Updates from the CAA - for UK pilots

[scro]

It looks like the CAA has updated the suite of documents relating to drone rules. Some of the wording has been made clearer or more explicit and along with it some significant contradictions and inconsistencies. Key points I picked up are as follows:

• Removal of class marking references.
• VLOS is no longer nominally 500m and now requires you to be able to tell which way the drone is pointing, as well as where it is in the sky and what's going on around it.
• For A3 category flights "built up areas" now includes even single houses. You need to keep min 150m away from any inhabited structure. This is more onerous, as previously it was implied it had to be a group of houses.

This YouTube video sums it up better than I can:

This related video is worth a watch too, regarding the errors and inconsistencies in the newly published documents:

 

[old man mavic]

@scro ,have watched both those vids ,and looked at the new rules myself ,and as of this moment in time ,the whole thing is quite a mess ,lets hope the CAA get their act together quickly,and amend the glaring contradictions

 

[zocalo]

As things stand, I think the rules basically preclude a lot of usage cases that are going to hit users of anything over 250g drones pretty hard. I tend to shoot in pretty rural areas, but I suspect a LOT of the shots I've taken with my M2P would not be possible under the new regs as I wouldn't have been able to determine if some random structure was occupied or not.

"Which way the drone is facing" needs more clarity too. I can tell which way the drone is pointing because I have an arrow on my phone screen showing me the direction and can see and interpret the video feed as well. If I need to be able to visually tell direction just by looking at the drone, then that means my operational distance is going to drop considerably. This basically removes the ability to launch from a public area and do an overflight to get the shot you want, which really sucks and is effectively a massive extension of the area covered by defacto NFZs.

Frankly, as things stand, I think this might well contract the market for >250g drones to the point that it just won't be viable for vendors to sell them in the UK as I suspect most of the current non-commercial users of larger drones are not going to want to pay for a CofC, let alone a GVC and do the paperwork. Or people are going to buy them regardless and just take a very liberal view on adherance to the rules. Neither option is particularly appealing, whichever way you look at it, and the CAA really should realise that those are the most likely outcomes.

 

[Felix le Chat]

As things stand, I think the rules basically preclude a lot of usage cases that are going to hit users of anything over 250g drones pretty hard. I tend to shoot in pretty rural areas, but I suspect a LOT of the shots I've taken with my M2P would not be possible under the new regs as I wouldn't have been able to determine if some random structure was occupied or not.

"Which way the drone is facing" needs more clarity too. I can tell which way the drone is pointing because I have an arrow on my phone screen showing me the direction and can see and interpret the video feed as well. If I need to be able to visually tell direction just by looking at the drone, then that means my operational distance is going to drop considerably. This basically removes the ability to launch from a public area and do an overflight to get the shot you want, which really sucks and is effectively a massive extension of the area covered by defacto NFZs.

Frankly, as things stand, I think this might well contract the market for >250g drones to the point that it just won't be viable for vendors to sell them in the UK as I suspect most of the current non-commercial users of larger drones are not going to want to pay for a CofC, let alone a GVC and do the paperwork. Or people are going to buy them regardless and just take a very liberal view on adherance to the rules. Neither option is particularly appealing, whichever way you look at it, and the CAA really should realise that those are the most likely outcomes.

The "see which way the drone is facing and what's around it" clause seems to suggest that the current VLOS distance is set to take a serious hammering in the near future. The CAA states that this has to be done with the human eye: unaided by optics or FPV so I'm reminded of the FAA's original 2017/18 stipulation that a UAV should be limited to a flight distance no greater than the length of a football field (360 feet). To be realistic: you'd need a bionic eye like Steve Austin's to be able to accurately determine position and heading at the current VLOS limit and the "what's around it" bit is ludicrous - depth or relative distance perception at 1640 feet (500m) is impossible. I'll lay odds that sooner rather than later, the same restrictions that govern model aircraft flight are going to be grafted onto the R&R for drones.

 

[scro]

I had the chance for a couple of flights with my Mini3P yesterday and I tried flying out to 100m, spinning the drone around a few times and then trying to work out which way it was facing. I could mostly get it right, but I wasn't perfect. At 150m I was failing more often than succeeding. With a bit of practice I could maybe get better, but I don't think reliable determination of the drone's direction can be achieved much past 100m without adding strobes (and risk breaching the magical 250g). Lighting and visibility at the time was excellent. I wear corrective lenses, and when using them I have marginally better than 20/20 vision (yes, tested, not impossible, and it's much more common than you think ). I'm really not sure what the benefit is of being able to determine the drone's heading purely visually is, other than to arbitrarily force a much shorter range on pilots - happy to hear others' thoughts on this! We have several streams of telemtry info that are every bit as reliable as the control signal we are totally dependent on. I suspect the main thing that will happen with this new amendment is compliance will drop significantly, rather than any increase in safety.

I'm all for keeping the drone in sight and having a good idea of what is going on around it. Most manned aircraft pilots don't have as good an awareness of what is going on around their aircraft as they invariably have huge blind spots caused by the aircraft body/wings. As drone pilots we have an obligation to make way for manned flights so the onus is on us to spot them and avoid, rather than the other way around - the additional awareness of the aircraft's surroundings is quite handy for this.

Our depth perception of airborne objects is actually far worse than we'd like to admit. Just try flying your drone out to towards a tree that's >50m away and stopping within 5m of it. Our binocular vision is only really good for things within about 10m range. Beyond that we're totally reliant on other depth cues, most of which are absent or subject to serious error for objects that aren't on the ground. Parallax, relative size, relative motion can all really confuse our brain's attempts at depth perception for airborne objects, as can bee seen by the many airprox reports of fully qualified pilots claiming they've seen a drone pass close by them, when the described altitude, speed, relative positions and size all make it very unlikely to be a drone, and very likely to be another manned aircraft much further away. I once came across a site where someone correlated airprox reports, and the positions of other manned aircraft at the time of the "incident" and more often than not there was another manned aircraft at the right distance, relative bearing and relative altitude to fit the description. Unfortunately I can't find the site to link to it now.

 

[zocalo]

I wonder if the use of third party strobes would count. Following conventions, you'd want red/green angled out from port/starboard respectively, and white at the rear (all positioned to avoid lighting up your subject unintentionally, e.g. nothing within the cameras typical field of view). Depending on the orientation of the lights, you'd be able to tell which way the drone was facing at quite a distance, I would expect. Much better if this was all directly built into drones to start with, of course.

If I can see the red light, I know the drone's port side is towards me, and therefore it must be facing to my left, to my right for starboard/green, if I can see neither (just the spec of the drone) then it's facing me, and if I can see white it's facing away from me. Any other combination of lights, especially cycling between the colours, and it's currently tumbling out of the sky, in which case all bets are off, but I least I still know its orientation and can infer its velocity to be straight down at ~9.8m/s^2

 

[scro]

@zocalo After posting, I was thinking exactly this too

Maybe the direction we should all be heading is to fit strobes. THe new wording does seem to recognise lighting on the aircraft as a valid means of knowing its orientation (pg 26 of CAP722, 9th ed. 2022):


I just weighed my mini3P and I've got about 4.5g headroom to play with for strobes. It's a shame the 2x green lights already on the drone aren't brighter and coloured according to typical nav-lighting conventions, and they switch off when recording video. Even these puny green ones can be seen several hundred meters away at night, though they're still not that helpful in visually determining orientation.

I think somehow wiring 2 or 3 appropriately coloured strobes to the main battery would be the way to go, for keeping it still within 250g, but the technical details for that are probably best dealt with in a separate thread, so as to not go off topic on this thread.

 

[Cymru]

CAA just released a clarification to an ammendment to an ammendment and a new (9th edition) CAP722.

https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP722_Edition_9.1%20(1).pdf

No real changes except this:

Ninth Edition Amendment 1 December 2022
Update in Section 2.2.1.2 to the A1 section to clarify that ‘transitional’ A1 UA must not
overfly uninvolved people, and that privately built UA may make use of the A1 provisions.
Simplification of the A2 section, to remove reference to class mark requirements.

All it really shows is just how much of a confused, legislative mess the CAA drone area is at the moment.

 

[wco81]

So flying drones in the UK is not advised at the moment, especially for drones over 250g?

Is there a good drone map?

I see this one that is linked from the Altitude Angel site:

Drone Safety Map | Altitude Angel

dronesafetymap.com

I haven't tried the Drone Assist UK app yet, apparently requires an account just to even check out.

This Drone Safety Map site, I think would require a sanity check for those unfamiliar with flying in the UK.

As expected, most of central London is red.

But I look at smaller cities like Bath and there's no restriction indicated for that city. For Oxford, the SW area is yellow but no restrictions over the University or some of the inhabited areas just to west and to SE of it?

 

[Felix le Chat]

So flying drones in the UK is not advised at the moment, especially for drones over 250g?

Is there a good drone map?

I see this one that is linked from the Altitude Angel site:

Drone Safety Map | Altitude Angel

dronesafetymap.com

I haven't tried the Drone Assist UK app yet, apparently requires an account just to even check out.

This Drone Safety Map site, I think would require a sanity check for those unfamiliar with flying in the UK.

As expected, most of central London is red.

But I look at smaller cities like Bath and there's no restriction indicated for that city. For Oxford, the SW area is yellow but no restrictions over the University or some of the inhabited areas just to west and to SE of it?

Try dronescene.co.uk. Really excellent resource. It's current, being regularly updated. Tied in with NATS data.