Remote Pilot Association

  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 ...

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...