A post later on in this thread features one of the Brit "auditors" who cycles around the west midlands of England making himself an arrogant, supercilious pain in the nuts to all and sundry. What he does is pointless, antagonistic and fails to have any educational or social relevance.Please describe a "good" auditor in the context we're discussing.
Legitimate "auditors" provide a valuable service that others seek them out and hire them for. For example financial records auditors, or cyber security auditors.
There are no legitimate drone-rights auditors. No one is interested in hiring them to test someone else's fidelity to flying rules. Further, their behavior is anything but professional, rather clearly prioritized for sensation and public dissemination.
This is not how an "auditor" worthy of the term operates. It's how hooligans and social reprobates behave. A real audit in virtually all situations is something you and I would never know about. It's private, sensitive information, collected to uncover deficiencies with the goal to correct and improve.
Should a PD undertake an audit to determine the knowledge level of drone flying rules among their officers, it would not consist of some pilot flying over the PD headquarters and then getting in an aggressive argument with whoever came out to talk to them, and posting it to YT.
That's exceedingly unlikely to result in an education program at the department.
The idea that there are ANY "good" YT drone "auditors" is laughable, and I'm holding back 'cause this is a family siteThe truth is, all these idiots do is make things harder for the rest of us enthusiasts, poisoning relations with LE, and advancing knowledge not at all.
There are, however, (as you pointed out) rare instances where oversight is justified, absolutely necessary and both morally and legally defensible.
A large scale infrastructure project (that shall remain nameless) was recently forced to undertake significant archaeology when a series of historically unknown features were unearthed in an area they were pushing through. These features were described by the lead archaeologist as being "...of National importance..." but the dig was rushed due to developer pressure. The hard features uncovered were significant enough to warrant being classified as a Scheduled Monument. An Elizabethan building close by which was the only surviving Estate structure was also scheduled for demolition.
In order to document the handling of this site, a series of drone survey and close detail flights was undertaken which captured photographic information detailing the systematic destruction of the exposed discoveries. This entailed the use of heavy machinery ripping the intact foundation courses of a Tudor turreted gatehouse apart and the dumping of the rubble in a big pile at the rear of the site (well out of sight). The flights also captured the entire process of the demolition of the surviving intact building, which could have been archaeologically disassembled and relocated as a local heritage asset.
Without this "oversight", there would not have been a comprehensive digital record of both demolition processes.
While not permissioned by the developer consortium, all flights were completely legal, using public access for TOAL, images taken during overflight were from waypoints on a longer A-B flight path, no persons were present on-site, local ATC was given detailed notification of all flights in advance, minimum safe distance from target was maintained and all photographs taken did not breach privacy or data protection laws.
The reason I know what I'm doing is that this process is part of what I do professionally, the surveying of heritage assets to document state: condition and disposition.
These monkeys who justify themselves as "auditors" make my job harder every time they post a new video. They make my teeth itch.
