Surely there’s a department within the Scottish Government that overseas this?
Going to go out on a limb here and say that the guys using drones to drop contraband over prison walls aren’t, necessarily, all that concerned about the specifics of the drone code
It’s been outsourced to China!
#TyposAreBrilliant
It wouldn’t surprise me.
Absolutely, but putting it over the 250 gm weight DOES put the drone into the category where the police can enforce the CAA rules, thereby giving them a reason to take down a drone flying inside the regulated distances etc
This is going off-topic but how would they know its weight and how would they take it down
Absolutely no idea ! The guy I was chatting to had the job of carrying out forensic examinations of recovered drones. Looking for fingerprints, recovering flight information where possible etc. He reckoned that some of the operators werent the brightest bulbs on the planet and would practice with a new drone near home and then go fly over a prison so they could get useful info from flight logs that gave them an area of interest, and on at least one occasion, fingerprints on a battery. We didn’t really discuss the hows and why’s of recovering a drone. He WAS quite impressed with the capabilites of my wee potensic Atom but the impression I got was that the majority of the drones he dealt with were the bigger heavier one’s. He did say that until they got on top of it, it WAS quite a problem.
I think they are bigging themselves up a little
They will just be using an Aeroscope to track the drone and the operator
That said they are redundant at the moment as flying a drone over a Scottish prison is not illegal from what we can make out, but obviously dropping anything from a drone is
Absolutely, but putting it over the 250 gm weight DOES put the drone into the category where the police can enforce the CAA rules,
Can you expand on that please? I must have missed this rule. Does that mean i can now fly my mini2 wherever I like and safely ignore all restriction zones?
Ok I’ll stop playing the game, I simply tried passing on information given by a police officer involved in dealing with drones at prisons. My comment mentioned putting a drone over the 250g threshold which would bring it into the CAA restrictions on drones OVER 250g flying within a certain distance of buildings/ people, AFAIA My comment did NOT say that left you free to ignore the common sense rules applied to sub 250g drones and fly wherever you want.
Anyway I’m out
To be honest, I don’t think breaching the specifics of the ANO would be the major issue anyway.
If I send a drone up over the local prison, regardless of the existence (or otherwise) of any NFZ or the MTOM of my drone, I’m going to get lifted on suspicion of breaching section 41 of the Prisons (Scotland) Act 1989:
(1) A person commits an offence if without reasonable excuse the person —
(a)brings or otherwise introduces into a prison a proscribed article (or attempts to do so)
Whilst it may cover a drone, to me reading this section in its entirety, it’s referring to visitors of inmates, staff, contractors etc who are physically entering to the inside of the prison itself. It’s a good one though.
The Procurator Fiscal seems to disagree.
Where there’s a will (and a piece of legislation), there’s a way
Ooft… what a lovely couple.
Well I guess we have the answer then as to why there are no restrictions over Scottish Prisons don’t appear via the CAA.
It’s all covered under Section 41 of the Prisons (Scotland) Act 1989.
Maybe so. It does irk when I see politicians pushing for ‘tough new laws’ to deal with some imagined issue where there’s already legislation that covers it, but in this case I wouldn’t object to the restrictions over prisons coming back just to make things a little clearer. Not like they’ve done over the border with the bigger zones, but where it was before with the footprint of the prison being restricted seemed to make a lot of sense.
Being a prison officer myself i am following this topic with interest. This all restrictions i can find on my local prison.