NASA · Aviation Safety Reporting System
Part 107 UAS pilot reported flying in a TFR without authorization.
What is ASRS?
The Aviation Safety Reporting System is NASA's voluntary, confidential, non- punitive incident-reporting system, established 1976. Pilots, controllers, dispatchers, and maintenance technicians file reports describing safety- relevant events. NASA de-identifies every report before adding it to the public database. Reports are not investigated by NASA, the FAA, or the NTSB — they represent the reporter's perspective.
Pilot narrative
Verbatim from the de-identified NASA record. First-person account by the
reporter. NASA strips identifying details (names, company, specific time);
anonymization placeholders are ZZZ,
X, Y.
This situation is something that should not happen and is the reason why corrective actions must be taken by the pilots to avoid them. I was making the second flight of the day, the first and the second were real estate missions, only take photos of several some, nothing complicated, in the second mission as I was approximately 4 miles from the ZZZ airport I checked the normal apps such as B4UFLY and Air Control (Aloft) which did not show any TFR in the area on the map, request the normal authorization for a period of 2 hours starting at approximately XA:34 local time, for about 2 hours to anticipate that the equipment or the wind would be very strong, finish the flight in 14 minutes and upload the photos again in the post work, when it was through social networks that I realized the TFR. Taking this into consideration and how to take corrective actions, I proceeded to call the local FSDO inspector and two other pilots to discuss what happened, the main thing we can learn and the actions that should be taken is to check other applications and other systems like ForeFlight that give immediate updates, and any other app that shows you more specifically what is happening in the area, in this way to avoid this from happening again, I already have it written in my checklist, not to trust alone in third-party applications, if not also, check in the planning other pages related to this type of restrictions, it is something that can happen to anyone else if we are flying commercial missions more often, report and share this type of experience with other pilots and help them increase safety actions to avoid this type of misunderstanding. When an authorization is obtained from these third-party applications, it does not mean immediately that we are authorized, corrective actions must continue to be taken and the action of SMS (Safety Management Systems) as a report is something that all pilots must take into account, in my experience as a pilot commercial and military for more than 20 years, are things that can happen but can be avoided by increasing situational awareness, to avoid actions in the future, this for me is self-remedial training to avoid making these mistakes again, share this with the community of drone pilots within my district and known so that they not only trust third-party applications but also check all other types of applications, web pages and aids to improve the operational safety system of the missions flown.
Analyst callback
ASRS analysts occasionally follow up with reporters by phone. These are the paraphrased additional notes from those conversations.
The reporter indicated they have implemented a new checklist to prevent this from happening in the future.
NASA classification — Anomalies
- Airspace Violation
- Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural
NASA classification — Assessments
- Contributing Factors / Situations
- Human Factors · Procedure
- Primary Problem
- Ambiguous
ASRS reports are voluntarily submitted, de-identified by NASA, and represent the reporter's perspective. The presence of reports on a topic cannot be used to infer prevalence in the National Airspace System. The authoritative source is the NASA ASRS Database Online at asrs.arc.nasa.gov ↗.