Looking at the areas covered by the bye-laws they appear to be on the outskirts of Cardiff with the exception of one area near Roath Park.
Central Cardiff and Cardiff Bay seem to be unaffected
Looks like it - might fly around the castle now
Careful with the castle - controlled by Cadw the Welsh mafia equivalent of the NT - and they think they own the airspace too
During the all-to-short time between starting to fly and losing my drone to seagull attack, I made several flights in Cardiff parks. AFAIAA, there is no restriction on them, but they are marked by Altitude Angel as ground hazards because ‘large groups of people may gather’. I’ve even mentioned that I fly a drone in the council ‘hub’ at Roath Park Recreation Ground, and elicited no particular comment. And the parkies were fully aware of my flying at the lake; again, just let me get on with it, as did Security outside the City Hall.
Watch out for the drone-murdering scumbag seagulls if you’re flying off the Barrage, though…
The castle sometimes hosts events of various sorts, as does the Castle Grounds park, which should probably be avoided even if there isn’t a NOTAM, but I can’t see what CADW can do about you TOAL outside the castle and overflying it. The pavement outside is fairly quiet on winter Sundays and suitable for TOAL, as is the grass perimeter but that is probably owned by CADW. VLOS prevents you from dropping down inside the walls, though. If you want to fly inside the castle, to film Burgess architectural details or the Norman keep close-up, for example, I’d inform the gatekeeper first and respect a refusal. One has to accept that one can’t always do whatever one wants to do.
Going about one’s lawful business one can.
And no Karen shall get in the way
Just don’t be a dick
I didn’t say Cadw could do anything or that it was illegal - I just warned Ian @DroneGeek he could expect to be pestered by some Cadw employee who mistakenly believes Cadw have control of airspace - similar to the NT situation which Ian is more than aware off.
That makes sense, CADW is basically the NT for Wales. They should be encouraging people to take an interest in historic or architecturally important buildings in Wales, and drones are an ideal method of getting close views of detail that are otherwise unavailable without a contract and a lot of scaffolding.
I suspect that what happens when a quango such as this is faced with something new such as a request to fly a drone around their buildings is that they go into a knee-jerk response conditioned by the possibility of some sort of claim against them should there be an accident of some sort, and refuse without thinking the matter through beyond that on the advice of ‘legal’.
Cadw no drone policy has been discussed here several times - as have NT and HE
If your interested - have a look here …
My understanding is that CADW, as is their right, do not allow TOAL from their land, but have no jurisdiction over the airspace above any of their sites that are not designated as FRZ or sujbect to NOTAMs on an Altitude Angel map. Therefore I am within my legal rights were I to TOAL outside Cardiff Castle, and fly over the inside of it, so long as I maintain VLOS and observe other CAA rules as I should be doing at all times (happy to be corrected about this). That would mean keeping a fair height, determined by the angle between me and the castles curtain wall, or the main buildings at the southwestern corner. At nearly 400’ nobody on the ground will see or hear the drone unless they are looking hard for it, so no CADW thrall is going to even be aware that my drone is even there, and it will be perfectly ‘legal’. I’d have no hesitation in posting the footage online.
Can’t see anything preventing me from flying close up to the clock tower from the outside of the structure, and given that I am interested in Burgess’ High Victorian psuedo-medieval stuff, I am quite likely to do exactly that!
I wonder what the legal status of a hand-launch and recovery inside the castle would be? Not gonna do it, even if I’m entitled to it’s unnecessarily provocative and I might mess up the recovery, but it does show how daft, and in practice unenforceable, some of these rules are. In fact they are not so much rules as official discouragement.
An argument that’s been done to death of you use the search
I’ve now flown the Castle, twice, from the outside in Bute Park. I’m told the park has a no-drone policy but I had no problems on either occasion. Did an overfly of the north Barbican and the Keep from the grass between the pathway and the (fenced) dock feeder canal, and then a ‘survey’ of the decorative west wall buildings & clock tower (tx William Burgess and John Crighton-Stuart 3rd Marquis of Bute and their mad laudanum-fuelled medievalist restoration) from the old moat bridge western entrance, bit hairy getting airborne and landing through the tree cover but managed it!
Got buttonholed by a chap who turned out to be a Mumbai Airport Traffic Controller visiting his son who is a student here, most interesting convo, he approved unreservedly of what I was doing and how I was going about it. His eye-rolling when I mentioned CADW and their TOAL ban spoke volumes…
Did he not mention the rules on drones in India !!
Not really. Have they got any?
His take on CADW was to advise me to take off anyway, carry out my flight normally, and, if challenged, stay up until battery runs low and declare an emergency, when I’ll be able to land anywhere I like…
I have no compelling desire to be a test case for this idea. I mean, I’d like to fly around inside the castle, and other CADW sites, but it’s not ruining my life that I can’t…
If he is what he says he is then it’s an intresting take.
He’d be in jail if he followed the same tact back home
He seemed pretty much on the level. There is, of course, the possibility that he was winding me up; I can’t believe that declaring spurious emergencies is accepted practice in civil avaition, though I’ve heard some ‘interesting’ Aeroflot stories from the late 80s… I got the impression that India has similar flying rules to our CAA ones, but no real equivalent of English/Scottish Heritage or CADW, or the NT. They have National Parks, but the rules for those are mostly about wildlife protection.