For some reason I thought my 1st PfCo renewal date was miles away in June, until yesterday when I realised it was in just a few weeks!!! PfCo Panic ensued!
- Firstly I had to update my Ops Manual to include ANO 2018 amendments as well as ANO 2019 amendments.
I had reached out to the folks I did my training with for help on updating this, but no reply, guess they had their money and I’m dead to them now maybe?
With no recent PfCo ops manual available to copy from I set about actually READING the ANOs and their legal updates and pulled together my own ops manual (as I suppose we all should over time!) and hope I have something acceptable to the CAA.
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Secondly flight logs!!! SHIT!!! I’ve got a little paper log book but I always figured I’d use the DJI logs, but after pissing about in iTunes downloading them and uploading them to various services I settled on dronelogbook.com. I paid £60 for a years subscription and linked my DJI account and within seconds hey presto I had a CAA recognised log book with 60+ flights and 20 hours for the year! result! I’d highly recommend this to other PfCo’ers!
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Finally the fee! £190 bloody quid to renew it! I know there is a lot for them to do, but thats because this country has tied drone usage into a needlessly complex legal aviation framework and we dont have a pilots union to help us or 100k a year jobs! That stung a bit, but stumped it up!
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Oh and then insurance! I’m running 5 drones now and an expensive thermal camera, so £500 to cover drone!
So hopefully my logs dont show any NFZs (they shouldnt!) and all goes well, but what a panic! I had a stress headache by the end of it!
Just a heads up for anybody considering PfCo. Its a great course and useful to have but dont under estimate the overhead of keeping it going. Unless you’ve got work coming in, you might find it a huge drain on finances!
