SightControl puts your UAV's terrain, instruments and controls all around you. Real terrain in 3D, a primary flight display pinned ahead, and a cockpit you fly with your eyes and hands.
For ArduPilot UAV operators. By Gardner Avionics.
Flat screens make you translate a map into a mental picture of the terrain. SightControl draws that picture for you, life size, and keeps the instruments and controls where your eyes and hands already are.
Real elevation data is built into a 3D world around you that banks and pitches with the aircraft. Every slope is coloured by its clearance below the aircraft: green above 20 m, yellow from 10 to 20 m, red under 10 m. You see the ridge before you reach it.
Switch the terrain between clearance colours, Apple Maps satellite imagery, or both blended, to match the job and the light.
Airspeed and altitude tapes, compass rose, vertical speed, home bearing and autopilot annunciators sit pinned in front of you, see-through, so the terrain behind keeps telling its story. Metric, imperial or both.
Turn the knobs and push to sync, like a cockpit. Pick flight modes by their manned-aviation names, arm, go direct to a waypoint, set heading, altitude and speed targets, and fly hold orbits. Every command is acknowledged by the aircraft.
The next waypoints of your mission stand on the terrain as pins, so the route is part of the world you are looking at, not a line on a separate screen.
A satellite map follows the aircraft and pulls the mission straight from it. Import KML and KMZ hazards such as power lines, and see them as curtains in the 3D terrain as well as on the map.
Every number the aircraft sends: attitude, dual GPS, batteries, motors, engines, vibration, wind and radio links, with an alert log. The whole crew picture in one window.
Side consoles at your hands carry lift-motor dials, engine gauges, battery packs and fuel. Engine start and stop are guarded, the way they should be.
Spoken callouts, a master-caution tone, autopilot chimes and an engine tone that tracks the real RPM. Your ears keep watch while your eyes are busy.
Play back ArduPilot flight logs through the whole cockpit, view-only, for debriefs, training and fault finding.
Terrain tiles sync from your iCloud folder, and any tile the flight needs that you do not have is downloaded automatically.
Save each airframe's motors, engines and batteries once, and the cockpit rebuilds itself to match when you pick it.
Take photos and video of exactly what you see in the cockpit, for reports, training and sharing.
SightControl speaks MAVLink, the language of ArduPilot. It joins the telemetry your ground station already carries, so there is nothing to install on the aircraft.
SightControl is made by Gardner Avionics, Kyle Gardner's company. Kyle flies UAVs low over real terrain, and every part of SightControl is tested for many hours against ArduPilot's own simulator before it goes near a real aircraft. It first flew a real aircraft on the headset in September 2026.
These are on the roadmap. None of them is part of the product today.
Aircraft cameras streamed into the cockpit over RTSP and SRT.
Other headsets join over SharePlay: observers first, then a co-pilot.
Nearby aircraft on the map, the flight display and in the 3D terrain.
Helicopter-style virtual cyclic and collective for flying by hand.
Terrain and waypoints showing through a translucent live camera view.
Cockpit alerts as haptics on Apple Watch.
An iPad view of the cockpit for the people on the ground.
Recent milestones, drawn straight from the development history. This page rebuilds itself as the app grows.
In development since 7 Jul 2026. Last update 6 Nov 2026.
Be first to hear when SightControl opens to other operators.
