Drone Safety

The European Union’s air transport regulator, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), has issued its latest annual safety review, which in terms of drones shows a drop in incidents and accidents across the board.

Flight navigation tech specialists Iris Automation and Sagetech Avionics are teaming up to provide a one-stop shopping solution to ensure cooperative and noncooperative detection and air risk mitigation for both drones and crewed aircraft.

Airspace Link is now one step closer to its mission of building a Waze for drone pilots and supporting safe integration of drones into the national airspace.

We enjoy Ken Heron’s YouTube work. He infuses his reviews with a great sense of humor. And, trust us, his latest drone crash compilation video is a blast.

Iris Automation has been in our peripheral vision for a few years now. So we thought it would make sense to take a look at what the company does, as its products offer the ability for a drone to detect (and avoid) other crewed aircraft.

So you’re set for a recreational flight. Something goes wrong, and a bystander gets clipped with a prop. Before you know it, there’s a lawsuit and they’re seeking damages of $750,000. This could, unless you’ve literally got money to burn, wipe you out. But there’s a better way: insurance.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has had profound effects on Switzerland’s aviation sector and the supervisory activities of its civil aviation regulator, the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA). One outcome of the same has been a steep reduction in the number of safety risk incident reports and occurrences involving drones in the country.

Let’s say you had an issue while on a recent drone flight. Maybe you were a mission and a manned aircraft dipped below 400 feet. Maybe the drone had a flyaway. What to do? Well, the FAA is encouraging you to report it, using an anonymous and largely non-punitive system.

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has partnered with Northern Territory Airports to install drone safety signage. The signs come as no surprise as the Alice Springs airport, located in the Northern Territory, saw an increase in drone activity during the pandemic.

The Port of Antwerp, Belgium, has announced it has chosen Unifly to be its UTM technology provider to improve airspace safety. The move will make the Port of Antwerp the first seaport to manage its own airspace.

Sigh. We’ve seen this before. A video is making the rounds showing a drone damage the winglet of a passenger jet on takeoff. We should clarify: Making the rounds again, because we’ve seen this before. It was a fake the first time… and it’s just as fake now.

DJI’s new FPV drone combo has some amazing technology baked in. It’s also not inexpensive. So this post is for people who are not experienced pilots.

The Port of Antwerp, Belgium, has turned to autonomous drones to undertake inspections, surveillance, and monitoring missions. The drones will allow the port to undertake fully independent operations, improve efficiency, lower costs in the long term, and make the port safer.

The popular B4UFLY airspace awareness tool – used as a mobile app by many US drone operators – is now available via desktop/laptop.

A pretty cool clip is making the rounds on the internet today. It’s of an eagle plucking a drone from the sky, and then flying away with it.

We’ve been kind of obsessed with jetpack guy since he was first spotted last summer near Los Angeles International Airport. Now, new information has come to light that suggests it could well be a drone.

We usually skip over fail videos on YouTube. But when we happened across this one, we thought it offered some lessons for drone pilots. And so we’re going to interrupt our normal drone news programming to offer you a greatest hits package featuring some dreadful pilot errors. Oh yes, and a couple of dogs.

In what appears to be a first, a drone pilot has pleaded guilty to colliding his drone into a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter. It’s believed to be the first criminal conviction in the United States for unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft.

The FAA is hoping a new reminder, along with some graphics, might result in people keeping their drones well clear of stadiums at game-time.

We’ve had a number of inquiries about whether it will be legal to fly DJI’s new FPV drone (when it’s eventually released). Of course, the same regulations would apply to all FPV drones, not just a DJI product. We knew the answer, but thought it would be good to take a deeper dive.

We believe rules are there for a reason. And both the Federal Aviation Administration and its Canadian equivalent, Transport Canada, have tried to strike a balance between maintaining safe airspace and letting drone pilots go about their business. But there will always be those who ignore the rules.