By: Dawn Zoldi
Flight Insight, under the leadership of founder and director Brent Genesis, has helped to bridge the gap between uncrewed and crewed aviation through a relentless focus on operational safety, compliance and technological accessibility. The company’s Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) software, available by both API and now a user-friendly app, has changed the way enterprise clients approach airspace safety.
From Fields to Flight Deck: The Inspiration for Flight Insight
Genesis has forged a company culture rooted in practical safety, real-world utility and collaborative innovation. He describes himself as an “unlikely drone subject matter expert,” tracing his roots from farming to flying, eventually running a charter aircraft company in Calgary, Alberta.
In this charter environment, serving the region’s oil and gas sector, Genesis gained first-hand experience with high-stakes aviation safety and auditing standards. He recounted, “we saw the need to get into aviation safety,” supported by stringent client demands for risk management and operational transparency. The introduction to the International Oil and Gas Producer (IOGP) standards provided a framework for the company’s early aviation auditing business. That effort quickly exposed the limitations of manual, paper-based compliance tracking for complex operations. Genesis and his business partner envisioned a system where safety audits and compliance lived in the cloud as a “living document,” rather than in a static binder.
By 2016, with Flight Insight launched, the company focus began to shift with the rise of uncrewed aircraft in the energy sector. A notable near-miss between a drone and a manned aircraft highlighted urgent new safety challenges. “You can’t just have these pieces of hardware up there flying and expect that there’s not going to be any risk,” Genesis reflected. This turning point catalyzed the creation of Flight Insight’s signature software and policy solutions tailored for both manned and unmanned aviation.
The Flight Insight Platform: “A Single Pane of Glass”
Genesis describes Flight Insight’s flagship offering as a comprehensive portal which provides a “single pane of glass” for enterprise airspace operational safety. The Flight Insight team designed the platform specifically for organizations managing extensive drone fleets (those with 15 or more aircraft) who require streamlined compliance, live flight tracking and granular real-time coordination between unmanned and manned operations. The system facilitates:
- Cloud-based compliance and safety management, integrating pilot qualifications, drone registration, pre-flight planning and insurance checks.
- Real-time “passive and active” flight plan visualization, notifying all relevant stakeholders and allowing instant coordination and oversight.
- A flexible API layer to incorporate external data, such as weather, wildfires, or other relevant operational alerts.
- Integration of both ground-based and airborne perspectives to foster mutual situational awareness between pilots and management.
Genesis explained, “That single pane of glass is what matters. Our API lets us plug in other data sources. So, whether it’s weather, wildfires, or traffic, our clients stay aware and compliant.”
EchoTech™: Enabling True Aerial Awareness
EchoTech™, a hardware-agnostic wireless tracking technology, central to Flight Insight’s technological offering, enables real-time communication between drones, ground operators and manned aircraft. EchoTech works with any drone or manned aircraft, to provide precise location and operational status, regardless of underlying manufacturer. This lightweight system supports:
- Real-time “drone to drone” and “drone to operator” signaling for cooperative airspace usage.
- Portable deployment by attaching EchoTech to any drone, manned aircraft, vehicle, or ground support asset for instant inclusion in the managed airspace picture.
- Support for rigorous use cases in harsh weather conditions, with feedback directly from field experience in the Canadian North and energy sites across North America.
“You can put [the tracker] on any drone. You can attach it to a pickup truck. You can attach it to a helicopter. It does not matter. It’s just out there reporting ‘here I am, here I am, here I am, this is my position,” Genesis explained.
Enterprise Value: Serving the Energy Sector
Flight Insight has had a notable impact within the energy sector, where operational hazards abound and reputation management remains as critical as compliance. The company’s largest clients, such as Suncor Energy, operate in complex, high-traffic environments where drones are mission-essential for inspections, mapping and site monitoring. (Watch Tedman Jess from Suncor Energy on the Dawn of Autonomy Episode 70).
Genesis enthusiastically cited joint projects at Suncor’s Firebag facility (a large in situ oil sands operation located about 120 kilometers north of Fort McMurray, Alberta), an environment characterized by airliners, helicopters and drones operating in close proximity, and in fiercely challenging weather, as inspiring his company’s software. “We worked together with [Suncor] and said, ‘How can we track the drones real time?’” he shared. “The result was a system that has reduced thousands and thousands of man hours of exposure to risk in high-hazard environments. When you’re inspecting a flare stack, that’s a high-risk activity for people. Now, that risk is minimized, not only on the ground but also in the air,” he said.
Flight Insight’s strong and enduring partnership with Suncor Energy provides perhaps the strongest testament to the company’s operational value. For his part, however, Genesis credited Suncor’s leadership with advancing one of Canada’s largest and safest drone programs. Together, they have integrated scores of drone flights annually while dramatically reducing ground exposure for workers and providing real-time risk mitigation for both airborne and ground-based assets. “You can’t understate what [the Suncor] team has done—thousands and thousands of man hours reduced from high-risk exposure at their sites. They are just a great example of what’s being done across North America,” Genesis noted.
Why Flight Insight Leads: New and Next Things
Flight Insight doesn’t rest on its laurels. This year, it rolled out its dedicated Pilot App to provide individual operators with direct mobile access on a smartphone to the portal’s full capabilities, including fleet management, compliance checks and real-time alerts.
This mobile extension addresses enterprise needs for tactical, on-site decision support, while the robust API framework enables integration with partner applications, data sources (such as GIS), and custom inspection workflows. The powerful API – app combination makes Flight Insight a true backbone for enterprise drone programs, whether in the back office or in the field.
Feedback from early users expressed they experienced the very things that shaped Flight Insight’s philosophy: ubiquity, transparency and instant access. As Genesis put it, “You might not always have a laptop. You just pull that phone out of your pocket and your enterprise, your fleet management, your oversight is right there.”
This culture of constant iteration and improvement informs Flight Insight’s value proposition: facilitating accessible, reliable safety for integrated airspace. With an agnostic tracking solution, sophisticated compliance management, and an unprecedented commitment to client and community collaboration, the company delivers:
- Demonstrated risk reduction across ground and air operations.
- Scalable software for large enterprises, enabling “compliance at scale” and long-term auditability.
- Practical, field-proven technology co-developed with major energy clients and tailored to meet industry realities.
- A focus on openness and interoperability, through APIs and hardware-agnostic designs, to ensure lasting relevance in an evolving regulatory landscape.
Looking Ahead: “Accelerate” for 2026
Genesis predicts that robotics, drones, autonomy, is going to continue accelerating at an incredible rate. With such acceleration in mind, Flight Insight remains primed to deepen its enterprise integrations, expand international reach and augment its suite with additional partner data sources and risk management tools. The company’s focus will remain on delivering that seamless, unified operational interface, the “single pane of glass,” for airspace stakeholders. “2026 is going to be a very exciting year…We’ve been waiting for this, and we are ramping up our developers to be ready,” he said.
By embracing safety as a core value, collaborating openly with stakeholders like Suncor and building technology that evolves with real-world needs, not just regulatory demands, Flight Insight continues to quietly influence how unmanned and manned aircraft safely can coexist in North American skies.
Watch Brent Genesis on the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Episode 98.