The marker shows the car park, with space for around twenty cars. It has a height barrier set at 2 metres. On a Tuesday afternoon in winter it was still populated with three or four cars. The area is part of the South Downs Way and is popular with walkers and bike riders. It offers similar scenery to the adjacent Queen Elizabeth Country Park which is, unlike this, not free to park (£6/day). Although it is possible to fly from the car park the only way to keep line of sight is to fly straight upwards (as I did for the pano that can be seen on Grey Arrows). It is, however, a useful place to stop to access the South Downs Way and open countryside
The originator declared that this location was not inside a Flight Restriction Zone at the time of being flown on 21/01/2020. It remains the responsibility of any pilot to check for any changes before flying at the same location.
I’ve flown here too @macspite. Once successfully, and once got aborted because a Chinook appeared at canopy height just before I took off. I haven’t had a great deal of success at Buriton generally. Bizarrely I had 2 flyaway / type crashes there, several years apart, flying from the green in Buriton village a few meters down the road from Halls Hill. Something about that area features something that can send our IMU units nuts. I haven’t flown it since.
The South Downs way is a public footpath and bridleway. Would I be able to TOAL from that? Or will that depend on who owns that footpath at the various points along the route?
Having said that there are various sites along the way that are owned by the National Trust who get bent out of shape if you take off from their land and quite afew SSSIs that may or may not be affected by overflying depending on what rare species are in the SSSI and the time of year.
Your best bet is to use DroneScene to both check out which areas are NT (you can overfly NT land but not use it for TOAL) or SSSI - you need to zoom in a fair amount to see those areas. Those layers are available to paying GADC members
I am going to stick my head above the parapet again because I really don’t like this site any more !
By taking off here we are far enough away from Buriton village that we can’t really see it properly, and all there is left is 2 visually unrewarding empty green fields and a massive bank of fairly non-descript trees (always in shadow) with instant end of VLOS and control signals if we go much beyond the ridgeline at the top where all the interesting views are ! Not to mention that we can’t see any aerial traffic approaching from that direction until it is right on top of us, meaning we have to rely on sound in advance, and the whole area is a big bowl that renders all low frequencies omnidirectional, so you have no idea where rotor or engine noise is originating from or vectored to !
AND people are always nicking stuff out of cars in that car park !
Much better, I think, to head down the hill, park in one of the laybys adjoining the main Buriton Rec field, and fly from there, where visibility is marginally better, there’s a train track for slightly better visual interest, and there is only 1 small school to avoid directly overflying.
And we are good to fly from there because a local model aircraft club is based in that field, although they are hardly ever there actually flying these days.
I only flew there because I had spotted the car park on Google Earth and I didn’t have a sub 250 gram drone in those days.
Not much to see but good fopr a quick pano while staying in VLOS, Car park theft seems to be a problem at various sites, I have tended to fly from places where the car is in VLOS at all times as well to counteract that problem. In fact most of my flying tends to be from the tailgate …
