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A Call To Arms

Felix the Cat

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A request to all British drone pilots (Autel or otherwise)

Is the HS2 High Speed Rail development scouring its way through your area? Are there any Grade listed buildings or Scheduled sites or monuments standing in the way? Is there HS2 archaeology being undertaken near your town or village?

If the answer to any of those questions is 'yes': please, PLEASE give a little of your time to the people in your community who genuinely care about the history and heritage that is in the process of being destroyed forever.

If you can, deploy your drone on any given Sunday morning and take aerial photographs - eye-candy: oblique, panoramic or orthocorrect - that detail the stages of local Heritage building condition and subsequent demolition, or the stages of archaeology that will be uncovering the hidden and previously unknown history of your home town.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a permanent record of heritage buildings and sites of archaeology before they disappear forever beneath the buckets and bulldozer blades of heavy construction plant. They will be gone forever in less than six months and they need to be recorded in as much detail as possible beforehand.

Drone pilots can be the independent oversight HS2 fears the most. The only two constraints HS2 have to obey by law are:

a) the Environmental Mandate (which defines their responsibility to preserving wildlife, countryside and wild habitats)... something they have been cheerfully laughing in the face of for three years already.

b) the Heritage Mandate (which defines their graven-in-stone responsibility to protect, record and preserve as much of the historic fabric of the land they want to carve a path through).

By producing time, date and geoposition anchored digital imagery, you can either provide unarguable proof that this mandate is being adhered to and respected by HS2 and their contractors: or you can provide unarguable proof that it is being ignored, circumvented and broken.

Contact your local history society and let them know that you have the ability to capture high resolution, orthocorrect digital imagery that can be included in the local historic record. Build a line of communication between people who genuinely care about history and heritage and people who have the ability to photograph it from perspectives that before the advent of consumer class camera drones, would have required the hire of a light aircraft or a helicopter.

Just remember to deploy and fly in strict accordance with ANO2016: CAP 722 and the EASA regulations governing C1 and C0 class drones and make sure your TOAL occurs in an area that is safe, permissioned (if permission might be required) and not listed as a park or public place under the control of any parish, borough or county council.
 

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