Operational Procedures, Risk Assessment, and Emergency Management
From checklist to contingency
Operational procedure questions test discipline: pre-flight inspection, site survey, crew briefing, in-flight monitoring, and post-flight reporting. The risk-assessment framework you must know is the SORA-style logic used internationally and reflected in ANAC practice: identify the ground risk (who is under the flight path) and air risk (other airspace users), then apply mitigations - containment, altitude limits, buffers, observers, and procedures - until the residual risk is acceptable.
Concepts to master
- Emergency categories: loss of link, loss of GNSS, battery failure or low voltage, motor failure, fly-away, and fire. For each, know the immediate action, the expected aircraft behavior, and the reporting obligation.
- Fly-away: the aircraft is not responding - do not chase it into unsafe airspace; record the last known position and notify the ATS unit and ANAC as required.
- Accident and incident reporting: serious incidents and accidents trigger investigation under the ICAO Annex 13 framework (in Brazil, CENIPA conducts the investigation; ANAC handles regulatory aspects). Never move wreckage unnecessarily and preserve data logs.
- Crew roles: remote pilot, observer/visual observer, and payload operator. A clear briefing assigns who calls "abort" and who watches the airspace.
- Checklists and normalization of deviance: the trap is skipping a step because "it worked last time".
Traps and a rule of thumb
Traps: treating a fly-away as a reason to exceed VLOS; forgetting that data logs must be preserved after an occurrence; and assuming an emergency automatically excuses all regulatory breaches - it does not, though it is considered in the investigation.
Rule of thumb: for every phase of flight, ask "what is the one failure most likely here, and what is my rehearsed response?" If you cannot state the response in one sentence, the procedure is not ready.