Just dredging this one up again.
Did my BNUC-s ground course last week and passed, so as far as my plans are going, things are moving in the right direction.
There's a lot of talk on forums about the CAA and BNUC-s programme and an equal amount of supposition.
Having experienced the course and having attempted to grill Andre at every opportunity about anything which sprung to mind or came up as a result of group discussion, i have to say that i found it a first rate experience.
EuroUSC will readily admit that the current process might be far from perfect, but i think it's a magnitude better than winging it outside the law and as there's nothing else it's the way to go.
I didn't go there completely green, but in a day and a half i picked up an awful lot of new, enlightening information and guidance on ways to work, so my operation, however small is efficient and safe.
The big - main - thing to take away from the experience is a push towards safe operation.
It does look like an association of BNUC-s certified 'pilots' will be the way forward, but 'someone' is going to need to put in a huge amount of effort building and maintaining a forum and co-ordinating it all - and i don't think the volume of work involved makes this a viable proposition for someone to do 'in the evening'.
Which ever way 'we' go we all need to be pulling in the same direction.
I also think we need to have some way of involving manufacturers.
A cynical view could be that they (manufacturers) are just selling the gear without actually looking at the legislation around professional AP and getting involved. A case in point, i asked DJI for more specifications on the S800, they were unable to tell me anything more than maximum wind speed and maximum weight. No information on max humidity or how performance and MTOM change at different altitudes. So if i get a job in the alps, i'm left guessing.
I also asked for their recommended, rigorous and repeatable system for testing an S800 after a firmware upgrade - the answer was "swap the payload for a similar weight and fly low until you're confident." - which isn't going to cut it quite frankly. I'm not pulling out DJI for a moan here, merely using them as an example as it's their products i'm using. But i'd guess i'd have a similar response from mikrokopter or hoverfly.
Maybe manufacturers simply haven't considered this issue, but it will become more and more important that they do.
Much of this is, i believe an issue related to hobby kit becoming professional tools. We've celebrated the fact that at 'hobby' money we have access to rigs which can perform as well as £20k turnkey solutions, but as soon as you understand the implications of taking those hobby rigs into the professional arena, those £20k price tags begin to make sense. It's nothing to do with similar functionality, it's training, back-up, testing and safety which bump up the cost.
If manufacturers sign up to some kind of testing programme - with an entity like EuroUSC - this should help with issues like updating firmware - under current guidance that represents a fundamental change to the equipment used and approved by EuroUSC during the flight test.
I think what i'm trying to say is that we're becoming a small industry and we will need a collective (on-line) voice which isn't kicking against the current system all the time, but working with it to improve and change things in a positive way.
