New Drone Laws in Australia — What You Need To Know
In 2016, drones have become affordable and simple to fly. You might already own one yourself that you’ve used on the weekend, and you might have seen one used at work for inspecting a roof, taking an aerial photo or even flying laps to perform a mapping survey.
However, until recently, all commercial drone activities required a license. The crewed aviation industry is an incredibly safety-conscious place for good reasons, and a hundred years of aviation safety culture has built up on assumption that most things in the sky are birds or professional pilots.
But in 2016, there’s an important and safe role that drones can play in airspace, with safety benefits for people on the ground.
After a long period of consideration, as of September 29, 2016, Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has made some changes to the Part 101 regulations that govern drones (or UAVs, or UAS, or RPAS…). It’s good news for people that want to use small drones for surveys and inspections on their work sites.
The Old Rules: any commercial drone operations required a full license from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).
The New Rules: in some limited situations, it’s become legal to fly a very small (<2kg) drone without going through the CASA licensing process.
This blog post lays out some of the things you might be wondering about when and how you can safely use very small drones under these rules.
There’s some more rules that specifically apply to what you can do on your own land or site — we’ll provide another update about this soon. This update is only about the more widely applicable sub-2kg changes.
It’s still clear that in a many situations, where there’s more risks involved, you’ll need to work with a licensed drone services provider. They have the equipment and training necessary to safely work with conventional aviation.
Summary
To fly without a CASA license, you’ll need to meet all of the following conditions:
- You’ll need a drone and camera that weighs less than 2kg total.
- You need to fill out a CASA form to get an Aviation Reference Number (ARN).
- You need to notify CASA online five days before you fly.
- You need to fly below 400ft (or just under 122 metres) above ground level.
- You need to keep your drone in direct line of sight.
- You need to fly 30m away from people, and generally need to fly in places that don’t endanger the public.
- You need to be 5.5km away from airports.
- You need to get permission in military and restricted airspace.
- You need to stay clear of emergency situations.
Overall, it’s straightforward, but there are things to know about each of these requirements.
1. Get a sub-2kg drone
This is the fun bit. We’re publishing an updated buyer’s guide soon. For now, if you’re looking to get a reliable, high quality option for inspections and small surveys, we think the clear leader is the DJI Phantom 4 — based on ease-of-use, capability, price and support.
If you end up reading the rules, the term used for this class of drone is ‘very small RPA’, and the definition as less that 2kg is in the Dictionary of the regulations.
2. Get an ARN
An Aviation Reference Number is basically an ID number for dealing with CASA. Getting an ARN is straightforward, but takes a few days. You can get it as an individual or as an organisation from CASA’s ARN Applications page. Form 1162 is for individuals and Form 1170 is for organisations.
3. Give CASA 5 days notice before your first flight
Once you have your ARN, you need to give five days notice that you’re going to start flying. For now (Oct 2016), all CASA is asking in this form is what your ARN is, what weight and type of drone you’re using, and what state and region you’re in.
It doesn’t ask for a specific location (we suspect they might add this soon). Then you need to confirm you’re acting in accordance with the drone regulations (which is what this blog post is about).
Here’s a link to the CASA RPAS notification form.
4. Fly below 400ft.
This is normally straightforward, and part of your flight planning on your drone controls. Some drones (like the DJI Phantom 4) have default settings that prevent flying above this height — but make sure you check!
Your drone will determine its altitude based on the altitude of your launch point.
There can be some ambiguity about this ‘ground level’ around cliff faces and tall structures like dams, mine pits or skyscrapers, which can all be over 400ft high.
The reason for the rule is to ensure the drone doesn’t interfere with other air traffic. We would suggest you should assess the risks more carefully if you’re flying at 390 ft over a mountain peak — where regular air traffic might dip below the clearance limit — than if you’re flying 390 ft over a mine pit, which is not a place that’s navigable by crewed aircraft.
This requirement is part of the standard operating conditions in 101.238(b).
5. Keep in direct visual line of sight.
This also means what it says. You need to be able to directly see your drone during the whole flight and maintain visual line of sight (VLOS).
This is a key limit on many drone operations. Only a small number of professional operators in Australia are permitted to fly drones beyond where they can see them (‘BVLOS’). Unfortunately drones can’t yet be used safely to just fly around a site with nobody watching.
The rules also make it clear that just using the camera feed from your drone or ‘first person view’ goggles isn’t enough to meet this requirement.
This requirement is part of the standard operating conditions in 101.238(b).
6. Keep 30m away from people, and don’t endanger the public on the ground
You have to fly 30m away from people. This rule is designed to avoid the risk of injury from direct contact with the propellers of a drone even while it’s operating normally.
Although the drone regulations don’t clarify this, it’s our understanding that it’s a 30m ‘bubble’ around the drone — as opposed to a 30m ‘cylinder’ — which is the exclusion zone. If you’re directly under a drone that’s 40m high, you’re outside the bubble.
But that’s not the end! Standing directly under a drone is still not a great place to be. You definitely need to consider the risk of a drone failure and the possibility it could fall straight down — in which case it doesn’t matter how high up it is. CASA’s rules say not to fly over a populous area, and considering this rule is arguably more important.
What is a populous area? CASA’s definition is more complex than you might expect. Section 101.025 defines it like this:
An area is a populous area… if the area has a sufficient density of population for some aspect of the operation, or some event that might happen during the operation (in particular, a fault in, or failure of, the aircraft or rocket) to pose an unreasonable risk to the life, safety or property of somebody who is in the area but is not connected with the operation.
So a ‘populous area’ isn’t defined by some specific person density number. It asks you to think about what could happen to people on the ground if the drone fails and falls out of the sky.
The impacts might be direct injury, indirect endangerment (consider causing a car accident from a drone landing on a highway) or property damage.
That’s why we describe this rule as ‘don’t endanger the public’.
7. Keep 5.5km away from airports.
All of these rules are serious, but this one might be the one that CASA and the aviation industry care about the most. Planes full of people are fragile things and keeping drones away from conventional aviation is the most important part of the drone laws.
The official publications are at Air Services Australia (a separate organisation from CASA) who are responsible for oversight of day-to-day airspace operations. They provide maps specifically for drone operations at http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/services/unmanned-aerial-systems-in-controlled-airspace/.
BUT: these maps are not yet comprehensive. We strongly recommend looking at AirCheck. It’s not official, but it’s a very handy map of Australian airspace.
When you open it, it includes all controlled airspace. To see the areas affected by airports, click on ‘Airspace Layers’ and turn off everything except ‘CTR’. (You’ll need to turn back on ‘Restricted’ to show military airspace — see below.)
The red areas show controlled airspace around airports.
This regulation actually applies to ‘controlled aerodromes’, which specifically means airports with air traffic control. It doesn’t actually cover the much larger number of smaller airports and airstrips dotted around Australia. If you plan to conduct an activity near these uncontrolled airports, we strongly encourage you to pick up the phone and let them know about the times you plan to fly your operation.
8. Stay out of restricted airspace.
There are many restricted airspace areas around Australia — for example, much of Sydney Harbour, where there’s lots of helicopter and seaplane traffic.
To identify if this is an issues, once again we recommend AirCheck. It’s not official, but seems to be comprehensive.
This time select only ‘Restricted’, and filter the altitude down to only 0–500ft.
Some of these apply all the time (‘H24’), while many are only in force when there’s a current notification (‘NOTAM’). You can see this marking on the AirCheck map.
Determining whether a NOTAM is currently active is a bit of an aviation insiders task and beyond the scope of this blog post, but it involves the Air Services Australia NAIPS online service.
However, this isn’t all. There are three types of Restricted Airspace, RA1, RA2 and RA3, and they have different rules:
- RA1 and RA2 require explicit permission from the air traffic controller for any operation.
- RA3 is the highest category of restriction: the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, for example. You need to be a licensed operator to get permission to fly here.
You can find out whether a site is RA1, RA2 or RA3 in the ‘Designated Airspace Handbook’. This also tells you the phone number of the air traffic control at this location.
9. Stay away from emergencies.
This one is obvious. Flying drones near emergencies like bushfires or car accidents endangers the crewed aircraft that need to be able to respond quickly to these situations.
Conclusion
That’s some important things you need to know about using a drone safely and legally in Australia. If you’ve got more questions, say hello@propelleraero.com. And you can go into more detail reading the Part 101 legislation yourself.
Propeller Aero wants to see people succeed using drones safely. Please send us your comments on this article as we’re keen to incorporate your feedback, share your experiences and improve this article for the whole drone and aviation community.
We’re a global company headquartered in Australia, which is why we’ve covered the Australian drone laws first. Our data processing and visualisation platform is used by hundreds of the world’s best drone teams, and our AeroPoints make it easy and reliable to capture survey grade data, so get in touch with us if you’re using drones for commercial applications — we’d love to work together.
Francis Vierboom is the co-founder and co-CEO of Propeller Aero. He has a very rusty law degree from UTS and the above should definitely not be considered anything near legal advice.
