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From Model Flying Clubs to Commercial Skies

Somerset has a long and affectionate relationship with flight. Long before anyone spoke of drones, the flat levels around Bridgwater and the breezy ridges of the Quantocks were home to model flying clubs, glider enthusiasts and the occasional home-built microlight. Taunton's position, tucked between the Blackdown Hills and the Somerset Levels, gave hobbyists sheltered valleys and open skies within a short drive of each other.

What has changed is not the enthusiasm but the purpose. The small unmanned aircraft once flown purely for pleasure are now doing serious work: measuring fields, inspecting roofs, counting deer and mapping Roman earthworks. For licensed operators across the county, that shift has turned a weekend hobby into a genuine trade, with its own skills, paperwork and professional standards.

What Aerial Surveying Actually Involves

Aerial surveying sounds grand, but the day-to-day reality is methodical. An operator arrives on site, checks the weather and airspace, sets out ground control points, then flies a programmed pattern that overlaps each image by around 70 to 80 per cent. Back at a desk, those images are stitched together into a single georeferenced mosaic by photogrammetry software, which can also produce a 3D model or a surface height map accurate to a few centimetres.

For a Somerset farmer wanting to know where drainage is failing, that means a clear plan of the wet patches rather than a guess. For a conservation charity monitoring scrub encroachment on a SSSI, it means repeatable measurements year on year. For a surveyor checking a listed building's roof, it means not sending anyone up a ladder.

• Topographic mapping – contours, boundaries and earthworks for planning applications and archaeological records.
• Building and roof inspection – high-resolution imagery of chimneys, gutters, lead flashing and stonework without scaffolding.
• Agricultural monitoring – crop stress, drainage, field boundaries and livestock counts across large holdings.
• Wildlife and habitat survey – nest counts, deer and pony distribution, and vegetation change on reserves.
• Volumetrics – stockpile and quarry measurements, useful around the Mendips and the quarries near Cannington.

The Rules That Keep It Legal

Anyone flying for commercial purposes in the UK needs a Remote Pilot Competence certificate and an operational authorisation from the Civil Aviation Authority, usually under the specific category. In practice that means a written operations manual, risk assessments, insurance, and a pilot who has passed both a theory exam and a practical flight assessment.

The airspace around Taunton is busier than many newcomers expect. There is the airfield at Culmhead, gliding at Norton Fitzwarren, military low-flying traffic over Exmoor, and the helicopter corridor serving Musgrove Park Hospital. A responsible operator checks NOTAMs, uses a recognised airspace app, and keeps well clear of the Hinkley Point exclusion zone to the north. Good practice is unglamorous: pre-flight site survey, a nominated observer, visibility of at least 5 km, and never flying beyond visual line of sight without specific permission.

Privacy and permissions matter just as much as altitude. Taking off from a public footpath is one thing; photographing into a neighbour's garden is another. Most experienced operators knock on doors, explain the job and hand out a contact card before the first battery is even charged.

Surveying Somerset's Heritage From Above

This is where the technology becomes genuinely exciting for anyone with an interest in the past. Aerial photography has been central to British archaeology since the 1920s, when pioneering pilots photographed crop marks across Wessex. Drones have simply made that technique cheaper, safer and repeatable at low altitude.

The Somerset Levels are a gift for this work. Ditches, droves, peat cuttings and the faint outlines of prehistoric trackways all show up clearly in low sun from 60 metres up. Around Taunton, the earthworks of Norman motte-and-bailey castles, the line of the Grand Western Canal, and the humps and hollows of abandoned mills become legible in ways that a walkover survey simply cannot match.

Thermal cameras add another layer. They reveal buried stonework through temperature differences in the soil, and can detect damp ingress in historic churches long before it becomes visible inside. Volunteers working with local heritage groups increasingly commission a single flight over a scheduled monument to produce a permanent record, which is then deposited with the county historic environment team.

Skills, Costs and Getting Started

Becoming a licensed operator is not a weekend project. Expect to spend somewhere between £800 and £1,500 on training and certification, plus the cost of a competent aircraft with a decent camera, spare batteries, a tablet and a hard case. A reliable commercial setup starts at roughly £2,000 and rises quickly if you need thermal imaging or a multispectral sensor.

The less obvious costs are time and discipline:

• Record keeping – flight logs, maintenance notes and incident reports, kept for the period your authorisation requires.
• Insurance – public liability cover of at least £1 million is standard, and clients increasingly ask for £5 million.
• Continuing practice – currency matters more than certificates; fly regularly or your skills will lapse.
• Data handling – storing, backing up and processing large image sets, often several gigabytes per flight.

For those starting out, the sensible route is to specialise. Roof inspection around Taunton and Wellington is steady work with clear demand. Agricultural mapping across the Sedgemoor and Curry Moor areas suits anyone with farming contacts. Heritage and ecology work rewards patience and good relationships with landowners and wildlife trusts. Trying to be all things to all clients rarely works.

A Practical Outlook

Drones have not replaced traditional survey methods; they have added a viewpoint that was previously expensive or impossible. A theodolite still has its place, and a trained ecologist on the ground remains irreplaceable. But when a landowner near Ilminster needs to know exactly where a field drains, or a churchwarden in the Quantocks wants to see whether the tower roof is sound, a forty-minute flight can answer the question that used to take a week and a scaffold tower.

Somerset's flying heritage was built on curiosity and careful craftsmanship. The licensed operators working across the county today are the natural continuation of that tradition, just with better cameras and rather more paperwork.