Aerial Evidence That Holds Up

Marshall Services flies FAA Part 107 drone inspections and produces appraisal-grade aerial documentation for property damage claims. The pilot is the appraiser: Marshall Smith holds the FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate and an IAUA CPAU certification, and writes the Xactimate estimate the imagery supports, so the person choosing what to photograph is the person who has to defend the file. A structured flight documents every slope, ridge, hip and valley at consistent altitude and overlap, shoots test squares and close-ups at repeatable scale, and covers steep, tile, slate and metal roofs that cannot be safely walked — without anyone stepping on the roof. Photographs taken from a ladder cover what could be reached, in no particular order, usually with the metadata stripped. Imagery is challenged on how it was produced before anyone argues about what it shows, so every engagement is documented end to end: the airspace class is checked and a LAANC authorization is pulled and logged before flights in controlled airspace, each frame keeps its coordinates, altitude, heading and timestamp, unaltered originals are archived alongside the working set, and a written chain of custody and a declaration on the capture method travel with the packet. Whether a particular exhibit is admitted is always the tribunal's decision. The delivered packet includes the full geotagged image set, an annotated damage report organised slope by slope, test-square and hit-count documentation, the flight log and airspace record, the chain-of-custody certificate, and Xactimate-ready scope notes — in your inbox within 48 hours of the flight. Property owners use it to get the roof on the record before repairs; contractors subcontract the documentation behind a supplement; public adjusters take it into appraisal and umpire hearings as exhibit-ready boards; attorneys get an evidentiary record and a pilot who can testify about how it was captured. Single-family roofs, commercial office, retail and warehouse membranes, industrial and long-span systems, and multi-family communities, condominiums and HOA portfolios are all flown, one building at a time and indexed per structure. The aircraft is registered with the FAA and broadcasts Remote ID, commercial liability insurance is in force with a certificate available on request, Part 107 recurrent training is current, and flights are arranged with the property owner or manager. The page closes its credibility argument with a provenance section on the family's own history in unmanned aviation: this is the third generation of the Smith family working in unmanned aviation. Marshall's grandfather, Lt. Col. Harold "Red" F. Smith, enlisted in the Iowa Air National Guard in 1947 and spent 32 years in uniform, was selected in January 1964 as a reconnaissance project officer for the Lockheed U-2 and the emerging drone programs, wrote the staff paper that gave Air Force drone crews their own Airborne Missile Maintenance Squadron with equal standing to the U-2 wings, and walked through Air Force headquarters the paper that gave the air-breathing drones official missile nomenclature: until then they were known only by the contractor's own 147-series model numbers, and after it they were AQM-34s on the Air Force's books. He worked the drone navigation problems at Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam in 1968, where he was present through the Tet Offensive bombardment, and months earlier, holding a Top Secret clearance, he was named senior officer and official courier on a flight rushing replacement cryptographic material into the Pacific theater after North Korea seized the USS Pueblo. By 1969 he was Chief of the Air Force's Drone Projects Division — effectively the service's drone Systems Projects Office, the SPO, and he was the first officer assigned to a dedicated post like it — running four branches on the Big Safari rapid-acquisition model with program-management credit on Combat Angel, Combat Dawn and Defense Suppression — the December 1971 demonstration in which a Maverick missile fired from an unmanned aircraft and guided in by a ground controller hit a simulated SAM site nine seconds after launch. One claim in that record is the family's own account rather than documented fact and is written as such: HAVE LEMON Task 05. He was a founding member and the second national president of the National Association for Remotely Piloted Vehicles, NARPV, the organisation that became AUVSI, he founded the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum around the collection he spent his life building, and he died in 2017 at 86. His eldest son Doug Smith spent three decades in the family businesses including drone manufacturing and, with his sister Paula and Marshall, spent two years consolidating the collection and opening it to the public as the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum at Caddo Mills, Texas — the only US military drone museum in the country, 22,500 square feet and forty-plus restored aircraft spanning the 1930s to today, among them the General Atomics MQ-1B Predator the page photographs Marshall beside, with three Hellfire kill marks stenciled on the forward fuselage, acquired by the museum in April 2023. Doug is the museum's current curator, and Marshall is the assistant curator of the Aviation Unmanned Vehicle Museum. None of that service record is a qualification of Marshall's, and the section says so in its own words: Part 107 is Part 107, and a certificate doesn't care who your grandfather was. What it means in practice is that the person flying grew up around this equipment and treats a flight log as a document that has to hold up when somebody challenges it. The museum is family-run; neither it nor AUVSI is affiliated with or endorses Marshall Services. The section's sources are named in text: The Dallas Morning News, "Drones have a history and a future," Business, May 14, 2023, in which Marshall is quoted on the Vietnam-era drones used for bomb damage assessment, and Lightning Bugs and Other Reconnaissance Drones by William Wagner (Aero Publishers, 1982) together with Red's official USAF Meritorious Service Medal citation of 5 April 1971. The section cites a second piece from the same paper, "Air Force vet from Parker advanced the country's drone program in Vietnam," November 7, 2014 — a profile of Red himself, not of Marshall, covering Bien Hoa and the Tet Offensive, the Kennedy-era push for reconnaissance drones, the Maverick fired from a drone in 1971, and the collection that became the museum; it is published at https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2014/11/07/air-force-vet-from-parker-advanced-the-countrys-drone-program-in-vietnam/ and a reader can also open and read it on this page. Marshall Services is based in the DFW Metroplex and flies across Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, and California.