ASRS 2294838
ACN 2294838 · 2025-10 · DJI FlyCart 30
Government UAS pilot reported conducting a demonstration flight outside of the area covered by their organization's COA.
Pilot narrative
Verbatim, de-identified by NASA. Placeholders: ZZZ,
X, Y.
My search and rescue drone team was invited to come do a demo of our capabilities at a conference which happened in Location X this year. This was a huge honor for our team to be invited. While there we demonstrated how we use drones like the DJI M30T to search for lost people and our command vehicle. We took along with us our Flycart 30 as well. We did a very short demo of this aircraft taking all safety precautions in mind and we accomplished everything without incident. We feel that the demo was a huge success show teams from across the world the life saving capabilities of these aircraft. I hope that we empowered teams and gave them ideas as to how to implement these tools to their life saving efforts. Now that I am home and rereading our Certificate of Authorization (COA), I see that I didn't comply with the details as our COA only covers operations within our county. This was a complete oversight and I see that I operated that small demo illegally and I should have filed for permission to put on that demo in Class G airspace. I recognize my error, I feel awful for it, and it will not happen again. In the future if such requests come I will file for a waiver to be able to conduct these demos legally.
Analyst callback
Paraphrased notes from ASRS analyst follow-up calls with the reporter.
The reporter had no additional information to share.
NASA classification · Anomalies
- Airspace Violation
- Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural
NASA classification · Assessments
- Contributing Factors / Situations
- Chart Or Publication · Human Factors
- Primary Problem
- Ambiguous
ASRS reports are voluntary, de-identified by NASA, and represent the reporter's perspective; they are not investigated and cannot be used to infer prevalence. Authoritative source: asrs.arc.nasa.gov ↗