Remote Pilot Association

  I’ve been having a frustrating experience with the battery situation on my drone and decided to buy an external battery carrier mount. The motive was to get away from the standard, and expensive, battery and go to the generic variety with higher output. There are some tried and true best practices that come with test flying a drone. A test flight isn’t just for R&D, it’s for the “return to service,” as the FAA says, after maintenance or modification. The motive is to exercise an extra bit of safety, imagine the alternative, showing up on a busy video shoot with an “unproven” aircraft so to speak.  S ource: Example of manned aircraft maintenance logbook, Ebay. com The majority of the best practices are common sense, but a famous person once said, “common sense isn’t so common.” Admittingly I suffered from swapping out parts and going on a regular flight, not good. The best advice is to keep the flight reality close, at a safe distance, low to the ground in-case something ...

  For National Drone Safety Awareness Week, November 16 - 22, 2020 It was a dream come true, flying a manned bush aircraft in Alaska. I traveled up via airline in November several years ago, yes I said November, not the height of tourist season. The reason was that the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) was offering one of their stellar Flight Instructor Refresher Clinics (FIRC) and I needed a renewal class. Unfortunately I didn’t have my drone, so I missed the opportunity for some awesome shots.  Source:  choisir-droneaerodrone.fr Although I received a lot of grief from the locals for being there off season it was actually neat because it was an opportunity to meet the locals. One of the folks in the class, Chad, was a local fellow and had met him at a conference in North Carolina a couple of years before. He asked if I had planned on doing some flying while up and I admitted that my contact fell through. Graciously Chad offered to take a friend and myself in ...

  Written in-light of  Drone Safety Awareness Week, November 16-22, 2020 In my Remote drone Pilot certification classes, teaching the basics of Class E airspace isn’t so bad; I simply refer to it as the primary airspace that’s the filler between the other airspace types, starting at either 700’ or 1,200’ Above Ground Level (AGL) and generally extending to the base of Class A at Flight Level 180, or 18,000’ Mean Sea Level (MSL). However, when it comes to Surface Based Class E, the magenta dashed lines around an airport, it reminds me of English class in primary school. The teacher would say something to the effect of, “The rule is X,” and I would get what she was saying. Then she would say, “Unless it’s this case, or this case, or that case,” and then I would be totally confused. Well, unfortunately this is the case with Surface Based Class E where basically the rule book gets thrown out. Never-the-less, I think we can give you an explanation that will help you learn this uniqu...

  I vividly remember being in kindergarten during play time, the teacher said we could choose anything we wanted to do for the remainder of the morning. After playtime we would have lunch followed by a nap, which sounds like a great plan today as much as it did as a five year old.    Source: RemotePilotAssociation.com My favorite playtime activity was play with blocks, building great structures, in my humble opinion, was the best. On that day I had a plan in my head to build a twisting and turning road complete with a cool bridge. The teacher paired us up into two person groups and paired Timmy and myself up, which was good because he was a friend. I went to Timmy with full exuberance trying to explain “the plan” but stumbled upon my words frustrating myself and proclaimed to just show him what I was wanting to do. Fortunately Timmy was a good hearted willing sport and played along, seeming to be happy as a clam playing with the blocks. He acted as an assistant of sorts t...

Don't get me wrong Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) is a great tool as it allows for much quicker access to air traffic controlled airspace. In the past the process for getting access required submitting a waiver, which could take up to 90 days to process. However, I don’t recommend this for every pilot.  Sadly, according to a Drone XL article only 20 to 30 percent of drone pilots are complying, or using, LAANC according to an Aloft company study, in ATC controlled airspace when they should be using the app. In other words, there are 70 to 80 percent of the drone pilots violating ATC controlled airspace. Source: interdrone, LAANC example What is LAANC and how does it work? As you know, airspace that is controlled by Air Traffic Control (ATC), Class B, C, D and sometimes surface based E airspace requires ATC approval. Approvals in the past were not efficient thus a new system called LAANC was developed to give drone pilots quicker and more extensive acc...

If I had a nickel every time a person came up, usually while I’m flying or getting ready to fly, and ask questions about my drone. Top question, “How much does that drone cost?” I’m sure you agree about this well worn question, but this is better than having a confrontation with an irate person. The good news is that there are certain techniques we will discuss that can be used to interact with folks or at least mitigate the situation to finish the flight mission.      Source: CanStockPhoto We were asked to do a photo job of the downtown of a major city. The photo would ultimately be turned into an artistic rendering to be put on t-shirts, mugs, calendars and the like. You might be asking who uses a physical calendar, and I would agree but guess there is a market somewhere.  The challenge going into the mission was picking a spot that would conceal us from too many onlookers and safe with respect to not flying over people. A vacant dirt parking lot seemed to foot the...

Debriefing is an important thing to do after every flight mission no matter how easy the job. I’m always learning new things from not only myself but my team after a mission. Our debriefings are categorized under two topics; what we did right and what we can do better. While we don’t always have this luxury, one of the big take-aways on a recent flight was the importance of spending time at the proposed LZ well before the mission to evaluate the environment. Source: FAA Safety Team and NASA I was shooting video at the beach, not on the beach but at a large inlet waterway with a scenic bridge, a very nice setting to say the least. The Visual Observer and I had scoped out the area earlier in the day and found a good LZ, a turn-off area just before the bridge. This was perfect for parking with a good amount of space for the drone to take-off and land. The idea was to get a video of the inlet at sunset (a good time to remember the :30 minutes after civil twilight regulation).  Since it...