C6 class marking untethers the Matrice 4D — and quietly raises the evidence bar

DJI's Matrice 4D and 4TD hold a C6 class marking under EU Regulation 2019/945 — the class required for STS-02, the European standard scenario that allows pre-programmed BVLOS flights over sparsely populated areas. Until this month that marking applied only when the aircraft flew from a Dock 3. As DroneDJ reports, it now covers the RC Plus 2 Enterprise controller too — the same airframe, docked or handheld, with the same BVLOS eligibility.

Read the conditions, not the headline

The class marking comes with operator-side strings attached: the aircraft must run firmware 17.1.5 or later, the operator needs the authorisation or declaration their national authority requires, and the organisation must maintain documentation and emergency procedures. Notice the shape of that list. The manufacturer's part — build a compliant aircraft — is done and stamped. Everything else is a continuing state the operator has to be able to prove: which firmware each aircraft actually ran on each flight, that procedures existed and were followed, that the paperwork holds together when someone asks.

That's a records problem, and it's the one we build for. Dock Pulse logs your fleet's firmware history as it changes, keeps the maintenance log auditable against manufacturer-derived intervals, and produces the whole picture as a single evidence pack when the question comes.

The UK angle

C6 and STS-02 are EU constructs — the UK hasn't adopted them, and UK BVLOS still runs through SORA-based operational authorisations. But UK policy consistently tracks this direction of travel, and the aircraft in question is the one UK dock fleets already fly. When eligibility gets cheaper, the differentiator left is the operation's own evidence. Ours is the platform that keeps it.