Time travel without scout drone makes no sense

When Doc is so excited about traveling 25 years into the future, I started thinking - how can he do that safely? How can he make sure there's not a building, wall, or enormous hole where the mall used to be?

I have brushed on it in the past, I think, but to really travel in time, especially to the future (with past, you can more or less do research as to what was where, so you can 'land safely'), you absolutely - ABSOLUTELY - need some kind of 'future-scouting system' to be able to ever do it safely.

You could, of course, travel one hour or day at a time, seeing slowly the progress of the environment, but that would be agonizing and wasteful, and even then, some disaster might have put a tree trunk or a train cart or whatnot, where you are supposed to 'land'.

I thought maybe doing it in the air (that's why the 'hover conversion' is a good idea) could be safer, but as the sequels and their '2015' have shown, even that's not a sure thing (they could've actually materialized inside a flying truck, just BY THE WAY..).

The only truly safe way to do this, would be to send some kind of scout drone into the future to collect information, and it could efficiently 'time-hop' minute-by-minute, for example, scanning enough 'samples' of each day to then form a reliable network of safety information, so the time travelers can then plan their 'landing' safely.

Think if it wasn't 25 years but 250 years! How could you ever know there's not gonna be a building, hill, mountain or an ocean where you plan to 'land'? You can't.

(I am ignoring the whole 'Earth moves in space' for this post, but it can be explained anyway)

So a 'scout-drone' is ESSENTIAL for 'future' time travel at least - you have to make it scan and take photos, video, audio, etc. of a large enough area for large enough a timespan around the point of time you plan to arrive, and then, and only then, can you research it reliably enough to prepare to be safe.

Otherwise it's a pretty big gamble - there might be a wall 10 cm where I materialize at 88 mph, or I might materialize inside a group of people or giraffes. You could never, ever know - Marty and Doc, as reckless as they are, are INCREDIBLY lucky that kind of thing didn't happen. Heck, the DeLorean hit a wall even when they DID know it was gonna be there! (The movie theater)

A city changes quite a friggin' lot in 25 years, let alone 100 or 250 years. The time machine is USELESS for 'future' travel, unless you have a scout to give you the data you need to 'land' safely.

This kind of reckless 'let's jump head-first into the deep end of a pool from 10 meters height, that I don't know if it has water in it or not'-type time travel just makes no sense.