Mark The Droner
Captain
Flight distance : 2917 ft
United States
Offline
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I was in the Seattle area last week, and I was lucky enough to have the helicopter ride of my life. I sat in front right next to the pilot and had an amazing 180 degree horizontal view and a 120 degree vertical view. It was a beautiful sunny day and we flew from Boeing Field to Snowqualmie Falls, back towards and around the skyscrapers of Belleview, flying close to and lower than the tops of the buildings, then over Lake Washington, over some land, and then down low over Puget Sound north of Seattle. There was some kind of beach there with people on the beach and the altimeter read 220 AMSL as we settled over the water. I waved to people on the beach and they waved back. The land from the water line rose up and was higher than we were. Then we flew towards the Space Needle. We reached it and circled it counter clockwise - level with the platform. It is currently being renovated and there were workers on the space needle on the outside with hard hats and orange vests. I waved to them. They waved back. We were maybe a hundred feet from the platform, I would say. Then we flew over and within the city, over the Pikes Place Market area and around the skyscrapers of Seattle, again - low and close - then went back to Boeing Field and landed. Flight time was 55 minutes. It was amazing.
Naturally I peppered the pilot with questions and I thought I'd give some feedback on what I learned regarding airspace restrictions for manned helicopters.
He told me helicopters are unrestricted regarding minimum height in Class C, which is to say they are permitted to fly as low as zero feet AGL in class C airspace. I believe what he meant was that he had no minimum height restriction in any airspace other than Class B because I believe we were in Class D (Boeing Field) at the time and we moved into Class E as we moved west to Snoqualmie Falls. His comment surprised me and I told him I thought manned aircraft generally had to fly at least 500' AGL or higher unless there was some sort of task at hand or emergency. He said no. In class C, manned fixed wing AC must fly 1200 feet minimum AGL (unless they are landing) but helicopters have no such restrictions. Also, it seems the minimum distance from the top of any tower doesn't seem to apply to helicopters either, based on how close we flew to the skyscrapers and Space Needle.
Obviously, this means any time any of us are flying our drones at any height in the NAS, we are sharing airspace with any manned helicopter which happens to be flying nearby. I suspect this may be news to some people, so I thought I'd share.
CFR Sec 91.119
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