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Comment by bennesvig | Hacker News Reader

You have to know things about weather and reading maps that you'll never use when flying a drone, bu it only takes a weekend of studying to pass the drone pilot test.

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The map reading should be useful for a drone pilot. The "map reading" in a PPL course is mainly focused on identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot. There are apps that help, but you should be able to reference a sectional or TAC and know whether you're legal to fly or not. I would call it a fundamental drone pilot skill. The fact that is disregarded by so many drone pilots is one of the reasons why the license is needed.

You definitely don't have to know as much about weather for a drone pilot. You aren't flying that far. Sure it doesn't take much distance for weather to become important, but you learn it in a PPL because you have to do cross countries. And if you don't do your weather planning for one of those you can get yourself killed.

Plus, all the navigation I learned for my private would be useless for a drone pilot (hard to do much cross country with line of sight). Learning to check notams and read a sectional shouldn't take a reasonable person more than a few hours.

Do you even need to read NOTAMs for drone flights? I figured you just do the rock test https://i.imgur.com/cKqDhPW.jpg

We need more weather rocks in the world.

> identifying airspace, which is critical for a drone pilot

Depends. If you work out of Los Angeles, it’s critical, if your drone business helps the farmers in Kansas or Iowa, there’s not that much airspace variation.

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