(I'm not affiliated with them, fwiw)
But if you have to stay below the cloud cover you're going to probably cover no more than a township(?) at a time. If I have to send a guy out in a pickup who launches, grabs a photo, pulls it back in and then drives to the next township it is slow and expensive.
People will be able to purchase very high resolution images from fixed wing and balloons.
(I am affiliated with SkyFi - CTO)
Why would an aerial photo plane fly when it's cloudy? Makes no sense
That’s why my reading is that he’s referring to the satellite photos, not airplane.
I worked on earth scale digital mapping the late 1980s on a product that ultimately fed into Keyhole | Google maps | Hexagon.
As a state we flew air photos every summer (and started with digitising these) and acquired various sat feeds through our ground station.
Polar precessing orbits (MODIS, etc) do a full loop about the planet roughly every hour or so, and their orbit walks about the planet to maintain a roughly constant ground sun angle (~ sun-synchronous), returning overhead in 24 hours (or within the week, depending on interlacing patterns).
The point being, we delivered high resolution images (digitised or, on request, blown up from good quality large format film negatives) over the urban areas from the summer surveys and ensured clear images OR we delivered sat imagery from a clear day (in the visual spectrum) or multi band spectrum data from whenever requested.
A cloudy day can be easily rejected from many sat feeds - unless its areas such as PNG that are famously Obscured by Clouds [1] and required near ground helicopter survey work to map (fun times).
But there was a fundamental disconnect between how a fertilizer company wanted to buy photos and how the satellite company wanted to sell them. We ideally wanted to buy them by the field, the section or township at worst. The satellite company wanted to sell you a 'scene' which was 10-12 counties. Most farmers trying technology as a test would give you 5-10% of their acreage. Try telling your boss you wanted to buy photos where you weren't going to use 99%+ of them.
Then to make it worse here in Michigan it is quite cloudy. You get your photos and 50-60% of them are ruined by cloud cover. When it worked the photos were a godsend. Getting three or four flyovers a season allowed you to spot trends as well.
I personally think drones will win the ag market. What I wanted to do back in the nineties was launch a drone from the county airport and have it automatically fly to a given set of gps coordinates and return at nighttime. Cost is lower, I don't have to buy any extra photos that I don't want and because its below the clouds all the photos are useable.
But back then the technology didn't exist. But the tech has been there since 2010. Since 2015 its been possible to fly around other planes in the sky and geofence fields near airports. But the FAA won't grant permission, even for tests. I know at least two Michigan startups that went broke waiting and I suspect there are many more. So for now you have no choice but try using satellite companies. As a result the market is 1-2% of what it could be.