How LiDAR and “Air Intelligence” Are Making Terrain Parks More Safe

Words by Guest Author Cyrus Struckman

February of 2023, Jayden Pedrotti was equipped with a black sweatshirt, baggy jeans, a beanie atop his long curly brown hair, and most importantly a skateboard. The board and bikes were the tools for their experiment, some random L.A. road was the laboratory. Over three years later, with short hair now, snow instead of blacktop, and shovel rather than skateboard, Jayden is digging next to a jump at Corralco Ski Resort  – a Chilean ski area on the side of a volcano. He’s unburying a metal post that holds the same technology he was testing a year before: LiDAR.

Used by ocean floor cartographers and snowcats to measure snow depth, LiDAR stands for “light detection and ranging,” and is essentially a pulsating laser of light that can remotely measure variable distances very accurately. What Jayden and a team of coders were observing on a L.A street three years ago was how well it could gauge speed. In August 2026, the blueprint that came from those tests has now grown into the “air intelligence” system: the product behind Jayden and his father Chris Pedrotti’s company Precision Approach. Like a radar gun for terrain park jumps, the air intelligence system is an abort warning system that gauges someone’s speed using LiDAR, and displays a light based on whether the skier or snowboarder is going too fast or slow to land where they’re meant to. 

“It’s not for the professional rider,” Jayden said. “This is for the little kids’ first time hitting a jump, and parents want to relive their glory days in the 80s. This was the original thought about the entire thing.” 

When someone approaches a jump equipped with an air intelligence system, the light moves between the colors red, orange, and green (it also can display a large X). Akin to a stoplight, the colors are stacked above each other vertically. Differently, a set of red and orange are both above and below the green light in the center. Below, means slower than what’s appropriate, above, means the opposite: too fast. 

The birth of Pedrottis’ idea came from a feeling many skiers and snowboarders can relate to. You’re staring down an in-run to the terrain park’s jump line for the first time, not sure how fast you should go, considering whether spending the remainder of ski season with shin splints or a bum knee sounds better.

In 1992, Chris was skiing at Mt. Hood Meadows when he spotted something from the chairlift. Beneath him, the resort had built a jump, and it was open to anyone on the mountain brave enough to try. As soon as his ride up reached the top, he skied down to get a better look at the new piece of terrain. 

“I couldn’t believe they were building those for public consumption. It was awesome, but it was kind of reckless too,” Chris said. Luckily, Chris had someone to follow into the jump to dial his speed right. “I came back later. Snow friction had changed and no one was there. I didn’t see the last person go. They could be laying in a pool of blood on the other side. I thought, ‘how could you ever do this by yourself?’”

Around three decades later, Chris’ son Jayden was 21-years-old, and his college courses had just been moved online because of the pandemic. He already had the certifications, so he moved to Utah to be a ski instructor. During the summer, he started serving tables, found it more lucrative than the commute from town every day, and switched to doing that year round. “I had no freaking idea what I was going to do,” Jayden said. “I was 21-years-old, and had just moved to Utah to be a ski instructor. I thought it was just skiing and skiing and skiing and more skiing.”

The idea of a radar gun for a jump had only been a conversation between father and son until Jayden was at a bar in downtown Salt Lake City. “I started talking to this guy,” Jayden said. “He had a connection with Tesla. And he started talking about LiDAR. We had an hour-long conversation.”

With actual science to run with, the Pedrottis’ idea turned into several conversations over the course of five or six months. The decision was made that Jayden should pitch to some investors. “They just weren’t interested,” Jayden said. “And I always joke that it’s because I had long hair – you know, a hippie kid from Oregon. I just didn’t have the gray hair in the room.”

Although they were turned away at first, Chris pitched an idea to a friend of his. He saw enough potential in their idea to invest, and that was enough to officially start Precision Approach. Once the code was written by Goji Labs, and it had been tested with Jayden in L.A, it was time to test it on snow.

To land a jump in the sweet spot, a rider needs a specific speed calculated from the jump’s angle. However, as soon as a skier or snowboarder starts heading upwards, gravity and friction slow them right before takeoff. Because of this instant speed drop, Precision Approach’s air intelligence system measures a rider’s speed right at the transition onto the jump ramp. Furthermore, a speed taken at the transition allows time for a rider to abort before becoming airborne. 

“We would set a jump, make an area [for the LiDAR],” Pedrotti said. “And after hours we’d go up there and my dad was like, ‘All right, Jayden, jump to the moon. Now jump as high as you can. Okay, where did you land? All right, now I need you to intentionally buckle.’”

The last consideration the Pedrottis needed to test was pop-velocity. Most people jump at least a little as they go off a terrain park jump, but some people don’t at all and instead absorb the jump. The result is that the arc of someone’s return to earth can start both positive or negative from the jump (it’s helpful to think of the end of the jump as the origin – or where the x and y axis meet on a graph).

In 2024, over the course of 13 days at Sierra-at-Tahoe and Sky Tavern Ski Resort, alongside infamous terrain park builder John Rice, Precision Approach tested 948 skiers and snowboarders on 13 different jumps of varying sizes. 92.3% of riders either popped or absorbed the jump within a small, predictable range. The other 7.7% ‘s pop equated to standing still and jumping eight inches off the ground. While popping harder launches a rider at a steeper angle and absorbing starts their arc lower, the study proved landing spots can fall within a predictable window. By setting the system’s green light to the exact speed needed for a sweet-spot landing, riders can avoid dangerous overshoots or undershoots — even if they pop hard or soak up the takeoff.

Although Chris is the CEO, he still works as a full time pilot for Delta, making Jayden the one with boots on the ground. Being co-founder of a company at 26-years-old, he’s been traveling between South and North America for the last three years, going wherever the Precision Approach’s air intelligence system goes. In 2025, he spent the Austral winter in Malalcahuello – a Chilean town with around 1,000 year-around residents. Some of his closest Chilean friends became local snowboarders who run snowboarding magazine Terror. Although he’s working in Valle Nevado this year, hours north of Corralco, he came back to ensure those friends are capable and ready to fix anything wrong with the newest version of the air intelligence system. Having personalities like those, representing Precision Approach in the terrain park isn’t just happenstance.

“I’m 58-years-old now and I don’t want to hang out in terrain parks with a bunch of kids, but Jayden does,” Chris said. “The idea is kind of just to create a little more stoke in the terrain park.”

To bolster Precision Approach’s role in the terrain park, the company created a subscription-based app to go along with air intelligence systems. Since LiDAR already sensed movement for the system, a motion-sensing camera could be added too. “It’s a training thing,” Jayden said. “We wanted to build something to make sure that the kids that are training know what they did last run, and also to show grandma because maybe she’s not up on the hill.”

For the aspiring skiers hoping to be Instagram famous it’s a good tool, but in the case of an accident it could also be an essential liability tool for resorts. Sometimes, an injury in the park goes unseen, and the only witness is the victim themself. “The video is stored in the cloud and available to the skier and defense attorneys,” Chris said.

LiDAR’s sensing of the landing zone serves dual purposes in the air intelligence system. Any dedicated park rider knows that over an entire spring day, a park jump begins to lose its original form and becomes slushy. If the speed going into a jump matches what the air intelligence’s motherboard predicts, but the landing zone doesn’t, an alert will be sent to a Precision Approach employee who can make changes to correct the system.  That same area is where the large “X” serves a purpose as well. When something larger than a glove or a snowball is detected in the landing zone, the LiDAR will only display the X, mitigating collision with hazards like another skier or a piece of their equipment.

Precision Approach is on its second generation, and is active in four ski areas around the globe. This is Jayden’s second year chasing winter for all 12 months, and Chris has been pitching to large European partners with the hope of bringing the air intelligence system there next season. Currently, the business is also working with the Snow Angel Foundation and is a proud friend of the High Fives Foundation. A lot has changed, but four years later, the fuel behind the fire is still the same as it was before: with more information, better decisions are made.

“We are trying to be friends with the industry and just waiting for all the things to come together,” Jayden said.

“I like to say how many kids won’t thank us because they aren’t sitting in a wheelchair,” Chris said. 

About the Author 

Cyrus Struckman is a journalism student at the University of Montana. His professional experience so far has been freelance writing stories surrounding ski adventure and the ski community. 

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*This article was updated on September 14, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. to correct factual inaccuracies.