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FAA Shuts Down Search-and-Rescue Drones
An anonymous reader writes "For about a decade, Gene Robinson has been putting cameras on remote-controlled model aircraft and using them in search-and-rescue missions. But now the Federal Aviation Administration has shut him down, saying his efforts violate a ban on flying RC aircraft for commercial purposes. Robinson doesn't charge the families of the people he's looking for, and he created a non-profit organization to demonstrate that. He also coordinates with local authorities and follows their guidelines to the letter. The FAA shut him down because they haven't designed regulations to deal with situations like this, even though they've been working on it since 2007. 'So it's difficult to argue that his flights are more dangerous than what goes on every weekend at RC modeling sites throughout the United States, which can include flights of huge models that weigh 10 times as much as Robinson's planes; aerial stunts of nitromethane-fueled model helicopters; and the low-altitude, 500-kilometer-per-hour passes in front of spectators of model jets powered by miniature turbine engines.'"
Always ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And they're nowhere near coming up with guidelines, as I'm pretty sure there's honestly no way to do this AND maintain current safety levels.
Current guidelines already include rc aircraft. The only difference here is 'commercial.' The FCC has guidelines for non-commercial use, but haven't done anything for commercial use.
This is something that is bothering a lot of people, but this particular guy is becoming the face of the problem for political reasons, because if you want to get something done, it is easier to show someone with a sympathetic cause that can get people outraged.
This is similar to calling some group of people bigots. The FCC is an anti-search-and-rescue bigot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yah, that's not a great move vs. a civil regulator like the FAA or FCC.
He has a pilot certificate that they can revoke; they can impose civil (not criminal) fines of tens of thousands of dollars before an administrative law judge, where there's no standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt (only preponderance of the evidence).
It is a fundamental principle in the United States that, unless something is illegal, it is legal. Regulations, therefore, should enumerate what makes something illegal, not what makes it legal. To do otherwise prohibits the possibility of inventing better ways to do something, until/unless the regulations are modified to allow it.
The problem within the FAA is that they have regulations that work both ways. In most cases, they tell you what you CANNOT do to remain legal, in others, they tell you what you MUST DO to remain legal.
All this guy has to do is wait for the next missing person to show up dead from exposure/injury, and then go to the local paper saying "I could have saved this person, but the FAA wouldn't let me"
Well said! Fuck the FAA and fuck most of the federal government too. Many of those pea-brained morons couldn't make it in the real world anyhow.
In fact, if your radio controlled aircraft is operating on HAM bands then you can probably, successfully argue emergency and disaster assistance. I know because I am a General-class HAM radio operator.
Under the regulations (or lack of regulations) under which this guy is being shut down, drone package delivery would certainly be considered a commercial activity and ruled to be illegal. Amazon's drone program is clearly dependent upon a change of regulation to be viable.
I'm not at all clear how this is to be considered a commercial activity. It isn't commerce in the sense of money changing hands between the service provider and the beneficial recepient. It isn't commerce in the sense of operating for profit. The only basis I can imagine is that it's because it has a _purpose_, it's not just flying around for the f**k of it. Consequently, if it has a beneficial purpose, it has a reason to be allowed, and therefore it needs to be ruled illegal, so that it won't get in the way of having the FAA make whatever regulations they please. It's my tax dollars being wasted in the worst way.
The FAA has been overturned by a a federal judge on this, and non-commercial and commercial drone flying are now legal.
" NTSB Administrative Law Judge Patrick Geraghty ruled Thursday that the policy notices the FAA issued as a basis for the ban weren’t enforceable because they hadn’t been written as part of a formal rulemaking process. "
http://www.politico.com/story/...
Decision 3-6-14:
http://www.kramerlevin.com/fil...
Here's a small Parrot drone at 1553 feet in the UK. It's little, but if it was sucked into a jet engine, the engine would definitely be damaged and might fail. In 2013, someone was flying a drone near JFK in New York and the drone had a near miss with a jetliner.
Unless drones were to start flying in large numbers of "flocks" they are unlikely to be as big a hazard to aircraft as birds.
There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.
You just destroyed the entire R/C aircraft industry in one instant.
I'd LOVE for them to do this.
The problem is that I can go out and fly my turbine powered 100 pound F16 at several hundred miles an hour for crowds of spectators with an old 72mhz radio that has pretty much zero interference rejection ... but I can't fly my 2 pound quad and take a pictures with it for commercial use even though my quad will never exceed 10mph and uses a DSSS based radio that will reject any signal that doesn't have the right GUIDs and checksums ... and is never used for in front of crowds, nor does it carry a half gallon of kerosene for fuel, and the quad has an auto pilot that will land it if it gets a low battery, over current, loss of control radio, loss of telemetry radio, or simply flying outside of the geo-fenced area.
Its fucking retarded. Its okay as long as no one can possibly profit from it, but if there is profit, fuck it, the EXACT same thing is illegal, and there is NO WAY I can make it legal without treating the UAV as if it were an aircraft capable of carrying passengers for hire!
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Current guidelines already include rc aircraft. The only difference here is 'commercial.' The FCC has guidelines for non-commercial use, but haven't done anything for commercial use.
And the "guidelines" they have for this non-commercial use of R/C planes that you're referring to says nothing of commercial or non-commercial use, and it's *advisory* -- not binding.
The FAA is basically just making up their rules as they go along, and they can't even bother to write them down so that people will know what the rules are. Instead, people get letters from the FAA saying that they're breaking the rules. Now, from that, people have sort of deduced what these unwritten rules are now, but it's still messed up.
Which is probably what prompted this ruling against the FAA ... they can't enforce laws that they haven't even made yet. (That said, they continue to try, and other courts may agree with them. But they could fix this by actually writing down their rules and making them official.)