GVC COURSE

To get your General Visual Line of Sight Certificate (GVC), students will need to undertake a practical flight assessment after the course. This can be completed either with your own drone (the easiest option), or by borrowing or hiring a drone for the duration of your assessment.

Yes – to complete this course, students will need to have a laptop or tablet with access to the internet.

Yes – to complete your General Visual Line of Sight Certificate (GVC), students will need to undertake a practical flight assessment after the course. The practical flight training will involve simulating operating situations associated with the Open Category. Further guidance for the practical flight training will be provided upon course booking.

Yes, however iRed provides free drone insurance for your practical flight assessment through Flock®.

We also provide students with a 10% discount off their first year of drone insurance.

Under the new regulations, there are now three categories in which drones can be flown. These are:

Open
Includes operations that present a low (or no) risk to third parties

Specific
Operations that present a greater risk than the Open Category, or where one or more elements of the operation falls outside the boundaries of the Open Category (Operational Authorisation Required)

Certified
Operations that present an equivalent risk to that of manned aviation (high-complexity missions and research & development)

The Open Category is broken down into three subcategories:

A1
Flying over people

A2
Flying close to people

A3
Flying far from people

These new subcategories include specific criteria of how and where you can fly your drone.

As part of the new UK drone regulations, future drones will now utilise a new classification system. Each drone will now have it’s own class rating, ranging from C0 to C4, which will be based on a drones weight, speed and safety features. 

Under the new classification system, specific classes of drone will be able to fly in specific subcategories of the Open Category. 

As no drones currently meet the class requirements, there will be a transitional period running until July 2022.

Currently, there are no C2 Class Aircraft available to purchase in the UK. As such, a transitional period from November 2020 to July 2022 has been put in place by the CAA to give manufacturers time to release drones under the new classification system. 

This means that ‘legacy drones’ (existing drones) can be flown in accordance with the new rules until the transitional period ends.