<rant>NZ airspace rules and regs are maintained by the NZ CAA. An external management group, AirWays who are an NZ state owned enterprise (SOE) operate the AIP, the Aeronautical Information Publication for NZ.
Amongst other functions, the AIP is essentially a database of information. It contains filed documents on all facilities, operations etc associated with aeronautical operation within NZ, both commercial and private. Amongst this are NOTAMs, Airspace zone definitions and more.
As someone inspiring to be a responsible UAV operator in NZ, as a consumer and a member of the public, I have spent hours and hours reading up on the rules and regs, I’ve searched through sources of information online trying to collate and build up an understanding of airspace operations, just to be able to responsibly fly my UAV.
I understand the basic constraints on operation and I’m 95% confident that I would now be aware if I was likely to infringe upon airspace restrictions. I say 95% because there are a few challenges which I have failed to overcome:
1) Knowing when you’re within a 4km exclusion zone of an airfield or within a CTR zone. – This is pretty straight forward actually, and I have overcome this, but initially to *know* whether I was ok or not it was pretty hard. GPS is able to tell you where you are, but how do you translate that into a certain YES / NO – am I within 4km or not? You need a tool. Googlemaps is excellent, but no-one in NZ has built a tool which you can run on your cell-phone to show your current location, and to show where those 4km zones are. Exactly the same goes for CTR zones (air traffic controlled, restricted flight zones).
2) Special Use / Danger Zones. There are HEAPS of these defined in the AIP. How do you translate these out to usable information? Short answer is you can’t. How do commercial users do this? – They go and BUY a visual representation of this in paper form from an official outlet, funds for this go back into running Airways. – This is their commercial operation.
– but, hang on… If I’m a kite flyer or a UAV operator, we need to be able to know this, and use this information too. – Yes, but it’s currently impractical and virtually impossible to do so. In essence the rules and regs exist, but for consumers to abide by them, it’s unreasonable to expect any of us to be able to do so.
These are the unique challenges which UAV use is now asserting upon the CAA and their associated bodies.
So, what can we do about this? – Well, I for one thought, that in the absence of a reasonable system I would try to, for my own personal use create a system which I could use on my phone, which showed my location against the dynamic set of notable zones. It worked a treat, it is was wonderful. I made an online (web based) googlemaps system which consumed a copy of location based information obtained from AirShare and added to it a current location pointer, and the ability to perform an address based lookup – for flight planning purposes. – In my eagerness to be a good community member, and to try to help I made contact with AirShare to tell them of my difficulties in using their information and offered this implementation back to them (they could have copied it and used it if they wanted to, it was offered to them). Instead I was told to remove it from the web as it violated T’s and C’s.
Petty. Very petty. Obstructive. Unhelpful. Back to square one.
They recognised while doing this that my feedback was both useful and helpful and that this particular enhancement is on their ‘back-log’ of work to do. Rather than take a moderated stance and say while they hadn’t yet met this need I could continue to use that for my own personal use, I got a takedown notice.
I can understand commercial use limitations, licenses, rights to access data, rights to re-use data, restrictions which may be placed on that; I’m a software developer, of course I get that. But, we’re talking about some pretty fundamental failures in information decimation, information which is critical to ensure safe use of airspace and compliance by the public with legislation, airspace rules and regs. What I did had no commercial impact on them, it was intended to be helpful, not only for my own use, but potentially for others who also experienced this gaping hole in usability and access to information.
There are further (restrictive) changes coming along shortly, they got accepted by the Minister recently and will form law as of 1st August, *some of which are impractical and unrealistic to expect all consumer operators, or even commercial operators to be able to comply with. The feedback period has closed now, but in the interim period there are various bodies and groups which we can become involved with to make some attempts to lobby for some reasonable implementation or enforcement.
… Anyway, this is a complex area, one which is far too complex currently for average consumers to navigate and currently the bodies who are used to serving pilots are not yet equipped to provide information and content out in appropriate forms to consumer level operators. There is a real risk of people falling foul of their obligations and ignorance is no defence. However, I believe there is a shared responsibly for those supporting the rules and regs to step their game up very quickly in order to support the public properly in this area to avoid unnecessary risk and safety issues.
FYI, the paper based planning map can be bought from AIP for less than NZ$20. But this is no where near as good as an online tool or an app which can help interactively, against a live, realtime updated database of Special Usage zones. This is what is needed and it’s needed now, not later on when the back-log clears. I don’t mind spending the money for a subscription or access to such an app, I just don’t think that paper is the right answer, nor is it ‘good enough’ it’s not the thing we consumers turn to. We no longer think that way, sorry.</rant>
—-
These are my personal opinions and viewpoints based on my own personal experience and observations.
Chris Wiltshire, UAV owner and operator, Director of Splodge Ltd, aspiring aerial photographer.
* When I mentioned impractical and unrealistic; consider the following commercial usecase: Aerial Photography use of a UAV for a real estate agency, a simple household photo shoot of a home in non-restricted airspace. As of the 1st August the operator will be required to obtain permission from each property owner over which the UAV is expected to fly. These are boundary lines, not necessarily homes themselves. It is the responsibility of the operator, not the client.
In the suburbs, this means that a house could be bordered by as many as, 5 or 6 other properties. For the purposes of this illustration let’s call it 3 other neighbouring properties and assume the one being photographed borders the road. These types of jobs are fairly skinny in terms of margins / profit, ideally it’s a turn up, get the job done and hope that you can be driving away within 15-20 minutes otherwise you’re making nothing worth-while in the way of income and the real estate agents are likely to want to either avoid the service, or make attempts to do it themselves if the charges are any higher.
So, how do you practically roll getting permissions into that type of single site visit? Especially when people are at work when these jobs might be done. You’d have to physically visit the property and door knock at some out of hours time (in order to stand a reasonable chance of getting each household within one visit). Chances are you might not, so that could be two different visits to the property prior to being able to commit to doing the job.
I’ve heard some people believe that commercial operators should be able to make use of a part 102 exemption for some of their requirements, but these are applied for, and granted on a per use basis, the overhead and paper work, (and possibly application fee?) to operate in this manner may well be as prohibitive as having to do all of the door-knocking.
What’s likely to happen instead?
- Leaflet drops – Operators attempting to use an ‘opt-out’ approach? This is not what the legislation calls for, this would not meet the requirements.
- Asking the client, or the home-owner to obtain that permission? – A written form for the home-owner to get signed by their neighbours? – Possibly. If this was on a document provided by the operator, outlining the time / date of the expected operation, providing contact details for the operator and an outline of the operational precautions which they would take etc, liability insurance details… Maybe this could work. But what happens when this goes wrong, or people start to take short-cuts? It’s not unheard of for someone asked to do something like this to fake it. That’s a risk us operators would have to be aware of and be willing to take. At least we could show that we made *some reasonable effort* and that someone else had defrauded us.
How many fines would it take under the new regs to burn through month’s worth of profit?… If you’re a small scale operator… This would be violation of proposed rule Part 101.13(2) which carries a potential conviction fine of $30,000 or an infringement fee of $12,000. Would you trust this degree of risk to a client? You’d need back-to-back agreements with their jobs which attempt to pass the liability of false claims and incurred fines squarely back onto them.