Agricultural Drone Association NZ

09/10/2026

Seems every Aviation Authority are reassessing agricultural drone regulations.

📌 FAA stops monthly drone reporting and recommends saving the letter...

FAA letter: Monthly UAS flight report discontinued (Section 44807 / COA).

FAA recommends printing this and keeping it with your exemption/COA paperwork:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RIYdTVy-5daus63leV0OSUk_6ixT3uW1/view?usp=sharing

Logs are still required: pilot logbooks and maintenance records, ready for FAA review.

Follow for more important ag drone updates.
VOLO | Drone Allies

05/10/2026

What if Ag drones had never been part of aviation and instead managed under the same health and safety law that covers the tractor, quad bike, and chainsaw?

Let’s look at WorkSafe’s "Keep Safe, Keep Farming" guide for an answer. Identify what could cause harm, eliminate or minimise the risk, make sure everyone affected understands it, keep it current, and make safety part of everyday work.

So let’s apply WorkSafe to Ag drones

Prior to starting the operator goes through the operating procedure guide that’s small compact, easy to read and understand. Any changes in affected people, roads, powerlines, trees, chemicals and weather are recorded. The big physical hazards go on the hazard register.

Regional plans generally require anyone applying agrichemicals from the air to hold a chemical application qualification. So only trained operators. Agrichemicals are approved by the EPA, and most are registered under the ACVM Act. The Hazardous Substances Regulations cover storage, handling and training. Regional plans have conditions on use, and point to NZS 8409.

Spray drift is already regulated through EPA controls, product labels, regional rules and the operator’s chemical training. Ag drones typically spray only a few metres above the crop or ground, so their application and risk profile is quite different from conventional aerial spraying by helicopters and aeroplanes.

Now the part aviation people will raise. Shared airspace. Manned aviation coming in low while an Ag drone is operating is a risk. They shouldn't be that low over a property without the owner's knowledge, but it can happen in transit, and a ridge line is the most likely place to meet an ag drone.

In this model it’s a risk assessment, with controls to match: knowing which aerial operators work the district, coordinating with them, and a drill for getting clear the moment another aircraft shows up. If you're working shielded and staying below 50 feet, the chance of meeting another aircraft is very low.

It still needs proper risk controls. But the question is whether the whole safety system needs to become an aviation certification system to manage it.

A WorkSafe style Ag drone operation in one paragraph:

Make sure the operator is trained and competent, identify the job, check for hazards and how they'll be managed. Check equipment, weather, product label and regional plan conditions, check no other aircraft is working the area, and ensure everyone involved knows what's happening. During the job, watch for changing conditions. If something changes, stop and reassess. Record incidents and near misses, learn from them, and update the hazards, or training where needed. Keep the paperwork simple and focused on the actual risks.

Sounds workable but that’s not how it’s done. Currently every operator using an Ag drone is treated like a small airline by CAA.

Does safety come from regulating a machine by what it's called, or from managing the risk where it actually happens?

01/10/2026

Safety is knowledge and knowledge evolves because the equipment changes, software gets updated, and what was safe last year is different to what’s safe today.
The real achievement is allowing people to do useful, innovative things while managing the risks that come with them.

The safest possible drone operation, in a purely statistical sense, would be one in which nothing ever flew. Zero flights means zero accidents. But we wouldn’t call that a successful safety system, because safety exists to enable valuable activity, not eliminate it.

When we’re working with new evolving technology like drones, change is constant. A fast moving industry needs a safety system that changes with it.

Competent ag drone operators are skilled at managing risk. They see the obstacle, assesses weather and product being applied then apply the risk mitigations. The regulator sees the industry. The operator sees the field. The safety system needs to trust the person managing the threat in front of them to deal with it.

This trust is crucial to safety and our law is already built that way. The Health and Safety at Work Act defines what is reasonably practicable by "what the person concerned knows, or ought reasonably to know" about the hazard. It descends from Lord Robens' 1972 report, which put the primary responsibility for safety "with those who create the risks and those who work with them." The law assumes a competent person on the spot.

Safety also requires learning and for ag drones this is constantly evolving with each new version of the technology. They are constantly asking these question and learning from them: What are the actual risks? What are experienced operators doing to mitigate them? Which risks are growing, and which are disappearing as the machines improve?
There is a flow to this learning that ends in gaining trust to operate.

1. Operating creates information.
2. information improves knowledge.
3. Knowledge builds competence.
4. Competent operators earn trust.

And what the industry learns feeds back into training and into the rules. That is why the new notification pathway is built the way it is: establish competence, register the aircraft, know where the work is happening, report meaningful events, and learn from them.
Now consider the opposite system.

An operator identifies a safer way of doing something and changes an SOP. Before that improvement can be used, the document must go to the regulator, wait for approval and incur a regulatory cost.

The safety improvement exists. The innovative solution exists. The competent operator knows what should change. But the system prevents the change from being implemented at the pace of the innovation.

That is not inherently safer because it involves more regulatory control. Delay itself is an identified risk.

Innovation isn't something safety should reluctantly permit after enough paperwork.
Every advance in safety came from learning something, changing something, and finding a better way. Safety doesn’t just allow innovation. Safety is innovation.

01/10/2026

29/09/2026

23/09/2026

Don't get hurt and make sure nobody else gets hurt. That's safety at its simplest.

It starts with recognising danger. If you can see it, you can avoid it, reduce it, warn someone, or find a better way.

Learning to see danger takes experience. A year into the job, an operator sees things they missed in their first week. Knowing what to do when you see danger is learned too. That knowledge has to come from somewhere.

For most of human history, it came from the older hand. A group crosses a river, someone nearly drowns, and that night they talk about why. Next time they cross differently. The young worked alongside the old and were shown what to look for and what to do.

People learned to recognise danger, act on it, and pass that knowledge to others long before anyone wrote it down. Reporting, investigation, training and procedure existed as behaviours before they existed as documents.

That system worked for thousands of years, and it still works. It is how a new operator learns what to set the obstacle avoidance to on the block they are flying. They stand next to someone who already knows.

Today we have formalised the way we capture and pass on that knowledge. We use operations manuals, standard operating procedures, risk matrices, certification, instructors and examiners.

Every one of them exists to do what the older hand once did: pass what one person has learned about danger to someone who needs to know it.

The document itself isn't safety. The knowledge it carries is.

A document that makes someone better at recognising danger and dealing with it is safety. A document that only proves something was done is administration.

When we create a new rule, process, form or reporting requirement, the test should be simple: does it help someone recognise danger, understand it, or act on it?

22/09/2026

1%. That's how many 102 applications CAA processed within 20 working days last year. The target was 50%. 5% were processed within 6 months. The target was 90%. We can all agree that’s not ideal for a technology that will grow an economy.

Those are CAA's own figures from its 2024/25 Annual Report. It’s the only year CAA has ever published Part 102 numbers, and the measure has been dropped from the 2026/27 plan. I kinda don't blame them, those numbers will never improve because Part 102 is not fit for purpose when applied to routine agricultural drone operations.

The problem is arithmetic. Part 102 certificates went from 133 in 2021 to 394 in 2026. CAA hired a lot of inspectors in that period and the wait went from 18 months to 9 months. However, the industry wants to go exponential so CAA will never get ahead of it.

Slow is what Part 102 does by design. Every agricultural operator writes an exposition, every exposition is read in full, every applicant is interviewed. All agricultural operators gets a bespoke assessment even when their aircraft and procedures are the same as the last 100. CAA would need to hire 50 new ag drone experts to get close to 20 working days, and that talent doesn't exist in the market.

The people effected most are the team at CAA being asked to meet these targets. It can’t be done and it’s not because they aren’t trying. The head of the drone team was up late Xmas eve one year to help me get a certificate done before the holidays. That is dedication, but the team doesn’t have the rewards for their hard work because the system can’t deliver it.

Moving routine agricultural operations out of Part 102 to a notification pathway is the only change that alters the arithmetic. It takes the standard work off the inspectors and leaves the high value work that needs their expertise. Every other option keeps the same process and hopes the next 6 hires outrun the next 150 operators. The last 4 years say they can't.

21/09/2026

“If government says we’re going to make it a priority in the next 3 years to change the regulatory environment for drones, and we want to see this level of uptake, then, actually, CAA will recalibrate.” Chris Hipkins, at the Drone Zone at Fieldays in June.

He’d just heard that a ag drone certificate takes a year to come out of CAA.

Three months on, the process is changing. Good to see both sides of the House want the same thing.