Before every flight in the Army, I walked around the aircraft. Every time. Didn’t matter if I’d flown that same airframe the day before, or if it had just come out of maintenance with a clean logbook. The walkaround happened before anybody sat down in the seat.
That’s not distrust. It’s discipline. The checklist exists because human memory is unreliable under pressure, and in aviation, a skipped step has consequences that can’t be undone. You build the habit so deeply that it becomes automatic — the same sequence, every aircraft, every time.
When I started Texan Roofworks, I brought the same approach to roof inspections. And what I found is that most of the industry doesn’t have one.
What a preflight walkaround actually is
The walkaround covers the entire aircraft in a fixed sequence — same starting point, same path around the airframe, same finishing point, every single time. The order never varies, and that’s the point: a fixed order is what keeps you from skipping something when you’re tired, cold, or behind schedule. It takes about ten minutes, and it catches things — a fluid drip that wasn’t there the day before, a fastener backed out, damage from the previous flight that never made it into the logbook.
The point isn’t to find problems on every walkaround. Most of the time everything is exactly where it should be. The point is that when something is wrong, you catch it before you’re airborne instead of after.
Roof inspections work the same way — or should.
What most DFW storm-chaser inspections actually look like
After a hailstorm rolls through North Texas, crews flood the neighborhoods. They knock doors, they glance at your roof from the driveway, they walk up one slope and look for obvious bruising, and they hand you a card. The whole thing takes eight minutes.
What they skipped:
- The gutters and downspouts (granule accumulation tells you how much surface the shingles have lost)
- The drip edge and fascia (the first line of defense against water getting under the roof system)
- The pipe collars and vent boots (rubber deteriorates faster than shingles and is the #1 source of active leaks)
- The valley flashings (where two roof planes meet — water concentrates here, and so does damage)
- The attic (the only place you can actually see whether water has penetrated)
None of those are obscure. They’re standard components of every residential roof. But a quick visual from one slope doesn’t cover them, and a crew that’s trying to knock twenty doors in an afternoon doesn’t have time for them.
The seven-point walkaround we run on every roof
We do this in sequence. Same order, every house, every time — because the checklist is the standard, not the exception.
1. Ground-level perimeter pass
Just like circling the aircraft before climbing up, we walk the entire perimeter of the house at ground level first. We’re looking at gutters, downspout condition, granule deposits, the fascia boards, and visible soffit. A lot of hail damage tells its story at the gutter line before you ever get on the roof.
2. Edge and drip edge
The drip edge is a metal strip that runs the perimeter of the roof and directs water away from the fascia into the gutters. Hail damages it. Wind lifts it. And most inspectors don’t check it because it’s at the very edge of the roof and easy to miss. Insurance code in Texas requires new drip edge on a full replacement — which means if it’s damaged and undocumented, your adjuster may not include it in the estimate.
3. Roof plane condition
This is what most inspectors spend all their time on, and it matters — but it’s not the whole picture. We’re looking at hail bruising (soft spots in the shingle mat, often without a visible mark at the center), granule loss, cracking, and cupping. Our EagleView drone captures full-resolution imagery of every plane, so we’re not relying on what we can see from one spot on the ridge.
4. Penetrations — vents, pipes, skylights
Think of these like pitot tubes and static ports on an aircraft: small, easy to overlook, and critical to the system working correctly. Rubber pipe collars crack and separate from the pipe. Ridge vents get impacted by hail. Skylight seals fail. These are active leak sources that don’t show up in a quick visual pass — you have to look at each one deliberately.
5. Valley and transition flashings
Where two roof planes meet is where water concentrates. That means it’s also where damage concentrates and where leaks start. Metal valley flashing gets dented and creased by hail. Step flashing at walls and dormers works loose over time. This is where we see the most underdocumented damage on insurance claims — because it takes more than a glance to inspect properly.
6. Ridge and hip condition
The ridge cap takes the brunt of impact hail and wind because it’s the highest point. Cap shingles come loose. Ridge venting systems get damaged. On a steep-pitch roof this is also the area that crews sometimes rush — it’s harder to move around up there. We check it anyway.
7. Attic inspection
This is the one that gets skipped most consistently, and it’s the most important for understanding what the roof has actually been doing. The attic tells you if water has been penetrating — stained decking, wet insulation, mold on rafters. It also shows you ventilation issues (which void manufacturer warranties), soft or delaminating decking, and evidence of prior repairs. In aviation terms, this is the maintenance bay — the place you have to actually look inside to know what’s going on with the system.
Insurance adjusters do their own walkaround. If we didn’t document something, they won’t include it. A thorough inspection up front is what gets a complete claim approved instead of a partial one.
Why the checklist matters more after a storm
After a hailstorm, the temptation — for everyone, including homeowners — is to move fast. Get a crew out, get the insurance filed, get it over with. I understand that. But moving fast through a bad inspection is how you get a denied claim, an underpaid settlement, or a replacement that doesn’t address everything that was actually damaged.
In Army aviation there was a saying: there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. The discipline isn’t about being slow. It’s about not skipping the steps that matter.
We run the same walkaround on every roof we inspect. Free, same-day written report with annotated drone imagery. If your roof is fine, we’ll tell you that and you keep the documentation on file. If there’s claim-worthy damage, you have everything your adjuster needs to approve it.
Book a free AI drone inspection at texanroofworks.com or call (972) 584-7849. We serve Southlake, Keller, Grapevine, Colleyville, Flower Mound, Arlington, and all of DFW.
This is the checklist behind every AI drone roof inspection we run, on every job across our DFW service areas. It is free, and it takes about 20 minutes.
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