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What the hell CAA?

As I've mentioned many times, including quite recently, New Zealand has some of the most outdated drone regulations in the developed world.

It's been a decade since our current set of regulations were imposed but this week there has been what should have been a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The CAA published an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making) document that outlined changes which it wants to make to those regulations.

Hooray! At last New Zealand's regulator will be dragged, kicking and screaming, into 2025.

Or will it?

I had hoped that CAA would have taken the time to investigate how regulators in other countries had measured the risks and adjusted their regulations to suit those risks.

The first hint that they may have done this is in the proposal that the drone-exclusion zone around helipads be reduced from 4Km to just 2Km.

The NPRM says:

Great news, the existing 4Km exclusion was ludicrous -- given that helicopters do not make shallow approaches or departures from their helipads in the way that fixed-wing aircraft must do when landing or taking off from runways. At last, a little sanity.

However, it would have been nice to see the situation that some countries provide where you can fly a drone even closer to a helipad so long as you land whenever a helicopter is flying nearby or using that helipad.

Off to a good start then!

Sadly, that's where the good news ends. The rest of this NPRM is a sad disappointment for anyone who flies a drone in New Zealand.

In fact parts of it are utterly draconian -- perhaps more by accident than by intent though, or at least I hope.

According to the proposed "Transport Instrument" (a regulatory document which is part of the NPRM), CAA now intends to regulate the flying of drones *indoors*.

WTF?

Since when has it been CAA's business how, when or even if I fly my tiny 20g drone inside my own house?

But now, section 2.9 of the newly crafted Transport Instrument would require me to get special training (at significant expense no doubt) if I want to fly my tiny 20g drone inside my own house using FPV goggles.

Now this is something I do quite a bit, especially in winter. There's alot of fun to be had zooming around the house with this tiny little drone -- darting in and out of doorways, dodging the cat's attempts to swipe it out of the air with their paws.

Apparently, CAA now believes that this is far too dangerous and that only those who have passed a training course run by a certified organisation will be entitled to that level of fun.

Are you shirting me?

What's next... will recidivist drone-offenders be required to have CCTV cameras installed in their houses to make sure they don't re-offend?

This is utterly outrageous and totally unacceptable.

There's no rules that stop me from juggling chainsaws in my living room or firing an air-rifle at targets down the hallway -- but I can't fly a tiny 20g drone because it's obviously too dangerous -- even if I'm the only person in the house and all the doors and windows are closed.

I won't go into the other details of the ridiculous insult to our intelligence that parts of this NPRM represent but suffice to say that the CAA has learned *NOTHING* from the decade of data we've accumulated since 2015 when the current rules came into force.

To show how dim-witted this is, they go on about the "current Statistical Value of Life" which is cited as being $12.5 million -- but fail to even mention that the recreational use of multirotor drones has never resulted in a single death -- anywhere, in the entire history of mankind.

They also claim that registration of drones is a form of safety mitigation -- despite the fact that there is not one single shred of evidence to support that fact. Not one instance where registration has prevented an incident involving a drone from occuring.

None of the real issues have been addressed, no lessons have been learned from local or international data gathered over the past decade and instead reference is made to SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) who have contributed to this steaming pile of BS -- although none of those SMEs have been identified so we can't challenge their qualifications or credentials as supposed SMEs.

Stay tuned... a fiery video will be coming on this. It's time for drone owners (the real SMEs) to have their say and I'll be making sure that they do so, in a polite but forceful manner.

Carpe Diem folks!

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