Preparing for a DSAC inspection (without the stress)

Two families of inspections coexist:

• The desk or on-site company audit, conducted by your inter-regional DSAC: a check of the consistency between your declarations (scenarios, operations manual, fleet) and your actual operation.
• The field inspection, often by the air transport gendarmerie (GTA) or local law enforcement: at the site of a flight, sometimes following a complaint from a nearby resident.

The trigger can be a surveillance programme, an event (incident, complaint), or simply the fact that your activity is visible. An operator who flies regularly will be inspected one day — the only variable is your level of preparation on that day.

The DGAC sets the documents the operator must have at the flight site and present on inspection; a company audit goes further, down to the registers. Everything must be up to date, accessible and consistent:

• The window-dressing operations manual — a downloaded template never adapted: the inspector spots it in two questions ('show me your loss-of-link procedure').
• The expired certificate — European credentials have been expiring in waves since 2026, the year of the first mass expirations.
• Insurance that does not cover the aircraft of the day — a valid policy, but the drone used is not on the covered list.
• Reconstructed registers — a flight log filled in with a single handwriting, dated the day before, is obvious.
• The declared-vs-practised inconsistency — deliverables that prove flights over a populated area when no prefecture declaration exists.

The express audit, to be redone every quarter:

• ☐ My operator registration and my STS declarations are up to date (company name, address, scenarios)
• ☐ All the team's certificates are valid, with their practical attestations
• ☐ Every aircraft in service is registered, marked, electronically identified — and insured
• ☐ My operations manual is in an up-to-date version, signed, and the team actually applies its procedures
• ☐ Flight and maintenance logs kept as you go
• ☐ For every sensitive mission of the last 3 years: declaration, notification, approvals and authorisations archived
• ☐ All of it exportable as a single file — not scattered across three inboxes and a hard drive

• Cooperative and factual — the inspector is doing their job; aggression or improvisation always work against you.
• Answer only what you know — 'I'll send you that document during the day' beats a vague approximation.
• In the field: keep the required documents accessible from your smartphone — operator information statement, operations manual, the drone's class declaration of conformity, the present pilot's ID and training records, the aircraft register extract, flight approvals, the insurance certificate, the filing or notification for the ongoing flight.

Depending on the findings: a simple instructive exchange, a request to come into compliance within a deadline, or — for established breaches — administrative or even criminal follow-up (non-compliant flights engage the responsibility of the operator and the remote pilot). An organised operator who shows well-kept registers and living procedures goes into the inspection on solid ground.