Insights / Go / no-go: a decision framework for drone flights
Why "the pilot decides" is not enough
The pilot should decide. The question is what they decide with. On a good day, an experienced pilot weighs wind, visibility, airspace, battery state and the client waiting on site, and gets it right. On a bad day, the client is waiting, the drive was two hours, and the wind is "probably fine." That is not a character flaw. It is the reason airlines took the decision out of the moment and put it into criteria written in advance, when nobody was waiting.
A go/no-go framework does three things. It states the criteria before the day. It names the person who applies them. And it defines the outcome when a criterion fails: not "use judgment" but a specific response, usually hold, mitigate or scrub. Everything below is one such framework, tuned for small inspection and survey operations. Change the numbers to match your aircraft and your regulator; keep the structure.
Five gates, in the order you meet them
Airline dispatch checks legality before weather, and weather before aircraft, because there is no point checking the aircraft for a flight that is not legal. The same ordering saves time on a drone site.
| Gate | Question | Go | Hold / mitigate | No-go |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Legal | Is this flight permitted, here, today, by this pilot, with this aircraft? | Registration, permits, airspace and Remote ID all confirmed | A permit is pending with a known decision time | Anything unconfirmed. There is no partial legality |
| 2. Weather | Are conditions inside the limits you set in advance? | Wind below your limit at height, visibility clear, no precipitation, no forecast deterioration inside the window | Gusting near the limit; wait 20 minutes and re-check | Above limit, rain, fog, or a front due before the mission ends |
| 3. Site | Is the airspace and ground picture as planned? | No unplanned people, vehicles or aircraft; launch and emergency landing sites clear | Transient activity that will clear; brief and wait | Persistent uncontrolled access under the flight path |
| 4. Aircraft | Is the aircraft ready, with evidence? | Pre-flight checklist complete, batteries above your reserve, firmware current, compass and GPS nominal | A non-critical item can be swapped on site | Any item on your no-go list: damaged prop, battery warning, link fault |
| 5. Crew | Are the people fit, briefed and enough? | Pilot and observer rested, briefed, roles assigned, emergency procedure rehearsed | Missing observer where one is optional; reduce scope | Pilot fatigued, impaired, or alone where two are required |
The gates are sequential. A hold at gate 2 does not mean start gate 3 while you wait. It means the decision is not yet made, and the person with authority says when to re-check.
Run the check
The tool below applies the five gates. It is deliberately simple: the point is not the software, it is that the same questions get asked every time in the same order. Print the result or screenshot it into the flight log.
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. The tool has no memory; that is intentional. The flight log is where the record belongs.
What "hold" actually means
Airline operations have a precise vocabulary for the state between go and no-go. A flight on hold has a re-check time and a person responsible for it. It is not "we will see." Apply the same discipline: when the tool says hold, set a time (20 minutes is a good default for gusting wind), name who re-checks, and decide in advance how many holds you allow before the answer becomes no-go. Two is reasonable. A site that has been on hold for two hours is a site where the decision has been made and nobody has said it.
The mitigate branch is the interesting one. Missing observer: fly a shorter, lower profile within visual range instead of the full mission. Transient site activity: brief the people, wait, fly the far side first. A framework that only knows go and no-go pushes pilots toward go, because no-go is expensive. Giving them a legitimate reduced-scope option is what makes the framework get used.
Who has the authority
Write one name on the mission plan next to "go/no-go." On a two-person crew that is normally the pilot in command. In a larger operation it may be a duty controller at base who has the weather picture the pilot does not. What matters is that it is one person, everybody knows who, and the client is not on the list. Airlines learned that the schedule cannot own the decision. The same is true of the site manager who drove two hours to watch.
The criteria and the named person are the two things that let a junior pilot say no. Without them, "I did not feel comfortable" is an opinion against the client's schedule. With them, it is "gate 2 failed on wind, per our published limit," which is a fact nobody argues with.
Where this sits in the larger system
Go/no-go is one procedure in a drone operation, not the whole of it. The gates assume a pre-flight checklist exists (the five-stage pre-flight checklist is a workable template), that the legal picture has been established (registration, permits and airspace in Japan, or your country's equivalent), and that somebody is keeping the record. How those pieces fit together is the subject of what a drone operations control center does, and why they need to be written down rather than remembered is in running drone inspection as a system.