Drone police at Manchester Airport

Interesting that GMP say you can’t fly a drone in Manchesters Airport FRZ

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Servator (imho) is a joke

Police checking vulnerabilities of business and facilities.

They might want to look in the mirror first.

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You can’t fly yours but we can fly ours. Total abuse of powers by the police!!! :laughing:

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well you cant fly in a FRZ unless you get the authurizastion needed thought thatts always how it is lol

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They still have to get permission from ATC, anyone can apply for the same permission, many have and many have been granted said permission.

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they do say in the post aftter they got relevant autthourity lol

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I’ve corrected them, and added a plug:

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That’s saying ‘up yours!’ to them. But in a nice way. :laughing:

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The things is, are people dumb enough to do this. It almost seems like some people are overly retarded. Common sense says don’t fly drones near airports and big passenger planes. It also says don’t fly near military bases or you might get shot. Same for nuclear reactors. Don’t fly in most of London, because you are then a terrorist and will probably get shot.

I see these stories come up from time to time. Sometimes you have to :person_facepalming:

Watched a vid on YT a month or so back of two idiots flying a DJI outside one of the police stations in Sheffield. They thought they got away with it, but those officers got there details and car reg, and they probably got black flagged for that. Just because it appears you got away with, doesn’t mean you actually did. But then if you are stupid enough to fly a drone outside a police station and then quote laws and regs to said officers and cause an issue, you deserve what’s coming.

As for detection, my guess is they look for obscure 2.4/5.8GHz transmissions, that don’t conform to standard wifi protocols, and probably any slowish moving air traffic. It interests me in whether 900MHz ELRS would be as easy to detect, or 1.2GHZ. Not to mention if you created a mesh using open wifi hotspots and flew on wifi, which i suspect would be possible on slower drones, probably not so much on FPV, even using OpenHD or RubyFPV.

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Nothing that fancy is needed I’m afraid, DJI aircraft broadcast the location of the drone and the location of the operator as part of the droneid / wifi beacon :confused:

Search on here or Google “AeroScope” for more info.

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Probably working on the basis of keep it short and snappy and on target. People who are responsible and knowledgeable will request relevant permissions to fly within the FRZ. They are not the target, It’s the muppets that fly with no knowledge of care for the law that they want to send the message to.

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Thankfully Kids toys are specifically exempted from those rules ALTHOUGH the safety and don’t be a nuisance obligations still apply.

My local A/F are incredibly anti-drone, refusing me permission to fly over my own back garden and look at my own gutters etc.

Quite nasty and aggressive about it even before the great gatwick hoax. (Airfield full of holidaymakers etc carrying cameras, plus the ever present CCTV and NOT ONE CLEAR IMAGE of the drone itself actually recorded? I call foul on that, until I see a clear pic of the drone or drones alledgedly terrorising that A/F) I won’t accept an “I was there” account although I’d find it interesting, because people lie, pictures not so often.

Fortunately there’s a whole range of kids toys that are exempt from all that tomfoolery, due to range and mass and composition etc. Kids toys are clearly marked on the box…

It’s a bit of a pain in the rear having to swap out those tiny coreless motors every 90 flights, and the ten minutes of endurance isn’t that great, but if that’s teh price of freedom…

The toy I fly in and around my back garden (with the permission (and in many cases approval of the people who’s property I occasionally overfly) does have a full PX4 stack, telemetry, fpv, waypoints etc, yet weighs about 150grammes MTOW, and is utterly reliable when flown within it’s limits…

That’s not how they’re supposed to administrate the FRZ. You can complain to the CAA here.

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From the FRZ permission requirement?

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Think you need to re read the drone code, the only exception toy drones have is the requirement to register, all other rules need to be observed when flying.

specifically the quotes from this section…

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Last time I looked, I printed off the page and highlighted the text where it says very clearly that “the rules do not apply to childrens toys”.

Look for the section that says" from 31 december 2020 the rules for flying drones will be the same in the UK and all european member states, THE RULES DON’T APPLY IF YOU ARE FLYING INDOORS OR HAVE A TOY DRONE. (Caps are mine)

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THE SCREENSHOT I POSTED IS A NOVEMBER 2021 AMMENDMENT. (caps are mine).

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I had input into the creation of the original set of CAA regulations.

I specifically raised the question of childrens toys in the class I use for practice (precisely because they offer an equivalent safety risk to aviation or people on the ground as a large sparrow or small blackbird, and that’s before I do my own obsessive/compulsive safety thing)

I guess it’s time to submit another letter asking for clarification.

It is precisely because I know I am unable to keep track of the ever mestastasizing rules that I campaigned for a class that could be used by children (or child like adults such as myself) freely, and only abiding by the basic common sense rules.

Until the “great gatwick drone hoax” (which admittedly, followed on the heels of several very real incidents where air traffic was endangered (and yes, some regulation of anything larger than a toy had to follow those incidents) I had been flying my drones from my back garden unknown and without incident (I lost several due to not understanding the effects of a light breeze on a Hubsan 104, or misjudging the slant angle twixt CX-32 and a large oak tree…) but that’s why I trained on and prefer to fly “toys”.

I accepted it with reasonable grace when the registration and operating complexity rendered the bulk of my fleet unflyable, (for me) I have a ROOM FULL of APM development machines gathering dust, and shortly about to be recycled, thank you very much.

I don’t want to fill in a fucking form and pay a fee to do what I’ve been doing since 2011 without incident (except when I made the FOOLISH MISTAKE of reaching out to the airfield when I was starting to fly the bigger and more visible stuff in 2016) thank you very much, and if they have finally closed that door in my face, then I may as well unsubscribe because that’s going to be the end of this hobby for me.

Or at least the end of making any effort to do it within the rules… It wasn’t all illegal when I started, you just had to stay away form aeroplanes and sunbathers, and get the permission of those people who’s lad you flew over. None of which required fees, examinations, or “applications”. Some of you seem to have an endless appetite for slavery and compliance.

I did not so I campaigned for and got a reasonable exemption to allow those of us with a childish love for freedom & simplicity without harming others to have some.

Childrens TOYS are different to adults DRONES, they are designed explicitly to not be able to cause harm and the packaging states this status clearly.

The laws according to the CAA are structured very carefully to promote air safety, and not to create a fiefdom of senior air users versus lesser air users, Jonathan was very clear about that in his mails.

I’m pretty sure that reasonableness alone is on my side, as well as the actual law, but since you’ve raised the question again, (there’s always one…) I’ll go and check my legal standing once again with the C.A.A.

All Grey Arrows club members did :blush:

It’s a nightmare eh?

Thankfully they’re all kept in one handy place:

https://register-drones.caa.co.uk

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