Preface: I live in the USA. I've been flying airplanes for decades (private pilot, learned to fly airplanes when I was a kid - I own a Cessna now). Been flying drones for about 5 years now. As I have an actual crewed-aircraft pilots license (which I value), I try to follow all the rules, even when it's a huge pain in the ***. I have my 107. I have registered myself and the drone for the EU, UK, and several other foreign nations. I've bought insurance when required. I've flown my Mini 3 Pro in about half a dozen countries. I am, for all intents and purposes, a "boy scout" when it comes to behaving.
I know I'm not going to be able to fly over Venice or Rome or other big cities and major tourist locations. I'm going to the far south of Italy next month, plenty of empty and rural places which I would guess airspave restrictions are few. At least that's my guess. Because there's no way to know.
But I can not get to square one with Italy, though I have tried mightily.
I have spent literally hundreds of hours over the past year trying to "do the right thing" and get legal for flying my drone on an upcoming trip to southern Italy, and see aispace that is/is not available to fly in. But I can not even get to Square One: simply registering for the "D-Flight" Italian airspace app. Without registration, the app won't work. Without the app, there's no way (that I can find) to know what airspace is prohibited, restricted, or allowed. Attempting to register for D-Flight, it just errors out with an unhelpful and generic error: "Error on register user"
To register, you must fill in two pages of online forms, which contain about 20 fields. Some of the fields are obvious and what you would expect - name, address, phone, etc. Others are somewhat more mysterious - the "CF/CIF/TIN" which is apparently an Italian tax ID number. Of course, if you're not Italian, you don't have an Italian tax ID number, so you are left to make guesses about what number might work. On other threads here, someone helpfully suggests using "50000000xx0". I've tried that. But I still get a registration error. Is it because I've munged the Tax ID number? Beats the flock outta me, I've tried 50000000xx0 (with two x characters), I've tried 50000000110 and 50000000990 and 50000000570 and 50000000ZZ0 and 50000000A10 and a dozen other variations swapping in letters and/or numbers, assuming the two lowercase x characters in the allegedly working-but-fake Tax ID number requires some substitution. All I know is whatever I put there, I get the same error: "Error on register user"
Maybe the first number I tried is perfectly fine, but it doesn't like something else I've filled in - the formatting of some fields is unconventional. It asks for insane things like your "birth province"...OK, we don't have "provinces" so I assume we just enter one's "birth state" but it's a free-format field, it's not a pick-list, so you can enter "NY" or New York or Cucamonga or whatever. There's also a required "birth place", which I assume is probably a city/town, again freeform. Maybe the form chokes on anything that's not "Roma" or familiar, maybe it doesn't matter and you could enter "Bumfokk" and it won't care, there's no way to know because it only produced the same error message no matter what I enter there. It asks for your birth date, and specifies it in the format mm/dd/yyyy. What's odd is that in almost all European countries (perhaps in Italy?), they specify dates as dd/mm/yyyy. I've tried entering birth date in both formats (and tried to be sneaky by using 06/06/1985 so the day and month wouldn't mattter). Maybe it thinks I'm too young or too old - I've tried birth years from 1901 to 2024. Always the same result: "Error on register user"
The form has two fields labeled as "Phone" and "Mobile (with country prefix +xy or 00xy"). Oddly, the "phone number" field is required but the "Mobile (wtf)" field is not. OK, whatever. I have enetered a dozen real and fake (but I think) properly formatted phone numbers in each of those fields. Same result: "Error on register user"
Maybe it doesn't care about any of these details. Maybe one of them is causing it to barf. No way to know. I must have tried over 100 different combinations. Same result: "Error on register user"
D-Flight has an ironically-named "service desk" which appears to be a portal to provide support. After sinking hundreds of hours into this lost cause, I figured I'd give it a try. It's all in Italian, and I don't speak Italian, which means I spend a lot of time copying and pasting via Google translate. How does it work? It's a joke. I enter questions, show screenshots, ask simple things "like what format does this field require?" "Is my non-Italian phone number OK or is that causijg it to fail?" "Is the registration working for ANYONE, or has it just been broken for months, and nobody has registered?" "Are there any humans on the support staff, or is this all just a bot?" "Can someone please just answer a single, simple question?" "Are you all just playing video games and watching porn all day?"
No matter what queston I ask, no matter what details I provide, I always get the exact same response: Translated from Italian, it just says: "Your service request has been closed. We consider your issue has been resolved. Thank you for contacting us." That's al - no matter what you ask, say, plead, or scream at them, they just automatically "close" your requst and mark it as "solved." Their stats must look impressive!
I have asked for the contact information for a supervisor, or a phone number, or some way of contacting a live human who will answer just one question (they can pick the question). The response is always the same: "Your service request has been closed. We consider your issue has been resolved. Thank you for contacting us." Rinse, lather, repeat. It's Italy.
Look, I know that many drone owners just ignore all the regs, at home and when abroad. Some do that because they don't care about the rules, some do that because they made some minor effort and couldn't find the information they needed to comply with the regs. I don't want to be one of those who just shrugs and says "I don't care about the regs I'm just gonna do what I want."
But fer cryin' out loud, this is ridiculous. Italy has set up a Kafka-esque system where they literally make it impossible for a well-intentioned visiting drone pilot to comply with the rules. It should not take a year of one's life to simply get registered for their **** airspace app.
Any Italian drone owners here want to chime in? Has anyone who's NOT Italian ever been able to register for the @#$%* D-flight app? If you have, you wanna just take a few screenshots and send them to me? Otherwise, I'm going to just go and do what I want. If I get arrested, I'll point to this idiocy in my defense. Maybe they really are all just playing video games and watching porn all day, so I need not worry about getting arrested for flying through the Pope's window...
My gawd, what a broken country....
I know I'm not going to be able to fly over Venice or Rome or other big cities and major tourist locations. I'm going to the far south of Italy next month, plenty of empty and rural places which I would guess airspave restrictions are few. At least that's my guess. Because there's no way to know.
But I can not get to square one with Italy, though I have tried mightily.
I have spent literally hundreds of hours over the past year trying to "do the right thing" and get legal for flying my drone on an upcoming trip to southern Italy, and see aispace that is/is not available to fly in. But I can not even get to Square One: simply registering for the "D-Flight" Italian airspace app. Without registration, the app won't work. Without the app, there's no way (that I can find) to know what airspace is prohibited, restricted, or allowed. Attempting to register for D-Flight, it just errors out with an unhelpful and generic error: "Error on register user"
To register, you must fill in two pages of online forms, which contain about 20 fields. Some of the fields are obvious and what you would expect - name, address, phone, etc. Others are somewhat more mysterious - the "CF/CIF/TIN" which is apparently an Italian tax ID number. Of course, if you're not Italian, you don't have an Italian tax ID number, so you are left to make guesses about what number might work. On other threads here, someone helpfully suggests using "50000000xx0". I've tried that. But I still get a registration error. Is it because I've munged the Tax ID number? Beats the flock outta me, I've tried 50000000xx0 (with two x characters), I've tried 50000000110 and 50000000990 and 50000000570 and 50000000ZZ0 and 50000000A10 and a dozen other variations swapping in letters and/or numbers, assuming the two lowercase x characters in the allegedly working-but-fake Tax ID number requires some substitution. All I know is whatever I put there, I get the same error: "Error on register user"
Maybe the first number I tried is perfectly fine, but it doesn't like something else I've filled in - the formatting of some fields is unconventional. It asks for insane things like your "birth province"...OK, we don't have "provinces" so I assume we just enter one's "birth state" but it's a free-format field, it's not a pick-list, so you can enter "NY" or New York or Cucamonga or whatever. There's also a required "birth place", which I assume is probably a city/town, again freeform. Maybe the form chokes on anything that's not "Roma" or familiar, maybe it doesn't matter and you could enter "Bumfokk" and it won't care, there's no way to know because it only produced the same error message no matter what I enter there. It asks for your birth date, and specifies it in the format mm/dd/yyyy. What's odd is that in almost all European countries (perhaps in Italy?), they specify dates as dd/mm/yyyy. I've tried entering birth date in both formats (and tried to be sneaky by using 06/06/1985 so the day and month wouldn't mattter). Maybe it thinks I'm too young or too old - I've tried birth years from 1901 to 2024. Always the same result: "Error on register user"
The form has two fields labeled as "Phone" and "Mobile (with country prefix +xy or 00xy"). Oddly, the "phone number" field is required but the "Mobile (wtf)" field is not. OK, whatever. I have enetered a dozen real and fake (but I think) properly formatted phone numbers in each of those fields. Same result: "Error on register user"
Maybe it doesn't care about any of these details. Maybe one of them is causing it to barf. No way to know. I must have tried over 100 different combinations. Same result: "Error on register user"
D-Flight has an ironically-named "service desk" which appears to be a portal to provide support. After sinking hundreds of hours into this lost cause, I figured I'd give it a try. It's all in Italian, and I don't speak Italian, which means I spend a lot of time copying and pasting via Google translate. How does it work? It's a joke. I enter questions, show screenshots, ask simple things "like what format does this field require?" "Is my non-Italian phone number OK or is that causijg it to fail?" "Is the registration working for ANYONE, or has it just been broken for months, and nobody has registered?" "Are there any humans on the support staff, or is this all just a bot?" "Can someone please just answer a single, simple question?" "Are you all just playing video games and watching porn all day?"
No matter what queston I ask, no matter what details I provide, I always get the exact same response: Translated from Italian, it just says: "Your service request has been closed. We consider your issue has been resolved. Thank you for contacting us." That's al - no matter what you ask, say, plead, or scream at them, they just automatically "close" your requst and mark it as "solved." Their stats must look impressive!
I have asked for the contact information for a supervisor, or a phone number, or some way of contacting a live human who will answer just one question (they can pick the question). The response is always the same: "Your service request has been closed. We consider your issue has been resolved. Thank you for contacting us." Rinse, lather, repeat. It's Italy.
Look, I know that many drone owners just ignore all the regs, at home and when abroad. Some do that because they don't care about the rules, some do that because they made some minor effort and couldn't find the information they needed to comply with the regs. I don't want to be one of those who just shrugs and says "I don't care about the regs I'm just gonna do what I want."
But fer cryin' out loud, this is ridiculous. Italy has set up a Kafka-esque system where they literally make it impossible for a well-intentioned visiting drone pilot to comply with the rules. It should not take a year of one's life to simply get registered for their **** airspace app.
Any Italian drone owners here want to chime in? Has anyone who's NOT Italian ever been able to register for the @#$%* D-flight app? If you have, you wanna just take a few screenshots and send them to me? Otherwise, I'm going to just go and do what I want. If I get arrested, I'll point to this idiocy in my defense. Maybe they really are all just playing video games and watching porn all day, so I need not worry about getting arrested for flying through the Pope's window...
My gawd, what a broken country....
