There are many times, far too many times, when it seems NPAS bring the world crashing down on its multiple heads through not thinking.
A few days ago The Guardian ran a story on how NPAS were seeking to operate drones at low level over the heads of the people of this country. The paper pointed out that Civil Libertarians were up in arms about the revelation. Now this morning they have run broadly the same story stating that.....Two Labour peers have demanded greater parliamentary scrutiny of police plans to use surveillance cameras mounted on drones after it emerged that forces across England and Wales could deploy the technology. Shami Chakrabarti, the former head of the civil rights advocacy group Liberty, has tabled an amendment to the police bill that would require the home secretary to approve the use of new “weapons, surveillance equipment or investigatory technology”.
All this results from an exercise they ran with industry asking about the capabilities of cameras in drones. The story was spoken of at he recent Helitech presentation at Excel London last month. It was not controversial and it simply laid out the parameters most manned airborne helicopters/fixed wing work to in terms of altitude. They added drone to the mix. NPAS do not fly drones, but they have this dream that they will one day and that they will operate them out of bases BVLOS.
They need to be forgetting all this tosh - it is just winding up people in civil liberties and they are mainstream politicians these days and so have the ability to vote down the new funds they need - and getting on with sorting out todays problems and operating a new fleet of aircraft.
Many in the drone industry see a workable BVLOS operations as being at least 5 years away and probably 20 years in the wake of public distrust of the aircraft industry post Boeing 737MAX.