New to the forum, and new to drone flying. I’m looking at possible places nearish to me (Hertfordshire) to fly my P4 Pro from. I’ve seen footage from Hadleigh Castle. I know it’s owned by English Heritage (although free entry). Is there somewhere close by offering line of site that’s safe to take off from (following CAA guidelines) that isn’t on English Heritage land? EH say you can’t even over fly, but I’d contest that if I am over the 50m limit and nowhere near crowds, just not sure about taking off from the site.
We have recently had a discussion regarding EH and their ‘rules’ and they can control the land which means you cannot take off or land on their property or be in control of while on their property. However, they cannot control the sky above as long as you stay within the drone code of no lower than 150ft/50m and they same distance around the property. Think of it as a sort of 50m bubble around and over the property. @ianinlondon made a great video of flying over and around EH property and the related discussion can be seen here:
Thanks for your reply and the welcome. I did see that post, made really interesting reading. It was partly what prompted my question about whether anyone knew of an area nearby that is a safe take off point but off of the EH land (so I could over fly over the 50m height). I guess it might be tricky to work out the boundary of their land. Thanks
Bit of a tricky one. It doesn’t appear to have a defined border, EG: a road enclosing the property, where you could workout a property line. Possibly the dirt track near the railway lines?? Hope you find somewhere, looks like an interesting place to fly over.
Don’t give up that easily. I have flown there many times and always made a point of going there when there is minimal public passage. If you look on Google maps there is a field below the castle itself as well as a public footpath that leads down to a railway line. This does not as far as I know belong to EH and would suit a launch site. I have posted pics on this site of Hadleigh Castle and they are in my instagram as well so it can be done. If you fancy meeting up one day down there then ping me a message and we can have a joint flight. As people say…EH and NT do not own the sky and as long as we’re drone code compliant when we are flying there they can’t really moan.
Thanks for the encouragement JayForceOne. Good to know there might be a work around. Thanks for the offer of a joint flight too. I’ve not flown the aircraft much yet, due to huge quality control issues with aircraft from DJI (On my 3rd Phantom 4 pro since purchase less than a month ago, technically my 4th because this 3rd one had to be sent back to be repaired - firmware update killed it). So I’ll get some flight time in over the next few weeks and maybe be in touch if I’m planning a trip down there.
This is a really interesting one, as a friend of mine recently posted a great video of an NT site on Facebook, he had no idea that he couldn’t fly on NT land. I too am Herts based and looking to find good places to fly, having come from fixed wing and later helicopters, being able to go out and fly with less restrictions (you can’t take a nitro heli or a big fixed wing to a park) is liberating in one sense, making sure of course, that you fly safely and within the law, but the plethora of bylaws relating to outdoor spaces is another thing again.
Having learnt the drone and its camera enough to start heading out to more adventurous places than the local park, all the places I thought of locally, seem to be EH or NT, sites. While this is a bit disheartening, I hadn’t considered that what they are enforcing relates to take of and landing on their property and by keeping 50m or above, could mean you are flying legally?
