The blast window is not what you think it is.
Our proposal said "weekly overflight, Monday morning." The site's blast calendar said Monday at 11:00 is when the SW highwall comes down. Our flight window was 10:30–11:30. We learned this on day two, from a ground-crew foreman, not from the mine's own GIS team — because no one had ever written the blast schedule down in a form that crossed departments. We shifted to 06:10 Tuesday, before the first shift changeover. Every subsequent flight has gone green.
Haul-road condition is a survey subject, not a nuisance.
We were there to map the pit. The mine manager wanted to know which haul road was killing his tyres. On a 50-hectare pit, a 2% ramp-grade error over 800m is a pothole in shock-absorber terms. Point cloud ingestion was easy; the lesson was that the survey buyer and the survey user are often different people, and the scope should follow the user.
The dust doesn't stop because we booked a flight.
Our first dataset had 9% orthomosaic reject due to airborne dust. The fix wasn't a better camera; it was scheduling around the water-tanker cycle and the shift changeover. Software got us to 92%. Operational discipline got us the rest.
Photos beat tickets.
By week three, the engineering team was clicking defect pins on our 3D portal to raise maintenance work orders. Bench-width violations that had been known-but-untracked for years became trackable overnight — because a pin with a photograph is harder to dismiss than a row in a spreadsheet.
The CFO wants the ledger, not the map.
We came in thinking the mine manager was the buyer. By week four, the CFO had joined our weekly review. She didn't want to see the 3D pit. She wanted the weighbridge-reconciled stockpile ledger. That became the new flagship deliverable — and the one that justified the monthly retainer.
The scope writes itself after week two.
The single biggest lesson: the scope a mine signs on paper in week one is never the scope they want in week four. Price for week four. Write the contract so scope expansion is a conversation, not a variation order.