Our 2022 Operating Safety Case update: more flexible flying for all our clients
We’re incredibly excited to share that our OSC — Operating Safety Case — has been approved by the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority), granting us new additional drone operator privileges outside of standard rulings!
Yes, our number plate says ‘Drones’ — always gives clients a laugh!
OSCs empower pilots to take off in busier areas, tighter spaces, and more challenging situations.
There are only around 100 OSC holders in the UK. This one took us six months to obtain, and it’s a tremendous honour; attaining OSCs is reflective a pilot’s meticulous professionalism.
Standard operational authorisation allowed us to take off and land 30 metres away from uninvolved people, and to fly as close as 50 metres to them. We often worked around this by ‘bringing people under our control’ (according to law) by providing a safety briefing and making everyone aware of our plan of action in the case of emergency landings.
This worked well on closed sets or in other smaller controlled environments, but got quite complex in city centres and similarly congested spaces.
Under our new OSC, we can now take off and land 10 metres away from people (cut down by 20 metres) and fly as close to them as 20 metres (a huge reduction of 30 metres). To achieve this, we undertook additional risk assessments, fixing propeller guards to our drones and erecting temporary cordons around our launch sites using traffic cones or extendable barrier poles.
You can see an example of this kind of cordoned-off space in the photo below. The car park we’re launching and landing in is small and very close to moderate crowds, but our operations were 100% lawful, and legally considered completely safe.
Being able to fly within 20 metres of large assemblies of people gives us a lot more freedom when filming at events like Victorious Festival and Hospitality in the Woods.
Standard rulings require a minimum distance of 50 metres. Some basic permissions state 150 metres!
It’s particularly rare for FPV drones to be covered under an OSC, so we’re especially excited that ours now includes our DJI FPV! We’re planning to write our custom-built FPV drones into our next OSC renewal.
Pilots can fly up to 400ft (120 metres) high under regular permissions. Our new OSC loosens the leash to 750ft (230 metres) within 50 metres of a structure, so long as we’re not 200 metres higher than the structure. The Spinnaker Tower in our Portsmouth hometown is 170 metres tall, so there’re 60 metres of space for us to play with above it! There are just a few extra steps to handle, like logging NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen).
In open spaces like fields, we can fly 600ft high (180 metres) — that’s 200ft (60 metres) above the usual limit.
We can’t wait to start putting these extended flexibilities to good use for our clients. Being able to fly higher-quality cameras on larger drones in more environments is a huge win, especially for event work and site/property surveys.
Geared up with headsets (for communicating with one another) and megaphones (for communicating with the public!)