Cleared for Takeoff

At the beginning of February, when I got my drone, I was thinking that we live in an area where I'd have a wide variety of cool places to use it in the mountains. And that's certainly going to be true during the summer, but at this time of year most of our favorite spots in nearby mountain ranges aren't accessible for my 4WD truck due to the deep snow.

So I've been flying it in and around Butte mostly. And one thing I hadn't fully appreciated before is that Butte has a pretty large protected airspace for a town this size.

Butte is home to St. James Hospital, the biggest trauma center in Southwest Montana, and medevac helicopters fly into St. James to deliver trauma patients who need urgent care. The combination of this protected airspace and the airspace for Bert-Mooney Airport (BTM) creates the odd-shaped protected area shown on the map above. if you're flying inside this area, the controllers at BTM need to know about it. So in order to legally fly my drone at our house or in nearby areas, I've had to learn how to get authorization from the FAA.

BTM is one of over 700 airports across the US that use the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) to coordinate drone usage with local air traffic. LAANC is a collaboration between the FAA and industry partners that provides a system for getting instant authorization to fly a drone in controlled airspace, as explained here on the FAA website.

The way it works is that you use an app from one of the FAA-approved UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) service providers, and the app communicates with the FAA's systems to get approval for your flight plan and notify the local air traffic controllers of it. If your flight plan the meets some basic requirements (such as staying under 400 feet above ground level), and there are no local Temporary Flight Restrictions (TFRs) in effect, then you get an automated authorization with no need for manual review by anyone. After the approval, local air traffic controllers have access to the details of your flight plan, so if something changes (such as a medevac chopper coming into the St. James heliport, for example), they can text or call your cell phone to tell you to abort your flight.

San Francisco-based Aloft Technologies is the largest FAA-approved UAS service provider, and their Air Control app was responsible for over 75% of LAANC authorizations last year, so I went with that one. It's a free app – Aloft makes their money off other services they provide to pilots and flight-related businesses. I have it installed my my phone, and also use it via their website.

This morning, I used Air Control to get a LAANC authorization to fly my drone up to 400 feet above the ground in the area around the World Museum of Mining for an hour starting at 8AM. The following screenshots show the process I followed to get the authorization, which can be completed in under a minute once you get used to the steps involved.

Next I got a screen telling me that this request is eligible for auto-approval, and reminding me to verify weather conditions, watch for low-flying aircraft, and so on. I clicked Submit Request, and got the following notifications immediately.

The fine print on the approval notified me that I'm responsible for the overall safety of UAS operations under this authorization, and reminded me that during my flight I must be continuously available for direct contact at my cell number.

Approved and ready to take off, I threw the drone and the dogs in my truck and drove over to the Word Museum of Mining, just a few minutes from our house. Below are some of the photos and video I captured.

Each time you do a LAANC authorization like this, the Air Control app saves a copy of the flight plan and authorization, so that you can see all of your previous flights within the app. So over time, I'll build up an catalog of my favorite spots to fly the drone around Butte, and I can go back and review the details if I want to do the same flight plan in the future.