Elevating Industry Standards

We are fixing the UK drone industry.

HireDronePilot was built to protect clients from uninsured hobbyists and to give highly-qualified commercial drone operators the platform they deserve.

"The drone industry was chaotic. I wanted to build a place where clients knew they were completely protected."

Hi, I'm Peter Leslie.

Founder & GVC Drone Pilot

I started my career flying drones commercially for construction site monitoring and complex roof surveys. It didn't take long to realise there was a massive problem in the industry.

Property managers, construction firms, and marketing agencies were blindly hiring drone operators off Facebook or Google — completely unaware that the drone pilots they hired didn't hold the correct Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) licences or commercial public liability insurance.

If an uninsured, unqualified drone pilot crashes a drone into a building or a person on your site, the liability often falls back on you — the client who hired them.

And insurance is only half the problem. Even when nothing crashes, hobbyists routinely deliver the wrong thing: blurry imagery, incomplete coverage, a dataset your surveyor can't actually process. Deadlines slip, planning applications stall, and clients end up paying twice — once for the cheap drone pilot, and again for a qualified drone operator to come back and redo the work properly.

I created HireDronePilot to solve this. We are a curated introduction platform. Before any drone pilot is allowed to see your project brief or send you a quote, my team and I manually verify their qualifications, insurance documents, and flight history. When you use our platform, you aren't just saving time comparing quotes — you're guaranteeing that your operation is 100% legal, safe, compliant, and that the data you get back is actually usable.

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Vetting Standards

Peter's Licences & Credentials

HireDronePilot is built around CAA compliance and operational accountability. These are the licences I personally hold — they set the benchmark used to assess every drone pilot on the network.

Peter Leslie — GVC

CAA Operational Authorisation (GVC) Mandatory

Formal assessment for commercial drone operations in UK airspace.
Supports structured risk assessment and mission planning standards.
Sets the benchmark used to assess drone pilots on HireDronePilot.

Peter Leslie — A2 CofC

A2 Certificate of Competency Verified

Supports closer-proximity work with clear operational boundaries.
Important for urban and built-environment drone project delivery.
Reinforces practical compliance standards across the drone pilot network.

Peter Leslie — Flyer ID

CAA Flyer ID (A1 & A3 Categories) Mandatory

Demonstrates active registration and drone operator accountability.
Supports traceability for aircraft operation and compliance records.
Part of the credibility stack behind HireDronePilot vetting.

It's bigger than just me.

While I founded the company in Dundee, HireDronePilot has grown into a nationwide network of hundreds of elite, independent drone operators across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Join a community of over 660,000+ drone enthusiasts — the UK's most followed drone network.