The pilot sat in my truck for forty minutes waiting on an approval that never came

I'm still in the researching phase on land, mostly holding patterns and figuring out what I'd actually do with a tract, but I wanted marketing-grade aerial on a 60 acre piece I was trying to talk a partner into. Booked a pilot for a Tuesday morning because the light is better and nobody's on the road.

He showed up early, walked the launch spot, then sat in the passenger seat of my truck with his phone out. Ten minutes goes by. Then twenty. I asked what we were waiting on and he said the parcel sits under controlled airspace for a regional field about four miles off, and he'd put in a request through the LAANC system for an altitude ceiling. Usually it comes back in under a minute. That morning it didn't.

At forty minutes he put the phone down and said he could fly at a much lower ceiling that was already authorized, but the shots I wanted, the ones that show the whole tract and the ridge behind it, need altitude he didn't have permission for. He would not go up anyway. He said the certificate is the business and he's not putting it on a pasture video.

So we shot low. Tree level passes, the creek, the road frontage. Half of what I'd asked for. He charged me his half day rate instead of the full and told me to check the airspace map before I book anything else, which I now do, and it turns out two of the four tracts I'd been circling have the same problem.

I went in thinking the hard part of drone work was flying. The hard part is knowing where you're allowed to be, and that's the part I was paying for without realizing it.