The regulations for flying drones or Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) in Mauritius have yet to be published, but recommendations are:
- Do not fly your drone over people or crowds of people - Respect other people’s privacy when flying your drone - Do not fly your drone near military installations, power plants, or any other area that could cause concern among local authorities - Do not fly your drone near airports or in areas where aircraft are operating - You must fly during daylight hours and only fly in good weather conditions - Commercial operations follow the same guidelines as above for recreational use.
There are a few operators based in Mauritius that sell RPAs, mainly multirotors and offer basic videography and aerial stills services.
3DroneMapping was approached by a Mauritian Civil Engineering firm to survey a site located in the centre of the island, approximately 450m AMSL, measuring 1400ha in extent. The client required very high resolution orthophotos of the site as well as contours of the natural ground level. All this information would be used in the master plan for the development of the site for a new commercial and government facilities hub. Most of the area to be developed is covered in sugar cane plantations as well as some house projects under construction.
Since the requirement was for high resolution imagery with a pixel size of less than 4cm, it was necessary to fly a lot lower than is standard practice for such an area. This meant that more flying time would be needed to cover such a large area. It was decided to inform the Mauritian Civil Aviation Department of our intentions. The persons contacted were fine with our operations, provided we briefed them of our dates, times, positions and elevations. We also used an airband radio on site, making periodic calls to other air traffic, as per ICAO requirements in uncontrolled airspace. No other aircraft were encountered during our operations.
The site was broken up into 5 areas and flight planned to run perpendicular to the wind direction. Each flight was expected to last 1.5 hours, travelling over 50km per session. However the persistent trade winds that blow over Mauritius were severely underestimated by ourselves. This relentless wind from the South East never dropped below 9 knots for 7 days. At times it would gust to 25 knots as reported by Pleasance Airfield. The effect of this airflow caused the aircraft to yaw or “weathervane” into the wind reducing efficiency and increasing flight time. All 5 flights were successful with perfect communications, flight characteristics, image quality and landing approaches with a total time of 8 hours spent