Key takeaways
- "There is an airport nearby" is rarely a no. It is a lead-time question — someone has to check the airspace and, where required, request authorisation before the crew mobilises.
- The aerodrome that stops a flight is usually not the international airport. It is an unmarked private strip, an ag strip, a hospital heliport or a water aerodrome nobody at the site thinks of as an airport.
- Give your operator the site coordinates or boundary and the working dates as early as you can. Airspace checks are cheap when they happen at quoting and expensive when they happen on mobilisation day.
- When authorisation genuinely cannot be obtained, the usual fix is a changed flight rather than a cancelled job — lower altitude, a tighter area, different hours, or a different capture method.
It is the first question a lot of Alberta clients ask, and usually the one they ask last: can you actually fly my site? The site is near an airport, or near something that looks like an airstrip, and there is an assumption that this makes drone work impossible.
Almost always it does not. What it does is turn the flight into something that has to be planned in advance rather than dispatched on short notice. Here is what actually gets checked, who checks it, and what the honest answer looks like when the answer is not a straight yes.
Controlled airspace is the part everyone knows about
Canadian airspace is divided into controlled and uncontrolled airspace. Around busy airports there is controlled airspace with a defined shape, and flying a drone inside it requires authorisation from the air navigation service provider — NAV CANADA — before the flight, not a phone call during it.
In Alberta the obvious cases are the controlled airspace around Edmonton International and Calgary International, and the airspace associated with the other towered and instrument-served airports across the province. If your site sits inside one of those, the flight is still very often possible; it is a request that has to be made, reviewed and granted.
The important detail is that controlled airspace is three-dimensional and its shape is not a circle drawn on a map. Two sites the same straight-line distance from the same airport can land on opposite sides of the answer. That is why the check is done against the actual coordinates of your site rather than against a rule of thumb.
The aerodrome nobody remembers is the one that bites
The flight that gets delayed is rarely the one beside the international airport, because everybody saw that coming. It is the one beside something the site does not think of as an airport at all.
Alberta is full of them:
- Registered and certified aerodromes in and around almost every town of any size, most with no tower and very little traffic.
- Private and farm strips. A grass or gravel strip beside a quarter section is genuinely used aviation infrastructure, and there are a great many of them in agricultural Alberta.
- Ag-aviation strips. Spray operators work low, fast and seasonally, often exactly where and when a crop-season drone survey wants to fly.
- Heliports. Hospitals, some industrial facilities and some remote camps have them, and they are easy to miss because they can be a painted pad on a roof or a clearing.
- Water aerodromes. A lake with float traffic is aviation infrastructure even though nothing on the ground looks like an airport.
- Temporary activity. Wildfire operations, medevac, survey aircraft and military exercises can put aircraft over an area that is normally quiet, and are published as notices to aviation rather than shown on any base map.
None of these automatically stops a drone survey. All of them change how the flight is planned, and all of them are the operator's job to find before the crew is on the road.
How the check and the request actually work
The sequence on a normal industrial job looks like this:
- Locate the site precisely. Coordinates, a boundary file, or a pin — not "the plant north of town". Airspace is decided by geometry.
- Check the airspace and the aviation environment around it against current aeronautical information, including anything temporary that is published for the working dates.
- Decide whether the planned flight needs an authorisation. This depends on the airspace, the altitude the job needs, and the nature of the operation — a low orbit of one stack is a different request from a full-site mapping grid.
- Submit the request through NAV CANADA's drone flight authorisation process, with the area, the altitude, the dates and the times.
- Fly to the terms that come back. An authorisation frequently comes with conditions — a ceiling, a window, a required contact, a requirement to stop for manned traffic. Those conditions are part of the job, not a formality.
Transport Canada sets the rules for who may fly what and where; NAV CANADA handles the airspace authorisation itself. Our 2026 Alberta RPAS compliance guide explains how the certification, registration and authorisation pieces fit together for a buyer.
Lead time is the real cost of airspace
Airspace almost never adds money to a drone survey. It adds calendar.
An authorisation request is reviewed by people, and the review is not instant. If the request has to be made, it needs to be made far enough ahead that a normal review time does not collide with your outage window, your month-end volume cut-off, or the two dry days in the forecast.
The practical version of this for a client is a single habit: send the location and the working dates when you ask for the quote, not when you approve it. The airspace check can then happen while the commercial side is still being agreed, and the answer arrives before it can cost anybody a mobilisation.
Short-notice work is still possible in plenty of places — a lot of Alberta industrial ground sits in uncontrolled airspace well away from any aerodrome, and those jobs can be flown quickly. The point is knowing which kind of site you have before you plan around it.
What your operator needs from you
- Where. Site coordinates or a boundary, plus where the crew can physically set up and stand.
- When. The date range, and whether there is any flexibility in it.
- How high the job needs to go. Driven by the deliverable — a mapping grid, a stack inspection and a marketing orbit have very different altitude needs, and altitude is part of what is being authorised.
- What else is in the air. Site helicopter traffic, a neighbouring operator's aircraft, crop spraying in season, planned flaring or lifts. Sites usually know this and rarely think to mention it.
- Ground constraints that shape the flight. Live process areas, public roads, occupied buildings, neighbouring property and anywhere the crew cannot go.
What a genuine no looks like — and what happens next
Occasionally the answer for a specific flight, on specific dates, is no. When that happens the useful response is almost never to cancel the job. It is to change the flight:
- Lower. Many surveys can be flown at a reduced altitude with more passes and more overlap, trading flight time for a profile that fits the airspace.
- Smaller. Splitting a site so that only part of it falls in the constrained area often turns one blocked flight into one authorised flight and one unrestricted one.
- At a different time. Aviation activity is not constant. A window that avoids the traffic is frequently available.
- Differently. Some deliverables that people assume need a drone — a stack condition record, a facade, a stockpile in a tight yard — can be produced from the ground or from a different vantage.
What you should expect from an operator is a straight answer about which of these applies, early enough to matter. "We will look at it when we get there" is the answer that produces an invoice for a day nobody flew.