Kevin Woolsey, 04/02/26
Head of RPAS
SAFETY AND AIRSPACE REGUALTION GROUP
Civil Aviation Authority,
Aviation House,
Beehive Ring Road,
Crawley,
West Sussex.
RH6 0YR
cc – Richard Ryan – Blakistons
Rob Bishton – CEO CAA, Giancarlo Buono – GDSARG CAA
Gareth Corfield – The Telegraph. Laurence Sleator – The Times. The Lord Young of Acton – FSU
Gary Mortimer – SUAS News. Sean Hickey – Geeksvana

OPEN LETTER

Dear Kev,
I have given your letter of 30 January exactly the degree of careful consideration that it merits.

It is a particular irony that the “Safety Airspace Regulation Group” appears incapable of even spelling the word “Regulation.” This, regrettably, feels less like a typographical accident and more like an inadvertent mission statement.

After reflection, and noting that I have sworn to you under oath that I have not flown a drone since December 2024, I have concluded that I do not, in fact, hate myself quite enough to continue attempting to work “constructively” with RPAS under your leadership, or under your present approach to regulation, engagement, accountability, or, increasingly, the basic concept of law.

Accordingly, and in the interests of sparing both of us any further exercise in institutional theatre, I hereby
surrender with immediate effect my:

• General VLOS Certificate (GVC);
• A2 Certificate of Competency;
• Flyer ID; and
• Operator ID.

I do this not because I accept your analysis, which I regard as flawed in both substance and process, but because your letter provides such a comprehensive case study in regulatory dysfunction that further engagement would be a professional and psychological waste of time.

On 8 May last year you purported to ban me from flying any drone in UK airspace, ostensibly because of my comments on social media, only to be corrected by my legal counsel that you did not possess such legal authority. You then re-issued, without apology, a diluted prohibition on 27 May against drones over 250g, and later declared that I lacked the “fitness of character” to operate such aircraft, essentially because I had the temerity to use lawyers to point out the law to you.

Your Regulation 6 Appeal Panel nonetheless concluded that I had “not engaged” with SARG, despite your persistent refusal to engage with my legal counsel or to respond substantively to their correspondence. The inescapable reality is that you appear to welcome “engagement” only on your own terms, which, in practice, means no meaningful engagement at all with your customers lawyers.

You have banned me from flying drones over 250g, despite knowing that I do not, in fact, fly them, while I remain licensed to fly an aeroplane weighing up to 5.7 tonnes. All of this, apparently, because of my social media posts and my insistence on using lawyers to highlight the legal deficiencies in your position, a standard of reasoning that, even by SARG’s benchmarks, is impressively thin. It is a curious conception of “safety” that regards me as a danger at 250 grams but entirely acceptable at 5.7 tonnes.

By way of perspective, I have paid the CAA many thousands of pounds over the years as a compliant customer of your regulatory regime. In response, the CAA has deployed hundreds of thousands of pounds of internal funds on external King’s Counsel for the Regulation 6 process and specialist human rights lawyers to justify your team’s conduct. It is a remarkable inversion of priorities: a regulator that litigates against its own customers at huge expense while preaching “engagement” and “proportionality.”

Perhaps this explains why your Operational Authorisation fees are some of the highest in Europe.
Your conduct is a striking repudiation of the principles of Just Culture. Instead of fostering transparency, fairness, and proportionality, you appear to equate dissent with misconduct and legal challenge with bad character. If this is your interpretation of Just Culture, it bears little resemblance to the version recognised across the rest of aviation.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is not a retreat from aviation or innovation. I am currently conducting research on AI-based drone control systems that will be flown, tested, and developed in territories that actively support technological progress rather than litigate it by correspondence. The contrast with your approach could not be starker.

It is also worth recalling how we arrived at this point. The UK Government, through the Future Flight Challenge, funded me to design and build systems intended to make UK airspace safer, smarter, and more capable. Those systems have since resulted in granted patents. As a direct consequence of your actions, those patented technologies will now be commercially exploited outside the United Kingdom. You have indirectly wasted the public purse.

If your objective was to encourage compliance, trust, and constructive engagement, you have achieved precisely the opposite. If your objective was to deter innovators from working in the UK, you have been remarkably effective.

I will now devote my time to working in other jurisdictions aligned with innovation.

It is the people of Darlington I feel sorry for.

Yours, with appropriately calibrated disdain,

Dr Chris Crockford

BSc. MSc. MBA. PhD. AFRMet. MIEEE. MACM. FRGS. FRAS.