Harting Down - Added to Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in South East

I have just added this to the map of places to fly your drone at Drone Scene:

Land owner permission requirements unknown.

Beautiful Harting Down is one of the most picturesque landscapes in South Hampshire. The National Trust have made it VERY difficult to fly here without TOAL from their land, which they forbid. But there is a chink in their armour we can all exploit :wink:

If we look at the NT borders North of my location point you will find one small field that is at the base of the central hill along the downs. This is accessible from Hill Road (turn left just before the hill climb to NT car park) and has a handy layby directly opposite a big chalk track that leads directly into the field, which normally has an open gate. If we go into that field, setup roughly in the middle of it on the raised section we are nicely hidden from the road (and the farm behind it, to whom this land belongs) by a thick bank of trees behind us but a relatively clear view up and over the downs.

You will need to set your vertical limit to at least 750 ft to get 400 ft above the hilltop, but you can fly the whole ridge with perfect visibility of the UAV so long as you don’t ever drop low enough to lose LOS behind the thin row of trees separating this land from NTs.

The originator declared that this location was not inside a Flight Restriction Zone at the time of being flown on 29/07/2024. It remains the responsibility of any pilot to check for any changes before flying at the same location.

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Incursion in progress !

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During the above flight VLOS was tested from the launch position. We maintain 5 bars of RC all the way up to the ridge, and about 50 ft behind that, only dropping a bar when we get behind the main footpath there, and over the hilltop wells that are scattered along the ridge. If we go back much further than that though we shortly drop to 1 bar, and then lose the feed altogether so caution recommended…