Monday, February 9, 2026

Civil Aviation Authoritarianism


I'm a follower of YouTubers in the US, in the main, who experiment with the means by which new methods and materials (principally electric) enable all sorts of outlines that might have been tried and subsequently discarded in the past due infeasibility. Note however in so doing they would have to break all six UK CAA stipulations to do so.

As influencer Katie Hopkins has pointed out, the one person least likely to follow the rules is the one most likely to be using drones for illicit purposes like ferrying drugs into prisons. There are though two more, that being casual users who might otherwise be flying drones; and innovators experimenting with them in the way that Frank Wang did by way of going on to supply 90% of the global market.

Regardless of the fact that the military in the UK forewarn of a critical lack of people ~ generally young white men, despite how distasteful that would appear ~ able to operate drones in the way Ukrainians do in order to eliminate up to 50,000 enemy combatants each month.

The pic below illustrates the effect the CAA has, like most other UK organisations, in crushing entrepreneurial endeavour from the get-go. The team is rightly proud of their ongoing efforts to break an existing world record relating to radio-control aircraft... except for the pilot, who they have had to anonymise in case men in black descend from Gatwick to arrest them for Loitering with Intent: