CAA Permission

[David Akerman]

I've just now received the renewal for my annual permission/exemption, and a couple of things have changed.

The first one is a new requirement to call the Swanwick Area Control Centre 1 hour prior to the flight.  Has anyone else had that added to their annual or adhoc permission/exemption?  I know that it's common to have to call a local airport but, being in the middle of nowhere.

Second, the CAA have now stipulated a maximum payload weight of 2.6kg.  Quite generous for my uses, and fortunately (and unlike at least one other that I've heard of) does not include the balloon.

Dave

[Kevin Walton]

Hi Dave

No Swanwick requirement on mine that I got end of Jan.  I did offer a max payload weight of 2kg, and my permission has that limit on it.

Cheers
Kev

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Sent from my Android device. Please excuse my brevity.

[Andrew Mulholland]

For the Cambridge (CUSF) launch last month, the permission also had a new requirement for Swanwick (45 mins before). We're used to having the requirement for our central London launches (15 mins before), but it was new for a Cambridge launch.

The issue with including Swanwick with all launches (if that's what they are doing) is we've had a real mixed back of controllers over the years... There doesn't seem to be a written down procedure for them to follow with balloons, instead solely down to if they think a balloon is risky or not. Had some excellent controllers that gave thumbs up in a few mins, while others have taken 30-45 mins and numerous calls back to finally get thumbs up (or in 1 case, thumbs down as they didn't feel they could approve it as it *could* float in the path of an aircraft...)

In the case of the CUSF launch, it ended up delaying the launch as they also couldn't find the paperwork on their end (which is pretty typical from experience).