Slashdot Mirror
Drone Pilot Wins Case Against FAA
schwit1 writes "In a David vs. Goliath battle that pitted the Federal Aviation Administration against the operator of a small model airplane, a federal administrative judge has sided with the aircraft's pilot. The judge has dismissed a proposed $10,000 fine against businessman Raphael Pirker, who used a remotely operated 56-inch foam glider to take aerial video for an advertisement for the University of Virginia Medical Center"
1. Guy flies radio-controlled model plane.
2. ?
3. Guy is in court.
What happened a step 2?
That's the meat of the verdict - since that's not given in the summary.
"Pirker operated the aircraft within about 50 feet of numerous individuals, about 20 feet of a crowded street, and within approximately 100 feet of an active heliport at UVA, the FAA alleged. One person had to take "evasive measures" to avoid being struck by the aircraft, the agency said."
He flew a model next to a helipad and wonders why the FAA are stomping on him. They apparently overreached a bit when going into the commercial motivations for flying the model, but he was being a dick and the FAA is not entirely wrong to stomp on people who are flying like a dick.
"I think he's still asleep. He lives in Hong Kong and they're 12 hours off," Schulman said
The University of Virginia couldn't find anyone in the US to take the pictures??? *shakes head*
One of two possibilities:
1) The FAA does not understand the difference between a drone (which does not require visual contact with the operator to be flown) and a toy airplane (which cannot be controlled out of sight of its operator).
2) The FAA is trying to consolidate more power to government by conveniently misinterpreting the rules to give them the ability to ensnare model airplane owners in a tangled web of onerous regulation and raise more money.
My vote is on #2.
I understand wanting to regulate full-sized military-style drones, but going after small commercial entities flying go-pro carrying quad-copters is a bit much.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Was the heliport the hospitals? By "active" does that mean that the heliport was actually being used at the time by a helicopter or that the heliport is used regularly but not at the time the drone was flying? If a helicopter was taking off or landing and if the drone was in flight and actually near the heliport at the time, then I could see the charges. There are many painted circles with H's in them that are not used very often. If these are going to be considered active heliports, lots of questions will need to be asked. We had one of these painted circles at work and if it was used as a heliport twice a year, that would have been a busy year for it.
Passionately Indifferent
I used to build and fly 2 meter gliders anywhere I could launch them, only FCC concerns I ever had was the frequency I was controlling them with.
Getting damn risky now.
FWIW my fav was the Gently Lady http://www.towerhobbies.com/pr...
Exactly how much time and tax-payer money did the U.S. prosecutor waste on this nonsense? So every kid with a model plane is now possible subject to a $10,000 fine?
WTF IS WRONG WITH AMERICA?
The judge should have disbarred the US attorney that brought this case, period!
thousands of children start crying and interest in piloting as a job from such children drops... end result... future pilot shortage.
I'd like to read the court's judgement to better understand the reason, but while the FAA may seem overbearing in this case, the FAA is charged with public safety, and they take it very seriously. Anyone that did complain to the police or the FAA had Good Reason. Incidents with RC aircraft are not uncommon. I have to agree with the FAA on this one. If someone is appearing to be reckless with their aircraft, regardless of the type, it needs to be addressed.
... for sending me to the Wiktionary with "polyseme"
No, you were never a drone pilot.
You were an RC aircraft pilot.
The FCC governs radio rules, we're talking about the FAA, which governs airspace.
You were bound by the same laws as this guy for your aircraft to NOT be a drone. Once you break these rules, you become a drone and as such require full certification.
RC aircraft MUST be below 400 feet AGL.
RC aircraft MUST remain in line of site of the operator.
RC aircraft MUST NOT be operated for ANY commercial purpose.
If you break any of those you MUST have a waiver or a Certificate of Airworthiness for the aircraft (just like all commercial aircraft, including that Cessna some guy you know has) or you are breaking the law.
You were never allowed to fly your glider within 10 miles of controlled airport, and 2 or 5 miles of an uncontrolled airport. Ever.
Your ignorance of these rules does not mean they didn't exist.
FYI: I built and flew my first Gentle Lady (from Carl Goldberg!) when I was 14 :)
I've lost line of sight to my aircraft, not a good feeling when you are aware of how much damage EVEN a Gentle Lady could do if it hit someone in the head with that hardwood nose at 20 knots or so that they fly. Light they are, but still significant mass.
Now ... however, my aircraft ARE drones (all have ArduPilot or ArduCopters controllers in them now), now when I lose line of sight, I flip a transmitter switch and the aircraft brings itself home via autopilot ... it goes into fully autonomous mode and comes home :) Of course, this is exactly what the FAA wants to avoid since that 'flight home' has at times involved flying into the side of a house as it tried to regain altitude for the trip home. That bird was a lost cause anyway, but none the less, one can argue it never would have hit the house had it followed the original rules.
My son was born last year, I already ordered him a Gentle Lady to build, and a Sophisticated Lady for myself (The gentle lady with a T tail and electric motor instead of winch/tow/upstart launch.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How much money did the drone pilot have to pay in attorney fees for this case?
Never Underestimate the drive of any government agency to expand its sphere of influence and control. Whether its the FAA wanting to control a park full of kids and their radio control toys or the IRS making up laws out of whole cloth, they never miss an opportunity to take more control.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
RC aircraft MUST be below 400 feet AGL.
RC aircraft MUST remain in line of site of the operator.
RC aircraft MUST NOT be operated for ANY commercial purpose.
Citation? The only thing I can find on the first two is an advisory from the 80s that doesn't really look like it went through rulemaking. Compliance appears to be voluntary. At least, that seems to be all the laws/regulations say.
I haven't read the commercial rules - they might be more specific, but judging by how this court case went I'm skeptical.
IMHO,
FAA has laws giving them the (exclusive?) authority to regulate the safety of the national airspace.
That includes protecting folks and property in the air and on the ground.
To use that authority, they have to make regulations through a defined process with public comment, etc.
Policy statements and guidelines don't necessarily follow this process.
The architecture of the FAA regs (14 CFR) appears to be to control certain things that have caused problems.
This is the 'written in blood' principal which has served aviation well to date.
This results in a myriad of rules which regulated aircraft owners and operators are well aware of.
But this also raises the argument that new things may be free game until they get through the proper regulatory process.
The definitions in the regs for 'aircraft' and 'operate' are broad enough to cover all all the UAV events.
I have not yet found a a path through the regs that says for a UAV, a random person can't operate an aircraft.
I'm not an expert, there may still be an applicable path I haven't found.
If there is no such path, then hopefully the FAA is scrambling to make one.
Maybe running a regulatory bluff until they can.
Which their recent policy statements seem to confirm.
This is an unsafe situation.
If there is a path through the regs, it's really unfortunate that the FAA hasn't spelled it out.
If there isn't one, it would be interesting to know what is keeping them from making one.
Does anybody have a link to actual judge's thinking for this case to see what the reason for ruling against safety was?
> You were never allowed to fly your glider within 10 miles of controlled airport, and 2 or 5 miles of an uncontrolled airport. Ever.
The above is demonstrably false.
Our AMA field boundary is less than 500' from the end of the runway of an uncontrolled, International US Airport - not in line with approach/departure obviously, but perpendicular to the runway. It's been there for 20+ years. We see commercial flights daily, and from our flight stations can easily make out the tail numbers on aircraft landing and taking off.
Further, the same government entity that owns the airport leases the land the field is on to us.
There's zero chance the FAA isn't well aware of our site.
Looks like 'we' will have to right to use drones of our own to do fairly non-invasive things like monitor our own property, take aerial images and videos, and patrol for intrusion.
Expect corporate drones to roll out fairly soon now that it's not considered illegal.
Next step: Armed Drones. They'll probably start will paint-ball chemical/visual tags, and work up the lethality scale slowly, but surely from there.
At least the paint-balls aren't too directly life-threatening... unless you're knocked off a high-rise structure...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZnJeuAja-4
Really very cool IMO.
I don't think you read the article. The FAA made it very clear
> "the FAA continued. "Anyone who wants to fly an aircraft-manned or unmanned-in U.S. airspace needs some level of FAA approval."
The article made it very clear, FCC considers every RC plane, regardless if it is solely controlled by a conventional controller or capable of self flight as covered under it's drone guidance. The guidance given allowed for hobbyist use, but it still falls under the FCC's definition of a drone. The FAA position is that all RC plane use is also regulated by them, and the guidance given is there "permission" but the drone laws still apply.
It looks like the FAA is at a fork in the road: it doesn't know what to do with RC aircraft with the new-found popularity of drone aircraft (apparently built to be flown out of your line of sight). FAA has a valid interest in keeping safe aircraft that carry people. If RC aircraft and drones are a danger to aircraft with people in them then the FAA should be creating concise, limited rules like 'no flying over __ feet' or 'no flying within __ feet of an airport'. As for rules about what a drone or RC can do within those parameters then the local community can handle the rules, if any. In fact, most situations are likely already handled by existing laws. The commercial purpose of the RC in this case is irrelevant. The facts relevant to any FAA intervention is the location of the helipad, how close the plane was flown to people-carrying aircraft, and how high the plane was flown. Everything else seems irrelevant for FAA regulation.
The difference between your examples and the one is that being discussed is that he (Pirker) was flying it remotely in a "for profit" endeavor. Flying for profit IS governed by the FAA, as is flying it recklessly. Note also that the judge did NOT "side" with the "pilot", he just dismissed the fine. In doing so, the judge did not set aside the FAA's case against him, but rather seemed to be indicating that he felt the fine was excessive. I'm sure that the FAA will appeal and probably be successful considering that there are rules that have been worked out for flying "drones" or "UAVs" and all of them prohibit flying them within populated airspaces. Not to mention that Pirker flew it into controlled airspace (the heliport) without clearance or authorization. Doesn't matter that he's on the ground, and he's quite lucky that they didn't actually proceed with pursuing that since it does involve considerably more than a $10K fine, it also can entail jail time.
The EXACT same action (shooting video from an RC plane) is fine if it's a hobby, but illegal if done for-profit.... this is PROOF that this issue is ONLY money. The FAA gets power and prestige and money from regulating commercial aviation activity and if somebody crosses this line it has NO SAFETY IMPACT but deeply troubles the FAA - by risking exposure of the scam. When government makes rules that some things are regulated differently if done commercially, you can guarantee that somebody who is well-funded will create a business that jumps the proper hurdles and starts making money, then uses those rules to get government to suppress any less well-funded upstart would-be competitors.
The FAA is NOT the government organization that makes aviation safer... THAT function is performed by the little-known and (nearly unheard of in government) Excellent and competent NTSB. After any aviation incident it's the NTSB that comes-in and deploys science and engineering experts to analyze the incident and then openly publish the results so that everybody can learn from them. The nation's founders would never have permitted an FAA (they DID know about aviation - Kite flyer Ben Franklin was following the ballooning work of the Montgolfier brothers and wrota about future uses of human flight) because they did not intend the federal government to control anything like transportation. Any aircraft operating entirely within a state should not even be subject to the FAA because it's not engaged in interstate activity of any kind. Want your freedom? Government must be made small again.
Note 1: for anybody concerned about a need for standardized national airline service, the easy answer is: FAA control only in interstate/international airport approach/departure corridors and at over perhaps 10K or 20K feet...
Note 2: while big-government people of BOTH parties have used the "commerce clause" of the Constitution to force the federal government into everything (including things like the FAA and TSA), the truth is that when our founders wrote that clause assigning the federal government the job of regulating interstate commerce, the term "regulate" meant "to make regular" (which is why many old clocks were labelled "regulator") and NOT "write lots of laws dictating lightbulbs, serving sizes, calorie counts, etc and then hire thousands of bureacrats to enforce those rules and put in place hundreds of taxes and fees to force the public to do what government officials want them to do"
FYI, this is the video he got nailed for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Just sayin', I don't think any shipped with oak.
No, you were never a drone pilot.
You were an RC aircraft pilot.
The FCC governs radio rules, we're talking about the FAA, which governs airspace.
The subject title "I was once a drone pilot" was me being facetious of such an absurd charge for flying an RC plane. I was wrong in I thought the FCC was involved; one of those click submit at the same time noticing an error, but too late.
If you break any of those you MUST have a waiver or a Certificate of Airworthiness for the aircraft (just like all commercial aircraft, including that Cessna some guy you know has) or you are breaking the law.
You were never allowed to fly your glider within 10 miles of controlled airport, and 2 or 5 miles of an uncontrolled airport. Ever.
Your ignorance of these rules does not mean they didn't exist.
And ignorance is what I'd of pleaded. I thought I was fairly close to an air port but didn't realize just how close http://i60.tinypic.com/x1ka52.... From the air port to the High School was less than a mile, sure along mile.
The only rule I was aware of was checking transmitter flags to make sure I was on a different frequency. There was one other that flew at that school, using the 100 feet of surgical tubing method. I built a pod for a .079(?) engine to take me up - just sweet.
I wasn't in a club or with others who flew, so knew zero on the legalities of gliding, or flying.
I built 3 Gentle Ladies, the third - the wing and it's angles are perfect, not having others to talk to about how to do "stuff" I stretched my mylar with a cloths iron :}. A heat gun I found out later was the preferred method and sure would of been heck of a lot easier.
At the time Helicopters were the big thing and where I'd of gone if not for a life changing event, I bought an Amiga.