GVC and A2 CofC Courses now live

by 7 Jul 2020

Global Drone Training are now running GVC and A2 CofC Courses

As you probably know if you have found this post, drone regulations in the UK are changing on the 31st December 2020. The UK CAA will be mirroring the new EASA regulations. This means most drone operations, whether recreational or commercial, will come under either the Open category or Specific category.

The EASA Open Category

The Open category is designed to be ‘low or no risk’, where there are safety mitigations either due to the size of the drone or how close you fly to people or built up areas. Some smaller drones can be flown almost anywhere without the need for certification, others will require different levels of training. The A2 CofC is the level of certification required to fly close to people certain drones. It is also required as a certification to fly certain legacy drones under 500g. The rules seem complex at first glance and we are currently creating a flow diagram to help people through it. In the meantime if you know you need the A2 CofC please click below to find out more. If you are unsure, please contact us to find out more.

The EASA Specific Category

The Specific category is going to look very like the current PfCO system. To operate under the Specific category, you’ll need the General VLOS Certificate (GVC). It doesn’t matter whether you are operating commercially or not, if your flights are too complex to be carried out under the Open Category, you’ll need an Operational Authorisation from the CAA and to get that you’ll either need the GVC or a current PfCO and competency certification at 31st December 2020. The Specific category will start off looking very like the current PfCO, but additional capabilities will be added over time that remote pilots will be able to access by completing appropriate learning modules. The first of these will be for extended visual line of sight.

Joined-up Thinking

At Global Drone Training, we have put a lot of thought into how we can make recreational and commercial drone training as logical and progressive as possible. To that end, we have written our A2 CofC Course to contain a bit of exra content that means that it forms day 1 of the GVC course. This means two great things. Firstly, everybody who completes our GVC course automatically obtains their A2 CofC certification. Secondly, if you do your A2 CofC course, you can “upgrade” it to a GVC at any time within the validity period of you A2 COfC certificate (normally 5 years from the date of issue) by completing day 2 of the GVC Course and a Practical Flight Test.

Anybody who does either course will get a 12 month Pro membership, giving access to additional support and offers.

If you are new here, welcome! If you’d like us to keep you in the loop about anything drone-related, including the upcoming regulation changes, please sign up for our Free membership and then choose the notifications you would like to receive under “my account”.

The Global Drone Training team