A couple of you have asked in this thread about GADC and an Article 16 authorisation and @Mercy asked in another thread recently too, so I’m just copying and pasting my reply here for those who were curious earlier in this thread.
We’ve been working closely with Tom Guest, RPAS Technical Inspector at CAA, quite a bit over the last couple of months.
After some gentle persuasion, CAA have agreed to accept an application for Article 16 authorisation from our flying association - if we wish to pursue it.
In our last meeting with them we also discussed the possibility of 10m separation distances for drones under 2kg, which they seemed quite open to, along with GADC also managing the renewals of CAA Operator and Flyer IDs.
Just for fun we also discussed the authorisation covering our members for the ability to drop items from a drone in the air. Drugs to prisons is obviously a no-go but they were happy for us to drop items of up to 500g from a drone in a controlled environment (eg, The Big Meet where everyone is an involved party, and the target-practice jolly’s that we’ve had in the past)
We’d also be allowed to conduct and host our own FPV drone racing events in a similarly controlled fashion.
As you can probably imagine, there’s a lot of policy and a lot of paperwork involved, most of which we’ve got wrapped up already.
We just need our members to convince us that the authorisation will be of benefit to them, and we’ll pull the trigger on it
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