It’s rare that I get to go film/fly/SpY outside of my garden these days.
A couple of months ago though, I managed a brief trip to the Emley Moor TV/Radio Mast. A place that has always been special to me, after many trips there with my Dad, on his motorcycle when I was so much younger, and he was so much aliver.
The Mast is right there on the horizon, day and night, I just have to look out of my window to see it. But visiting it is special, for me.
It’s also a becon on the horizon, signalling that you’re almost home, after a long trip.
I hated pretty much all of the footage I took on my last visit. Bad light. Bad choice of filming locations. On a tight deadline to finish up my little hobby and get home, due to life commitments.
It’s taken me until now to try and cobble something together with it. Far, far from perfect, but actually a bit better than I’d expected.
That’s a fair beastie at over 1,000 feet. Until quite recently you could ‘top’ such structures as long as you had permission from the owner. There’s a mast near me that I always singled out for that at 1,002 ft…
You’re not too far from me then, I live about ten minutes from the mast. Went there a couple of weeks ago when we had a nice dramatic sky. I’m still practising with my drone photography but was happy with this one.
Here’s a shot from my film days (about 1985) when I worked in the doughnut for TV OBs. In those days the rack-and-pinion lift took 20mins up and 15 down.
Cheers.
Great footage, brings back memories. In my younger days I lived in Kent but worked in Newcastle Upon Tyne for a while and stopped over a few times with close family friends who lived in Emley when travelling to and fro. My 1850 Triumph Dolomite at the time struggled to make the journey in one hit , I recall our friends also commenting that seeing the mast was always a welcome site when coming home from their travels! Likewise it helped me find their house, no satnav back then, just paper maps.
The CAA rule is not changed TTBOMK, 400’/120m from the nearest ground. This does not necessarily mean straight up, as one can be legitimately horizontally 400’ away from a steeply sloping mountainsid, say the summit ridge of Ben Nevis, and a couple of thousand feet directly vertically above the ground, but in practice it means that if the ground you are flying from is 500’ ASL you can go 400’ above that, which is 900’ ASL
I’m not sure I could reliably see a drone the size of a DJI mini at 400’ without a strobe light on it even wearing glasses, so assuming that VLOS is required one wouldn’t be able to legitimately exceed it much anyway. 400’ above the ground I’m on is plenty high enough for my photographic purposesl
I don’t think you could argue that a building such as the Elmley Moor Tower can be regarded as ground so that you could fly 400’ above it, or even 50’ away from it but 1,000 off the ground.
If the person or organisation responsible for a very tall structure over 105m asks you to carry out a task related to their structure, you’re allowed to fly higher than 120m (400ft). For example, if they ask you to take pictures for a survey. You must never fly more than 15m above the structure. Your drone or model aircraft must be within 50m of the structure horizontally when flying over 120m (400ft)
would not say Luxury but am lucky to see a lot of sights and have access to a lot of limited access places . i have some pictures somewhere when was flown up to snaefell that was fun
, I recall our friends also commenting that seeing the mast was always a welcome site when coming home from their travels! Likewise it helped me find their house, no satnav back then, just paper maps.
