Rec Night Flying in Controlled, Freefly Grounding Astro, Spright отримує загальнонаціональний BVLOS

 All right. This week in drone news, we have three stories for you. The recreational ЛАНС is finally enabled for night flights. That’s a big deal. Freefly Systems is grounding a bunch of their aircraft, and then Spright gets nationwide BVLOS. Let’s get to it.

LAANC for recreational flyers

Your first story this week is good news. Especially if you’re a recreational flyer, you can now fly at night in controlled airspace.

And yes, some of you might be looking at me and be like, oh, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that. You actually couldn’t go into the system and request LAANC request at night. Now you can. The FAA announced this week that LAANC now supports near real-time authorization for recreational pilots, or recreational flyers, I should say, in controlled airspace.

Recreational flyers must still follow all the guidelines of CBOs when it comes to night flying. So make sure you have your aircraft equipped with the right lights if that’s what your CBO is asking for. Drone zone approval is also available for recreational flyers who may be flying at an airport that is not LAANC approved.

Any LAANC provider that can provide authorization for recreational flying can now give that nighttime approval as well. Now, if you want more information on how to choose a CBO, make sure that you head out to this video right here because we compared all of them.

FreeFly Systems grounds Astro drone

All right. The second story this week is from FreeFly Systems, which has recommended that all owners of its Astro aircraft ground the aircraft due to an in-flight software failure.

The in-flight software failure has resulted in at least one crash of an Astro, and FreeFly says that they just want to make sure that everything is good, but the system should have handled the error by itself. But the flight control software didn’t actually work as intended. We’ll keep you posted if we hear any updates on this, but unfortunately, that’s sad news.

Spright BVLOS

Alright, your third story this week is Spright. Spright has received, not the Sprite that you drink. We have a Spright company that makes aircraft that fly BVLOS and do drone deliveries. They have received a BVLOS waiver for infrastructure inspections. Now, the cool thing about this is that this is a non-geolocation specific waiver, which means that Spright can travel up to four miles to conduct the utility inspection.

Their president, Drew Resnick, said that, In this case, they’re proud to have earned the FAA’s first non-geospecific BVLOS waiver for utility inspection. And then they believe that it is a testament to the aviation-minded culture that puts safety at the center of everything that they do. That’s really cool.

All right. And then lastly, I have one more, make sure that you check out the latest video that we did. It’s a review video where we test a bunch of ND filters. We test for color and density accuracy, and you would actually be pretty surprised about the results. We put that on the testing bench and did a pretty thorough testing, and I think it’s pretty cool.

All right, that’s all I have, as always, so subscribe, and we’ll see you next week.