New drone operators are being warned that their Christmas cheer could turn into a festive fail if they fly their presents in the wrong places — including most of central Dunedin.
Civil Aviation Authority(CAA) unmanned aircraft certification team leader Corey Price said while drones were sometimes sold at toy stores, they were first and foremost an aircraft and using one made a person a pilot who was subject to CAA rules.
Recreational drones were prohibited from flying above 120m, outside of daylight hours, beyond the operator’s line of sight or over other people or their property unless consent was given.
There are 4km exclusions around takeoff and landing zones for other aircraft, which rules out most of Central Dunedin due to the helipad at the Public Hospital.
The CAA had the ability to prosecute breaches but tended to take an education-first approach, depending on the circumstances.
Breaches of the 4km exclusion zones around airfields was taken pretty seriously and where there had been a clear and deliberate breach of the rules infringement or prosecution was likely, Mr Price said.
Figures obtained under the Official Information Act show that last year 72% of the 29 complaints made to the CAA about drones in Otago and Southland were due to the people under the flight path not having their consent obtained.
In the past five years no enforcement action has been taken in Otago, but in Southland two incidents resulted in written warnings and six resulted in infringement notices.
Nationally in the year to December, 66% of the 537 complaints were caused by operators not getting permission of those under the flight path, while 9% were due to operating in controlled airspace or too close to airfields.
Five of the complaints this year resulted in further action.
For those new to the hobby, it was important to get up to speed with the proper regulations before hitting the skies, Mr Price said.
"You can get caught out just through your ignorance of those rules in some cases," Mr Price said.
He encouraged new users to get training or join a club, as those who did tended not to come to the attention of authorities.
Often people were in a hurry to get started using a new gift without fully reading the instructions.
A common scenario was that people read enough to get started with a new drone that arrived half-charged, but not enough to get the drone to return.
As a result the drones tended to break upon an crash-landing.
Many newer drones tended to have obstacle avoidance and flight ceiling features which were important to set correctly — as was flying responsibly, because not everyone was as enthusiastic about unmanned aircraft as drone operators.
"Don’t go whizzing around and chasing people’s dogs and upsetting them, or buzzing over people or their children," Mr Price said.
