How You Too Can Be Shut Down By the Feds For Flying Drones

An anonymous reader writes "University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Matt Waite waived a government cease and desist letter recently received for his experiments using 3-pound, $500 drones for news reporting (specifically, for a story about drought in Nebraska). He gave journalism organizations the lowdown on what they can expect from the government on this front going forward and said he's posting his experience in trying to get certified by the FAA on GitHub so they can follow along."

Comments

Re:Tin foil

[HornWumpus]

My hobby eye in the sky is legal. His professional eye in the sky is illegal.

Mine is a scale predator drone. I use it to 'real world troll' groups with paranoid populations. e.g. Occutards, gun shows, teabaggers, privacy advocates, protestors in general.

Completely legal as I'm doing it for fun.

Hint for anybody thinking of joining the fun. Put a plant in the group to spot the drone just as it completes an orbit and disappears. Otherwise they won't see it. At 400 feet AGL a five foot wingspan drone is about right.

Too Good To Live

[b4upoo]

Drones have an ability to make truth more evident. Not only people but governments do not like it when truth is available. Any effort to make good use of drones will be met with huge resistance. For example we are willing to spend billions of dollars on a border control as long as it does not work. Imagine what a fleet of drones could do to halt illegal immigration. Now tell me just how likely it is that drones will be heavily used to patrol our borders. I have seen this same phenomena in police work where a couple of cops came up with a great way to curtail drunk driving. Two cops simply waited outside popular bars and stopped drivers who pulled out of the parking lot late at night. Almost 100% of the stops resulted in a valid drunk driving arrest. The city quickly halted the practice. The problem was that the town bordered another town and when word got out people simply drove a few hundred yards to get drunk in the next town's bars. In other words the real working policy of the city was to make a show of stopping drunk driving while making sure that they really did not stop drunk driving.
                Drones work too well. By using drones we can expose situations and that endangers all kinds of social institutions. With a good swarm of drones on patrol we could really knock out almost all home burglaries at night. But how many companies and jobs depend on a busy criminal justice system? Society really is that perverted.

Re:RC plane?

[Megahard]

My television certainly should qualify, it does nothing but drone when it's on.

In that case, my wife would also qualify.

Re:Anything police can use should be restricted

[HornWumpus]

It's illegal to fly an RC model for any kind of pay.

As long as you are doing it for fun (and follow AMA safety rules), RC camera work is legal.

I am a pilot...

[jgreen1024]

Nothing stops these UAVs from flying in the same airspace as planes carrying people - all it takes is a little software malfunction. They are small and hard to see, aren't in radio contact with air traffic controllers, and don't show up on radar. There's a reason the government is concerned about them, and I suspect it's not about supressing truth.

Re:I am a pilot...

[HornWumpus]

Those rules are simple. We stay under 400ft. You stay above 1000ft. We don't get anywhere near airports. We don't fly if we see any traffic.

Even under those rules, RC is strictly non-commercial. Amateur reporters can continue to use eyes in the sky.

Re:I am a pilot...

[mbeckman]

I'm a pilot too. A helicopter pilot. You've got the rules wrong. Fixed wing aircraft stay 1000' and higher. But helicopters fly specifically at 500' AGL for the most part, as we are required to "avoid the flow of fixed-wing traffic." So there is a scant 100' clearance between us and potential catastrophe from an errant RC pilot. Drones are a worse hazard than RCs to helo pilots, because drones are often flown by idiots whose sole qualification is a Frys Electronics gift card. This includes the so-called drone journalists, who uniformly, in my experience, are ignorant of airspace rules and regulations.

Putting drones at the same site as an active news story likely to be covered by helicopter ENGs is abject stupidity. Drones, even million-dollar military models, are incapable of complying with the FAA's see-and-avoid visual flight rules for traffic separation. The technology to sense and avoid other aircraft in the same close quarters simply doesn't exist. Drones should be specifically outlawed in any journalistic or commercial role because they cannot operate with the same separation helos have from overlying fixed-wing traffic.

Re:What's the difference between a drone & R/C

[HornWumpus]

You can have a real time camera, as long as you operate it in line of sight.

You can't operate it for profit. e.g. Aerial photography of real estate.