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New FAA drone rule is a giant middle finger to aviation hobbyists:
More than 34,000 people have deluged the Federal Aviation Administration with comments over a proposed regulation that would require almost every drone in the sky to broadcast its location over the Internet at all times. The comments are overwhelmingly negative, with thousands of hobbyists warning that the rules would impose huge new costs on those who simply wanted to continue flying model airplanes, home-built drones, or other personally owned devices.
"These regulations could kill a hobby I love," wrote Virginian Irby Allen Jr. in a comment last week. "RC aviation has brought my family together and if these regulations are enacted we will no longer be able to fly nor be able to afford the hobby."
The new regulations probably wouldn't kill the hobby of flying radio-controlled airplanes outright, but it could do a lot of damage. Owners of existing drones and model airplanes would face new restrictions on when and where they could be used. The regulations could effectively destroy the market for kit aircraft and custom-designed drones by shifting large financial and paperwork burdens on the shoulders of consumers.
"I think it's going to be harmful to the community and harmful to the growth of the UAS industry," said Greg Reverdiau, co-founder of the Pilot Institute, in a Friday phone interview. He wrote a point-by-point critique of the FAA proposal that has circulated widely among aviation hobbyists.
The new rules are largely designed to address safety and security concerns raised by law enforcement agencies. They worry that drones flying too close to an airport could disrupt operations or even cause a crash. They also worry about terrorists using drones to deliver payloads to heavily populated areas.
To address these concerns, the new FAA rule would require all new drones weighing more than 0.55 pounds to connect over the Internet to one of several location-tracking databases (still to be developed by private vendors) and provide real-time updates on their location. That would enable the FAA or law enforcement agencies to see, at a glance, which registered drones are in any particular area.
But critics say the rules impose massive costs on thousands of law-abiding Americans who have been quietly flying model airplanes, quad-copters, and other small unmanned aircraft for years—and in many cases decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)
Why not have a mobile app that reports the drone operators ID and location, via cellular, and assume a certain radius of flight from the location of the drone operator?
Still gives them a general purpose idea of drone locations for tracking without any real added expense other than a cellular phone and data rates, which are Walmart level cheap these days. Most areas would be covered excpet for very remote locations, in which case you could still use the app to report where you plan to fly your drone to keep it all legal like.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday March 03 2020, @06:30AM
This is part of the proposal.
My read of the proposed rules is that you need...
* An app on your phone and you fly within 450 feet of that phone.
* Your model to send telemetry to you to relay that telemetry the internet.
* Your model to send telemetry directly to the internet
* or to fly at a preapproved location.
If that read is correct I'd like to see
* The FAA encourage development of extremely low cost telemetry reporting modules
* A process to approve all existing AMA flying fields and new fields as preapproved locations
... and I commented to that effect.
I'm a realist. We're going to need some rules. The FPV hobby stomped all over the rules we have today and there are thousands of hours of footage on YouTube to prove it. This is the cost of that.