I want to fly here and here.

This weeks I will only be coving two sections. Aircraft Performance Recording and Flight Operations Area/Plan. The first sections is real simple but the second can take a bit of time. Let get started.

The Aircraft Performance Recoding sections is three simple questions

Flight Data Recording: yes/no

Control Station Recording: yes/no

Voice Recording: yes/no

That’s it for the aircraft performance recording section. Not too bad right?

The flight operations area/plan takes a little bit of work. It’s not hard, but you have to keep your points straight and be able to use an image editing software (i.e. paint, photoshop, etc.)

So you have to think about this what is your area of responsibility? Are you police? Are you fire? Do you have mutual aid agreements that need to be taken in to account? Here is why I ask that question. If you are police how often do you have to leave your jurisdiction to assist other agencies? Especially assist with operations that would need a drone. The system that personally work in our police stay in the city 95% of the time. So for them to request outside the city in the county does not make a lot of sense and would risk getting their COA kicked back to be fixed. However, our fire department also manages the county HazMat team. They respond often to the county outside of the city. So for them requesting a COA outside the city and in to the county would be beneficial and less likely to be kicked back.

We now have a better idea of what we need for our COA area of responsibility (AOR). So we will need to get GPS coordinates of our area now. So you can go to Google maps (or Bing if you’re nasty) and get GPS from those sources. You will need to select between 4-8 points to encompass your AOR. These will be your way points to input on the area/plan section. When you select these points make your list and find a GPS converter. You will input the Latitude and Longitude in “degrees-minutes-seconds” format. If you selected theses coordinate points from google like I told you to then the Datum will be “NAD83”. Now for the ceiling and floor because we fly drones your ceiling will be “400” and you floor will be “0”. Radius from the point can be what you select. Keep in mind that when your COA is issued the ceiling and floor will be from your local Above Ground Level (AGL). The reason the points are in Mean Sea Level (MSL) is because when manned aircraft are flying they use MSL. So don’t get wrapped around the axle with this. Next part for the point is speed. Find the Max speed for your aircraft and put it in the “Max:” section. If you have a multirotor drone then the “Min:” speed is 0. You will need to do this for each and every point you have selected to encompass your AOR.

Last but not lease your image editing software use in now needed. You will need to take a screen shot of your AOR and input the waypoints on to the map and attach that to the COA request. I have attached a picture of an example.

So this can be one of the more involved sections but its not hard it just takes work. Next week we will cover the last sections and get you ready to submit your COA for approval. Thanks for joining me this week this is Nate signing off, drink whisky, fly drones, shoot guns, (but not at the same time) and have fun in life. Semper FI

#PoliceDepartment #FireDepartment #EmergencyServices #PublicCOA #Drones