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THOROUGH ANALYSIS
An indoor waterpark promises hours of fun for families and friends, but an endless balance of maintenance and open hours for the operators. These spaces are a unique challenge to operate, with infrastructure that is mounted at height and under constant, unpredictable strain and a corrosive, humid environment.
Failure to adequately inspect and maintain these spaces has seen material fall from the roofspace, falling on people and resulting in both injury and lawsuits. Examples of this include an accident at Kalahari Park in Ohio in 2017/18, where a section of duct fell onto people in a pool, or the more recent accident at Gaylord Resort in Colorado Springs in 2024. Preventive maintenance in indoor waterparks is thus critical to preventing overhead falling hazards and structural integrity risks, ensuring the safety of both guests and staff.
ReadyVIS presents its results via its custom platform, showing the site space and points of interest and defects they identified with their Elios 3.
Facility owners at indoor waterparks need to gather data for condition assessments to help them plan upcoming works and identify potential hazards quickly. The access to the high-up slides and structures, however, can be an obstacle and calls for an innovative solution. ReadyVIS, a department within Passero Associates, backed by over five years of expertise in this specific field and over 50 years of engineering experience, is using Elios drones to gather this data without risks to staff, guests or infrastructure.
Passero Associates is an engineering and architecture firm with specialists across the AEC sector. Internally, its ReadyVIS department manages the use of emerging technologies in its projects, including drones, internal tooling, scanning, automation and both 3D and VR visualisation. The team takes on missions that involve working with complex assets and obstructed environments, aiming to minimise asset downtime while optimising safety standards and cutting costs.
The safe and smooth operation of indoor waterparks stems from preventive maintenance.
To achieve this, the company has been using Elios drones since 2018, transitioning from the Elios 1 to the Elios 3, highlighting the Elios 3’s capacity for quality data collection, confined space access and the localisation of points of interest as factors that streamline work. In the past, the company has successfully used it to inspect indoor waterparks, including Great Wolf Lodge and Kalahari Resorts, providing quality data to facility owners and maintenance management.
The Elios 3’s camera is used to help identify areas of interest or missing equipment so the problem can be dealt with before it escalates.
The safe and smooth operation of indoor waterparks stems from preventive maintenance – the process of regularly inspecting equipment and addressing issues before they can escalate. These inspections must be thorough and efficient, striking a balance between comprehensive assessments and not prolonging downtime. The Elios 3’s easy access, wherein it doesn’t require scaffolding or rope access, means that a few minutes of flight can provide the full picture of a pipe or shaft that would previously have taken hours to access in part, let alone to completely assess.
The ReadyVIS team emphasised three key features of the Elios 3 that make it ideal for these applications:
- Localised data: When the Elios 3 flies, it simultaneously captures 4K videos and a 3D point cloud. When a fault is spotted – for example, a loose screw or rust build-up – the location and photo are saved as a point of interest (POI). When it comes to analysis, you can navigate the 3D model and see exactly where each POI is and the asset’s condition. This makes it easy to recommend maintenance work and catalog POIs by order of severity/urgency. When complete, the data is viewed in Flyability’s Inspector 5 software, allowing for clear side-by-side comparisons between POIs and their location in the inspection area, empowering easy maintenance planning.
- Safety: Using a remote inspection tool like the Elios 3 means that scaffolding, cherry pickers and rope access are not needed. This cuts risks to inspectors as they no longer have to work at height, and also saves time on special safety assessments and permits needed for this type of work. The ReadyVIS team can stay comfortably on the ground while collecting all of the data they need for the inspection.
- Speed: A combination of the data quality, improved safety and ease of access achieved with the Elios 3 means that the inspectors at ReadyVIS can turn around their projects faster than traditional inspectors. This is thanks to the comprehensive data collection and the easy analysis with the localised data alongside time and cost savings with the drone’s remote access.
Passero Associated has been working with various indoor waterparks for years, and its ReadyVIS department demonstrates that using the right tools can make this seemingly complex inspection task straightforward and safe.
For an indoor waterpark inspection, the ReadyVIS team typically turn around its results in seven days or fewer. This includes the flights for data collection, analysis and report generation – alongside detailed quality assurance and quality control. The POIs are included in the report with their location and a condition analysis. ReadyVIS’s remediation tracking workflow allows facility owners to utilise the produced PDF reports (with their QR codes) to attach to work order requests and update the web records of the work performed – including who worked on it, when and with any relevant image attachments. These reports are incredibly detailed, with a recent waterpark inspection comprising over 5,000 (and counting!) individual points of interest.
A waterpark inspection includes assessing the HVAC ducts, fire suppression systems, portable water pipes, ceiling fans and general steel framing and roof structure. All of this can be assessed with the Elios 3 and requires no work at height for the inspection team. They use the 4K camera as well as the 3D model captured by the drone’s LiDAR scanner. In some cases, the drone’s infrared camera is also used to identify hot or cold spots on a recently energised duct system.
The Elios 3 at an indoor venue, being prepared for an inspection flight.
For each inspection, the drone is flown in a linear manner to make it easy for reviewers to recognise and comprehensively assess the asset from end to end.
To ensure total coverage of the asset, the ReadyVIS pilots use thorough flight plans and cross-check the post-flight trajectory, something the Elios 3’s localised point cloud (viewable from the flight control app) assists in ensuring quick pilot orientation between flights.
Once the inspection is complete, ReadyVIS presents the results to clients on its custom 3D interactive web-platform. The data is also shared as an executive summary PDF, containing a brief overview of its findings, site plans, applicable as-built drawings or details and individual POI reports organised in order of severity – including the remediation QR code for future repair/replacement tracking.
The use of drones for indoor inspections of hard-to-access facilities is now an accepted method of work. Over the years, ReadyVIS has watched its techniques become more widely recognised, singling it out as an early adopter of innovative tools.
ReadyVIS reports that its results are highly regarded by both facility owners and operators, empowering it with the exact data it needs to make decisions on how to ensure the safety of its sites. The results achieved by ReadyVIS have seen its work expand across new construction projects where owners and contractors want an exhaustive list of assets inspected and checked off as safe.
This use of the Elios 3 combines the need for safer means of access with the pressure to complete maintenance and open the sites as quickly as possible. The success of ReadyVIS’s work is evident in its repeat inspections at waterparks and other infrastructure sites in the USA and it expects to continue this work – alongside other complex confined-space inspections.