The legalities around flying UAVs in the UK seem to be pretty complex but Tom M did a good job of finding out the important points for our project:

1. We haven't found anything that states you can't fly at night *sigh of relief*

• We must maintain direct, unaided visual contact at a maximum horizontal distance of 500m
  
• Must not fly above 400 ft (would be a bit pointless for bats!)

Don't fly...

• within 150m of congested areas (i.e. urban)
  
• within 150m of an assembly of 1000 or more people (we'll make sure there are only 999...)
  
• within 50m of any vessel, vehicle or structure not in our control
  
• within 50m of any person
  

Its a bit of a shame we can't fly the UAV out of sight as using autopilot we could have done some nice long transects. That said I can understand why this is the law.

There are already quite a lot of people exploring the possibilities that drones offer the world of conservation. Thankfully this means we don't have to start from scratch.

First things first we needed to get the drone of the ground. Not a ground breaking discovery but all journeys must start somewhere!