Glossary

echoMike borrows heavily from CAA vocabulary and then adds a few words of its own. Where the two collide — override, clearance, revision — the app’s meaning is the narrower one. This page is the reference; each entry links onward where there is a full page behind it.

Access and billing

Term	What it means
Capability	One permission toggle, such as Manage safety or View files. Capabilities are what the app checks before it shows you a page or lets you write something. There are 21 of them, grouped into Finance, Employees, Organization settings, Fleet & maps, Operations, Calendars and Files.
Role	A named bundle of capabilities you can apply to a person in one click. Three are built in — Manager, Surveyor and Viewer — and you can define your own. Applying a role copies its capabilities onto the person; it does not link them to it.
Custom	What the role badge reads when a capability set matches no role exactly. It is a description, not a role you can pick.
Plan	Your subscription tier: Starter, Pro, Business or Enterprise. The plan decides which features exist for your organisation at all, and how much storage you get.
Entitlement (plan feature)	A capability of the plan rather than the person — organisation certificates, vehicle tracking, white labelling, the audit log. When one is missing you are told the surface is not included in your current plan, which no permission change will fix.
Seat	One active user against your plan allowance. Exceeding it puts the organisation into a blocked state until seats are added or people are marked as left.

Safety and clearance

Term	What it means
Readiness	The automated checks that run behind every upcoming job — organisation, pilot, aircraft, job, conditions and notices. Safety → Readiness is where they all live.
Severity	How hard a readiness finding pushes back. Blocker stops the flight. Confirm to proceed lets you fly but must be accepted by name. Advisory never stops a flight on its own. Met means nothing to do.
Flight clearance	The recorded decision that a job is fit to fly, made through Record flight clearance. Outcomes read Cleared, Cleared with conditions, Not cleared or Needs recheck.
Enforcement mode	Whether the gate is live. In advisory mode a clearance can be recorded past a blocking check. In enforced mode a blocking check cannot be cleared without an authorised override.
Continuation	What the trail calls a clearance recorded past a blocking check while enforcement is advisory. It is logged, with a reason.
Override	A named, expiring, formally approved exception to a blocking readiness rule. Needs the Approve flight-release overrides permission, and appears in the history as an Exceptional override.
Operating mode	How your organisation issues safety paperwork. Solo issues in one step and records it as self-issued. Team submits documents for review by whoever you assign. Regulated always requires a second person to approve, and confirming a check needs override authority.
Controlled document	A safety instruction or bulletin published to the organisation register, with a review and approval trail behind each version.
Revision	One version of a controlled document. People acknowledge revisions, not documents, so re-issuing a document asks for fresh acknowledgements.
Critical acknowledgement	A flag on a revision. An unacknowledged critical revision can block an affected flight release.
Acknowledgement	Your recorded confirmation that you have read and understood a revision. Made with Accept, on the home Safety panel or in Safety → Acknowledgements.
CAA SkyWise	The regulator feed, imported automatically every 15 minutes. Anything relevant can be promoted into your own safety register.

Regulatory and documentation

Term	What it means
Operator ID	The CAA registration number for the organisation flying the aircraft, in the form GBR-OP-…. Set on Settings → Company → CAA / Operating; a CAA audit pack export is blocked without a supporting document.
Flyer-ID	The personal registration a remote pilot gets by passing the DMARES online test. A built-in certificate type — no setup needed.
A2 CofC	A2 Certificate of Competency. A built-in certificate type.
UK GVC	General VLOS Certificate — theory plus a practical flight test, covering the subjects in CAP 722B. A built-in certificate type, and the qualification PDRA-01 operations are normally flown under.
PDRA-01	The Pre-Defined Risk Assessment the specific-category workflow is built around. It appears as the label beside the Safety page title, and is the usual value of Operating authorisation.
RAMS	Risk Assessment and Method Statement. Written per project and per job, reviewed and approved before flight.
CAP2606 Annex 2	The on-site record the CAA expects for a specific-category flight. echoMike generates it from the On-Site Planning form and carries the signed copy into the audit pack.
Occurrence / Airprox report	The incident report defined at PDRA-01 Appendix E, raised against a job from its Forms tab.
Ops Pack	The complete document bundle for one job, exported from the Ops Pack button in the job header.

Flying and survey

Term	What it means
VLOS	Visual Line of Sight. Maximum VLOS distance on Settings → Company is the default radius the flight area TOAL tool draws around each vertex; individual flight areas can override it.
TOAL	Take-off and landing. The TOAL tool works out where you can launch and recover inside a flight area, and reports when more than one TOAL zone is needed to cover it.
Flight area	The polygon you are permitted to operate in, together with its TOAL zones and operational parameters. Owned by the project, borrowed by its jobs.
NOTAM	Notice to Aviation. Airspace notices are shown as a map layer with their own filters, and feed the airspace evidence behind a job RAMS.
Kp index	The measured geomagnetic index, shown on the home readout strip. Above 5, expect degraded GNSS/RTK accuracy. It is measured rather than forecast, so a future job date has no reading.
CRS	Coordinate reference system. Settings → Company → Project & flight defaults controls which systems projects in this organisation can pick from.
RTK	Real-Time Kinematic positioning. Survey imports recognise the rover-to-base relationship, so base station points can be identified and removed from a point set.
Orthophoto	A georeferenced aerial image overlaid on the project map. Uploads take a .jpg, .jpeg, .png or .webp image plus its world file (.jgw, .jpgw, .wld, .pgw, .pngw or .wldx).