A public letter to the CAA and NATS

To whom it may concern,
I am delighted to see that the CAA and NATS have a clear interest in the safety of those who may be in the vicinity of ‘drones’. However, I am writing this letter to inform you of my disappointment in the current idea of introducing registration to the hobby.
Firstly, let me describe why I dislike the term drone. I dislike it because it’s far too much of a generalisation. A drone could range anywhere from a quadcopter to a hexacopter to an octocopter to a plane to an RC blimp to a VTOL aircraft to a military predator. However, whenever I look at recent documents released by the CAA about drone safety, it is always a quadcopter that is depicted. This is most likely due to the fact that plane or ‘fixed wing’ enthusiasts have never really caused a problem for airspaces as their pilots tend to be hardcore enthusiasts that understand the responsibility of what they are doing, they do not deserve the inconvenience of having to register aircraft that have never been an issue.
I believe you would be doing yourselves a favour if you were to stop listing every RC aircraft as a ‘drone’. Most people who fly for a hobby will refer to the DJI Phantoms and other similar aircraft which have been causing the issues leading to this latest crackdown as ’quads’ or, if you wish to include aircraft that have more rotors, ‘multirotors’. Those who fly their aircraft into airspaces and other such areas are also the kind of people who would just avoid ever getting them registered.
It may come as a surprise to hear, then, that the majority of multirotor pilots spend their time sitting in a field, miles from any airspace, with a pack of batteries at their side, practising for races, or flying freestyle. We do so because we dislike the idea of flying into a human, as much as any human dislikes the idea of being flown into.

The aircraft we fly are almost always homebuilt with no GPS, whereas the multirotors causing a problem are almost always GPS enabled and pre-built by a company such as DJI. I feel your time and money would be far better spent researching a GPS database of airspaces and public venue events such as stadiums, that could be used as a geofencing library for these GPS enabled aircraft to physically stop them from flying into these areas.
Thank you for listening to my points and I hope you consider them when drawing up new regulations.
A multirotor pilot,
Henry Penton
