Why evidence-backed completion matters for drone services

Drone services have a trust problem that has nothing to do with the drones. A customer books a spraying run, mapping flight, or inspection pass, and at the end has no reliable way to confirm the work happened as described — beyond the pilot's word.

Sortie closes that gap at the state-machine level, not the UI level. A mission cannot move to COMPLETED until four things are on record: a pre-flight digital checklist, a timestamped before photo, a timestamped after photo, and the final acreage or area actually executed.

This is enforced server-side. The pilot app can guide a pilot toward capturing evidence, but the backend is what blocks the transition if anything is missing. That distinction matters — UI gating can be skipped or break; a backend state check cannot.

The payoff is that completion means something. Customers get a verifiable record tied to the job, pilots get a clean audit trail for disputes, and operations gets a dataset that can answer 'did this actually happen' without relying on memory or screenshots in a chat thread.