Mark Baguley, Project Director, Worldwide for Bell Geospace, gave host James Kent a peak under the subsurface of geophysical survey operations to reveal the data potential today’s airborne surveys can provide.

Bell Geospace’s fleet of three BT-67 DC3 aircraft captures geophysical data. Downloading and data occur on the ground after daily survey mapping completes. “Lots of things happening concurrently, but the exciting part is in the field when you get to fly and collect the data,” Baguley said.

The surveys typically occur between 80-300 meters off the ground. “Eighty is our minimum for safety, and that’s over land,” Baguley said. “In terms of the equipment, we’re acquiring full tensor gravity gradiometry as our main acquisition, and then we also acquire gravity and magnetics alongside that.”

Daily data capture will vary based on the different parameters of a particular survey, but on a good day, Baguley said they look to acquire 1,200-line kilometers offshore and 800 onshore. Weather and travel distance to a survey site are a couple of factors that play into these numbers, and 800 offshore and 500 onshore might represent a more typical data-gathering day. And processed data is usually available 24-hours after a survey flight.

Baguley said sometimes there isn’t much information available before the survey occurs. When a survey takes place towards the beginning of a project, there may not be a lot of pre-existing data about that area available. And when the survey occurs later in a project, there might be a lot of captured data to utilize. “We can work with both of those scenarios, but the more information we have, the better for survey design,” Baguley said.