Luddites, Airspace and Harassment.
A little story about trying to gain permission to fly drones Beyond Visual Line of Sight across Morecambe Bay for the NHS.
In April 2021 I started a Temporary Danger Area application to fly drones across Morecambe Bay for the NHS. I published the application on the CAA Airspace Change Portal and built a website detailing our plans. I went onto the local Airfield's Facebook users page and posted news of our plans.
Almost immediately I was swamped with outrage!
How dare I suggest drones fly in class G airspace? that this was an "Airspace grab" even though the word "Temporary", meaning 90 days was lost on the reader...
I received volumes of complaint from one individual, who, when speaking with other BVLOS drone operators has made a name for himself as a serial complainer.
His complaints ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
"How would we deal with someone on the Heysham Ferry (the only vessel working commercially in Morecambe Bay) with a GPS jammer?" through to "How would we deal with RAF Spadeadam running GPS jamming trials some 100 kilometers to the north and the other side of the.... er.. Lake District National Park, home to the nations tallest mountain range...
They were not really complaints, they certainly had nothing to do with the airspace where we planned on flying. They were just rantings, that as part of the stakeholder engagement process, we had to respond to.
They were just designed to waste our time.
The individual contacted his local Microlight club who too wrote in and complained that they had not been consulted, despite the fact that this was the stakeholder engagement phase where we were open to consultation.
The individual then went further and published that we were "planning on infringing restricted airspace" eventually we had to involve our lawyers as his action was defamatory.
He then went quiet for a while and the baton changed hands.
Another pilot, friends with the first, then contacted Natural England and complained that we were planning on flying drones through Sites of Scientific Special Interest.
Natural England then took the offensive and wrote to the CAA and to the NHS demanding to know why they had not been consulted..... more outrage...
Eventually we FOI requested Natural England and established from their lawyers that SSSI/SPA/RAMSAR sites have no airspace attached to them.
(Yes this does make the CAA's Drone and Model Aircraft Code advice incorrect re SSSI's....)
As such with no airspace, Natural England concluded that we must not upset the flora and fauna of the land within the SSSI/SPA/RAMSAR sites and only the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 was applicable, in the case that we actually make a forced landing within a SSSI etc.
The best quote from NE was "I don't think Air Law is actually a thing" from one of their excellent regional directors...
The baton then moved to another pilot, a Microlight CFI (who we later found out flew from Swansea) who claimed he used Morecambe Bay for Practice Forced Landings all the time and how our routes would impede his PFL practice.
He would offer no evidence of usage and when we sought our consultant CFI's advice and pointed out that PFL's should not be practiced in a manner to endanger the aircraft (i.e. over quicksand) and the appropriate articles of the ANO that he might be contravening he just wrote back to us telling us to go away.
This did make us investigate the land ownership of Morecambe Bay and we discovered that neither of the two landowners directly under the Microlight Flying Sites that sit on the sands of Morecambe Bay have ever consented to landings by aircraft on their lands. Thus any aircraft landing there is effectively committing trespass.
There is also a Byelaw that prevents aircraft landing on any beach around the Morecambe/Heysham peninsula..
The CAA also condone this trespass by declaring these sites as Microlight Flying Sites, (which AIP-ENR1.1-5.5.5.1 declares as aerodromes) despite the landowners being unaware of their lands additional usage...
One of the sites is still having its "anti-glider metalwork" removed from WW2 as part of a wind-farm cable laying project.
Sensible place to land then?
ah well it's marked on the CAA chart it must be fine..
But then the 3rd Microlight pilot from the North West got involved.
(Friends with the first two and a gentleman who had ended up in court, courtesy of the CAA, for a low flying incident towing a banner over a football match, only to stand up in court and claim that the video footage of the flight that he had posted on Twitter the day of the flight may have been another flight all together....)
Now I knew this pilot's son had an apprenticeship with the flying club I occasionally fly out of, so I, mistaking him for a supporter of our drone project, asked him one day on Facebook how the apprenticeship was going.
The gentleman in question then becomes my stalker.
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Suddenly I receive Facebook messages asking me to confirm the registered address of the company....
I have my tweets retweeted by him.
My Linkedin profile is viewed by him weekly.
I get text messages.
There is a car outside our house....
Then I get an email from him directly stating that my enquiry as to how his son's apprenticeship was working out was an obvious attempt to intimidate him and that he had discussed this harassment with a certain Detective Constable of Lancashire Police...
This email was sent into the Manager of Airspace Regulation at the CAA for his digest by the author.
But strangely I never hear from the Police.
And then I do a bit of digging. Pilots 1,2,3, I believe, all attended the same grammar school. Pilots 2 and 3 tow banners together...
I find that Pilot 1 had sold his Microlight to the very same DC from Lancashire Police that Pilot 3 claims he has reported my asking how his son was getting on to...
So I wrote to Lancashire Police and asked them to confirm if this had indeed been investigated.
I block Pilot 3 on LinkedIn.
The Police confirm there is no investigation, writing to Pilot 3 in the process.
I am assuming the poor DC must have been none to pleased to get roped into all of this. And thus the harassment stops.
Eventually we conclude the stakeholder engagement process by hosting an evening event for the real local microlight pilots.
I stand up in front of twentyfive, 50+ males and a couple of ladies.
There is some push-back to the technology but no serious complaints, this is sub 400' over a large tidal area, the flights are during the working day.
We work to establish better lines of communication and establish the actions of just a handful of pilots have soured relationships up till this point.
All ends well.
In total the process saw us engage and seek support from
But you cannot please all the people all the time.
The lengths that some people will go to, to recreate Luddite-ism in the twenty-first century is quite astounding.
As a caveat I should declare that in November 1831 one of my ancestors was deported to Tasmania for Swing Rioting.
Bloody Luddites.
CEO & Chief Capability Designer at Flyby Technology
2 年Keep going Chris.
Seasoned UAS Risk-Operations Contractor
2 年Commendable perseverance Chris…
Its electrifying!
2 年Why am I not surprised?
Include | Inform | Inspire | Infinite Player
2 年I feel your pain. I thought the website was a cracking idea! Keep going-soon come???? just a truck load of patience required…!
Co-Founder | CEO at IDU GROUP
2 年Movie script!!! “A bridge too far part Deux”