Unmanned Systems Editing and Proofreading Services

A manned aircraft pilot reports "a drone" passing close to their wingtip during approach. The report says it was close, it was fast, and it was gone before anyone could do anything about it. Nobody investigating this can determine the altitude, the actual separation distance, or which of the several hundred licensed drone operators within a ten-mile radius might have been operating at that time, because "close" and "fast" are the observations of someone travelling at 140 knots who saw something for under a second, and the report contains nothing that could narrow the search.

We edit what drone operators, manufacturers and regulators produce around incidents and near-misses — unmanned aircraft incident and near-miss reports, lost link and contingency procedure documentation, operator logs and flight records, airspace authorisation and waiver applications, manufacturer safety bulletins and firmware update notices, and the correspondence following a reported sighting or complaint. Our editors work on reports written about an encounter that lasted less than a second.

The reconstructable detail is what turns a drone incident report from an anecdote into something that can actually be investigated, and its failure is a report built entirely from impression — close, fast, big — with nothing that can be checked against records. A near-miss report with no altitude, time or location precise enough to search against cannot be matched to any operator, confirmed against any flight log, or used to identify a pattern. We work through these so the time is recorded to the minute where possible and the location as a specific position or a distance and bearing from a known point, since "near the airport" could describe a search area of many square miles and a specific position narrows it to something that can actually be cross-referenced; so altitude is estimated with a stated method — relative to the observer's own known altitude, or relative to a landmark of known height — rather than as a bare number with no basis given, because an unsupported altitude estimate cannot be weighed against another account that disagrees with it; so the description separates what was directly seen from what was assumed, given that "it looked like a small quadcopter" and "it was definitely operating illegally" are very different kinds of claim; so the operator's own logs are checked against the reported time and location before ruling an operator in or out, rather than accepted or dismissed based on reputation or on whether the report seems plausible; so a lost-link or contingency procedure is described in terms of the specific action taken and the time it took to execute, since "the aircraft returned to home safely" does not show whether the contingency worked quickly or worked only just in time; and so recurring incidents in the same location or time window are tracked as a pattern, given that isolated reports of drones near the same approach path are, collectively, an airspace problem rather than individually, several unrelated events. Reports written this way can actually be acted on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including flight records, incident data and operator information. We are editors rather than drone operators, air safety investigators or regulators, and we offer no view on airspace violations, safety or liability. What we can do is make sure the report contains enough to actually investigate.