So this morning we gave our ENP presentation. Rob & I stayed up until the wee hours this morning pouring over the legalese covering aviation in Australia – specifically the CAR (Civil Aviation Regulations) 1988, CASR (Civil Aviation Safety Regulations) 1998 and CAA (Civil Aviation Act) 1988. And all the amendments. And CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) mandates, gazettes and other junk.
Long story short, lawyers are inevitably the biggest consumers of antidepressants, after accountants. ;)
Rob & I still disagree about some of the interpretations, but it’s reasonably clear in my mind that our project is recognised as a “small UAV”. This exempts it from licensing, registration and a whole bunch of other aspects of aviation law, which is good. But as with all legal documents, all the regulations are written with the aim of referencing the entire body of Australian law in each and every paragraph… I think cross-referencing all those is probably NP hard. It’s certainly recursive, which poses interesting questions for enforcement of the law.
Anyway, that didn’t put us in the best state, come 9am this morning, when we both rocked up for the presentations. They started at 9:30. That’s all we were told, even after asking several people for more details. Irony dictated that Rob & I were scheduled last, hours later – if only I’d remembered, I could have at least wrung a few bookies for it.
We did our presentation, and it went well enough I guess… not nearly as polished as the previous presentations, but it isn’t officially marked, and the audience of engineers weren’t looking for flash, so that’s okay. Although Rob still wanted to get dulled up. We were the only two there wearing anything even resembling a suit.
And then after that, of course, it was on to ADD, which I’ve mentioned just previously.
I came home after this painful day, had dinner, watched lots of Scrubs, and now I’m going to bed as soon as Aidan & Travis shut up. One day I’ll live in a house with interior doors that aren’t made entirely out of the mere essence of cheap chipboard.
