Send the island, the parcel, and what you need out the other end. We’ll come back with a scoped, fixed-fee proposal within one business day.