Photo Flight Tools was created by an aerial photographer who's years of flying missions have inspired these refined tools to streamline your aerial photography processes.
Aerial photography is a professional discipline that demands military-grade precision — coordinating airspace, managing ATC notifications, briefing crews, optimizing routes across multiple targets, and delivering mission-ready packages before wheels ever leave the ground. For years, professional aerial photographers have cobbled together that workflow from a patchwork of general-purpose tools never designed for the job.
"I kept building workarounds for problems that deserved real solutions. At some point the workarounds became the platform."
— Ryan, Designer & Developer · Photo Flight ToolsPhoto Flight Tools grew directly out of the operational workflow at Red Wing Aerials — a professional aerial photography operation with over a decade of real-world mission experience. Every tool in the platform was designed to solve a problem that showed up on an actual job, not a hypothetical one.
What began as internal tools built for one operation is now a full mission planning platform — purpose-built for the aerial photography industry and available to professional operators everywhere.
Ryan has spent his career at the intersection of aviation and visual storytelling. As a professional pilot since 2009 and an aerial photographer since 2014, he has logged years of real-world mission experience — managing airspace, coordinating ATC notifications, briefing crews, and delivering photography packages for commercial and residential clients.
That experience made one thing clear: the tools available to professional aerial photographers weren't built by people who had actually done the job. So Ryan built his own — first as internal workflow tools at Red Wing Aerials, and eventually into the platform you're using now.
Photo Flight Tools is designed from the ground up by someone who has planned the missions, flown the routes, captured the shots, and felt the friction of every missing tool along the way.
Professional aerial photography deserves professional mission planning tools — purpose-built for the industry, by people who work in it.
Photo Flight Tools was born inside the operational workflow of Red Wing Aerials — a professional aerial photography operation with over a decade of mission experience in commercial, residential, and agricultural photography.
Red Wing Aerials served as the proving ground for every tool in this platform. The challenges of coordinating real missions, managing real airspace, and delivering real photography packages shaped every design decision made along the way.
That foundation means Photo Flight Tools isn't a product built by outsiders looking in at the industry — it's a platform that grew organically from the inside out, refined by the demands of an active, professional aerial photography operation.
Your client data, job site information, and business records belong to you — full stop. Here's exactly what we collect, what we don't, and why.
By default, all of your operational data stays in your own Google account — not on our servers. Photo Flight Tools is the interface. Your Google Workspace is the database.
For richer dashboard features — mission history, cross-mission search, faster load times, and offline resilience — org admins can explicitly opt in to also storing data in PFT's secure database.
Regardless of your storage choice, Photo Flight Tools collects only what is strictly necessary to operate your account.
Your client relationships, job sites, and business intelligence are yours. This is unconditional — it does not change based on your storage choice.
You own your data. You decide what gets connected, what gets stored, and what gets deleted — at any time.
If you opt in to PFT database storage, you do so with full awareness of the following:
Join professional aerial photographers already using Photo Flight Tools to plan, brief, and execute their operations.