Drone Spray & Coverage & Sorties

It links the drone's coverage to your field. Area covered per battery = swath width × ground speed × flight time per charge. Sorties = field area ÷ area per battery. Total spray = field area × the application rate, and tank refills = total spray ÷ tank size. From a handful of specs you get a complete spray plan: how far one charge goes, how many flights, and how much liquid to mix.

It's the effective ground the drone treats on a single charge: swath × speed × flight time. A 4 m swath at 5 m/s for 10 minutes covers 4 × 5 × 600 = 12,000 m², about 1.2 ha. Real coverage is a little lower because of turns, overlap, refill stops and reduced speed at headlands, so treat it as the optimistic ceiling.

Sorties (battery flights) = field area ÷ area covered per battery, rounded up. If each charge covers 1.2 ha and the field is 6 ha, that's 5 sorties. Sorties matter because the drone lands between them to swap batteries, so they set the rhythm of the day — and how many spare batteries you should carry.

Drones fly fast and carry only a small tank, so they use concentrated, low-volume spraying — often 10–25 L/ha versus hundreds for a boom sprayer. Fine atomised droplets and rotor downwash drive the spray into the canopy. Always follow the product label's drone or ULV rate; the low total volume is by design, not under-dosing.

Total spray volume = field area × application rate. At a 20 L/ha low rate, a 6 ha field needs 120 L of made-up spray. Mix to the label concentration, account for what stays in lines and the tank, and split it across tank loads. This tool gives the total and the number of refills for the tank size you enter.

Tank refills = total spray volume ÷ tank size, rounded up. A 120 L job with a 16 L tank is about 8 fills. Because a small tank may empty before a battery dies (or vice versa), plan refills and battery swaps together so the ground crew keeps the drone in the air with minimal idle time.

Enough to keep the drone flying while used packs recharge. With fast chargers you might cycle three to four batteries continuously; without, carry more. A rough rule: have enough charged packs to cover the time it takes the first one to recharge. The sortie count tells you how many charge cycles the whole field will take.

Wind, payload weight, battery health and temperature, terrain, obstacle avoidance and overlap all cut into the textbook figures. Heavier loads and headwinds slow the drone and drain batteries faster, and safety buffers reduce sprayable area. Use the calculator to plan, then refine from your own logged flight times and field results.

They're solid planning figures based on swath, speed, flight time, rate and tank size. Actual results vary with the drone model, conditions and operator. Always follow the label rate, respect drift buffers and local rules for drone spraying, and verify coverage on the ground — treat the outputs as a flight plan to steer by, not a guarantee.