Pilots who fly planes or any type of aircraft have a preflight inspection checklist consisting of more than 30 items. If the pilots do not carefully follow the checklist each time before take-off, they increase the possibility of a tragic accident. Do you know what type of pilot is specially urged to complete the checklist every time? It is the very experienced pilot! A seasoned pilot could easily skip some of the details thinking nothing is going to happen, but an experienced one takes this checklist very seriously.

Like a safety-minded pilot, service companies and drilling engineers make survey calculations that are fundamental and necessary to monitor and control wellbore trajectories. Initially, the oil and gas industry was concentrated on drilling vertical wells. The concept of inclination angle began when engineers realized that a drilled wellbore trajectory was not a plumb line. Then the concept of azimuth angle arose when they found out that a drilled trajectory can deviate from a vertical well. A wellbore trajectory is a continuous curve in space that bends and turns simultaneously.

The oil and gas industry has acknowledged the importance of survey calculation for more than 50 years and has extensively applied the research results in the field. Inclinometers can only give parameters from separate survey stations and cannot give the real profile of a wellbore trajectory. Therefore, a proper method of survey calculation must be on the basis of a 3D wellbore trajectory model. A software with the help of simple methods can be sufficiently accurate and precise for these types of well such as extended-reach wells and multi-target wells.

By combining the survey calculations with visualization technology, PVI has developed PathView (Well Path Visualization) which provides an interactive, true 3D view of single and multiple wells.

Some of the features included in PathView are:

• True 3D-rendered wellpath visualization
• Anti-collision calculation
• Surface lease lines
• Lithology
• Up to 5000 rows of survey data
• Plots specified wellbore range
• Up to 10 sidetrack levels
• Plots and prints detailed well profiles
• Plan view, Section view, 3D view and Dogleg

Precautionary methods are an effective way for safety-minded pilots to buy time to reevaluate the flight conditions. Pilots, who understand their aircraft systems, follow standard operating procedures and use conservative risk management techniques, will diminish inconvenient situations from further becoming worse; just like the ability to see the well path in a 3D work space is essential for engineers to visualize the development plan, understand it and therefore, avoid well collisions.