New government regulations can be hard to get excited about — but not if you’re a drone pilot like Ian Wills.
Transport Canada’s updated rules, to be unveiled early this year, will lift restrictions on longer-distance flights for the remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or drone industry, making it simpler for pilots to take to the skies.
“The entire drone space is exploding,” said Wills, president of Coastal Drone, a drone pilot training organization in Langley, B.C.
“They’re evolving and getting more powerful and more capable and empowering people to do things that we can’t even imagine yet.”
Think large-scale drone deliveries, aerial inspections or vast overhead mapping or inspections.
It’s the kind of lofty potential that people have talked about for years in Canada, but one that’s really only made possible with these new regulations.
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Don’t expect Canada’s skies to be filled with drones any time soon — the new laws won’t come into effect until fall.
But it means for the first time Transport Canada will move away from a case-by-case application process for these flights. It’ll open up much of the country’s skies to missions that fall under low-risk beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), where a drone flies out of the pilot’s field of view, says Ryan Coates, executive director of remotely piloted aircraft systems for Transport Canada.
It will also mean more stringent rules for pilot certification and updated weight limits for drones.
The BVLOS rules will be most lax in low-risk or less-populated areas, meaning Canada’s more remote communities could stand to gain the most from services that could be provided.
Updating rules
Previously, a pilot would need to apply to Transport Canada for special permission every time they wanted to fly their drone beyond their visual line of sight.
That meant tens if not hundreds of hours of paperwork, says Wills.
From the regulator’s perspective, the application process, which involved a rigorous review and risk assessment, became incredibly time-consuming and eventually a barrier for many drone users, says Coates of Transport Canada.
The department realized the technology and industry was capable of taking on these flights en masse, says Coates — the laws just had to catch up to make it possible.
But all of this hasn’t come out of nowhere.
In 2019, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to introduce rules for RPAs following a wave of close calls with people, their drones and restricted airspace. The original regulations included restrictions like not operating drones while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or near airports. Since then, Transport Canada has certified more than 107,000 drone pilots and registered about 100,000 RPAs — numbers the department says increase almost daily.
In that time, the technology has also become more capable and sophisticated, says Coates, intensifying the industry’s calls to ditch the administrative burden and update the rules again.
“We always move faster than the regulators, right?” said Glen Lynch, CEO of Volatus Aerospace in Ontario.
Some commercial drone companies like Lynch’s already get some leeway from the regulator to fly drones BVLOS, following years of experience in the aviation industry. But this widespread change “is a whole new realm,” he says.
Drones replacing people?
That’s not to say that any kind of drone will be able to be flown anywhere.
Transport Canada says pilots who want to do BVLOS must be certified and their drones will be required to have the technology and ability to detect and avoid other air traffic. The RPAs will also need to weigh less than 150 kilograms and be flown over sparsely populated areas in uncontrolled airspace at low altitudes.
The new laws treat drones like aircraft, because they share the same space — and in some cases, some of the risks. In Canada, the rules also apply equally to commercial drone pilots as they do to recreational ones, who are the largest cohort of drone pilots in Canada. They might use their drones for simpler activities, like taking pictures or videos on a hike or vacation.
For those on the commercial side, the future use cases for BVLOS are impossible to fully realize just yet.
Lynch thinks of oil-and-gas pump jacks in Northern Saskatchewan, where drones could replace workers “in gummy rubber boots” driving out to inspect leaks or damage to a rig. Or agriculture, where they could identify and spray sections of infected crops, all flown by a pilot in a totally different location.
A potential game-changer
But the potential isn’t just about benefiting industry.
It’s also about people, says Dr. John Pawlovich, family physician and the University of British Columbia’s chair in rural health.
“I see this as being a real game-changer for communities,” he said.
Pawlovich is part of a pioneering pilot project that went through the sometimes infinitesimally slow and small steps of figuring out how to deliver medicine and supplies by drone from a pharmacy to Stellat’en First Nation in Northern B.C. Journeying to a pharmacy can be difficult for Stellat’en members because of the weather or because some are in poor health.
It might sound elementary, he said, but there are many steps to consider, like how a drone could arrive at a pharmacy in time for a digital prescription to be made available. The team was able to perform more than 1,200 test flights through special permission from Transport Canada at the time.
Updated BVLOS rules mean a project like that would be easier to expand to other remote communities, involving all kinds of valuable cargo.
For Pawlovich, it’s the best example of how, with some consideration, the changes could improve the lives of people living in some of Canada’s most remote places.
“This technology holds great promise to kind of close or eliminate the gap in access to medical supply.”
