The Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority's regulation on drones has been published in the Government Gazette. Amateurs will have to declare them.
The Government Gazette/B/3152/30-9-2016 was published, which concerns the regulation of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on drones. Or rather on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or UAS.
Those interested can download it in pdf format from the official website of the national printing house.
UAVs should certainly have been brought under a legal framework at some point, just for the safety of manned flights. However, in this regulation we see a legislative strictness, especially for amateurs of the genre, that is, for those who will buy a “toy” to play in their free time.
The new requirements are that everyone will have to declare their flying device via an electronic form and indelibly write the license number on it. So far so good, but we have seen flight bans of 8 kilometers around airports, which means that on almost all of our islands that have at least one airport, drone flights are prohibited. In fact, if we remove the prohibited zones such as camps, public buildings, cities, gatherings of people, etc., the flight area becomes much smaller.
And since we're talking about gatherings of people, the law prohibits amateur drone flying over gatherings (or if you prefer, the open category as it refers to them). If you plan to film your outdoor wedding, you should probably forget about it, or you'll have to pay the professional who holds the special permit for this and that the regulation took care to grant him.
In the category of professional use of drones, the legislation requires possession of a license after passing exams, being over 18 years of age, certification of knowledge of English and Greek, and even submitting a flight plan.
Of course, the obligation to submit a flight plan to the CAA binds all UAVs that fly further than 50 meters from their pilot. That is, those that have the ability to fly and communicate beyond 50 meters.
We are waiting to see, on the one hand, the implementation of the basic rules of this regulation (declarations, permits, etc.) but also its subsequent implementation.
For now, if you want to see the 8 kilometer limits from Greek airports (military, civil and club) then you can use the freemapstools website, go to the map it contains and enter the number 8 km under Options – Radius Distance. So, with each click on the map above, you will see a green circle with a radius of 8 kilometers that will inform you of the prohibition limits.
