Slashdot Mirror
FAA Bans Delivering Packages With Drones
An anonymous reader sends this report from Ars Technica:
The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon. The revelation was buried in an FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft." The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. ... In Monday's announcement, published in the Federal Register, the FAA named Amazon's December proposal as an example of what is barred under regulations that allow the use of drones for hobby and recreational purposes. The agency did not mention Amazon Prime Air by name, but it didn't have to. Under a graphic that says what is barred, the FAA mentioned the "Delivering of packages to people for a fee." A footnote added, "If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose."
quick... fire all those new "drone engineers".
Back to the catapult idea.
RTFS
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Drones are for delivering missiles.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
Yet another example of an overbearing bureaucracy killing innovation.
Low-level flight should be regulated on a municipal level, not through national airspace policies. Such type of drones doesn't need (despite having the ability) to fly higher than you average apartment block. As such, commercial, recreational or even military use of such gear should have never fallen under the FAA's jurisdiction, as the FAA never really had control over what's on a shallow level of the ground (excluding airports or helipads, but even there it's the facility that molds to the FAA regulation and not FAA regulation restricting it to total impossibility).
It's much like saying the FAA should regulate paper-plane throwing or bungee-jumping: "Hey, you can't jump from that bridge wearing an Amazon t-shirt silly. You're going to jail"
Trebuchet's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
You'd have to argue that since corporations are people too, the corporation can make deliveries as a hobby. Somehow, I don't think that will fly.
These rules are tentative, and Amazon is a long way off. By the time Amazon is ready, I think these rules will be modified.
I didn't check the actual article but, from the summary, this sounds like same old same old.
Drone use has been limited to non-commercial recreational use. This is not new, this has been the state of things for a while, we have seen several articles on it. I don't see how this adds anything new except to point out that Amazon's plan, wouldn't be legal under current regulations.
This seems kind of navel gazing as it was a) obvious and b) everybody has been expecting those regulations to change in the near future.
Was there really anyone who expected amazon would start such deliveries before the obvious and well known regulations that forbid it changed? I certainly expected all their plans were aimed at being ready for the opening of the floodgates and not an attempt to jump ahead of them.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
...this just means it's time for Amazon to laywer-up. Or lobbiest-up. Or both.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This has been debated before but here's the recap.
An administrative judge ruled in 2013 that the FAA does not have the authority (in other words it has not been given this authority by Congress) to regulate model aircraft including balsa-wood planes, paper-airplanes, radio-controlled (r/c) planes, helicopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, etc. This is established fact. The FAA elected NOT to appeal this.
The FAA has attempted to levy _one_ fine against someone flying a 'drone' (see above for disambiguation with quadcopters, hexacopters, etc. and realize it's the same thing) and THAT was the time the administrative law judge shot them down and hard.
The FAA can write whatever they like in the Federal Register.
Step 1: Get Congress to give them the authority. Until then the FAA lacks jurisdiction*.
Step 2: Get Congress to fund enforcement actions under this authority. Until then the FAA won't [be allowed to] enforce anything.
Step 3: Profit.
Ehud
commercial helicopter pilot
Tucson AZ US
* A previous poster said that "if you can put a piece of paper between it and the ground the FAA has jurisdiction." This is not true. The FAA's jurisdiction comes not from simplistic experiments with tree bark pulp and thin slots, but from the Code of Federal Regulations. It's all in there. Too boring to quote tho.
...ban an entire industry...
That industry better make with the campaign contributions, then.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
This was actually a very smart regulation. The fact is, the newspapers likely would have ended up filled with stories of people who had gotten a buzz cut or even seriously injured after being hit by a drone. The idea of sending a drone into neighbourhoods and relying on a computer algorithm and finicky electronics, hoping that nothing goes wrong and that it can avoid hitting something, perhaps even killing someone, is bonkers. There are too many things that can go wrong. A bug in code, a bad sensor reading, or simply something not being where it is expected to be, could send the thing headfirst into some kid riding his bicycle.
Just a couple of months ago, in March, a Federal National Transportation Safety Board Administrative Judge ruled that the FAA does not have legal authority to regulate small low-altitude commercial drones.
FAA seems to be trying to act like Obama, going ahead with policy it already knows to be illegal.
and have worked extensively on safety studies. No commercially available UAV (including the military ones) are anywhere close to safe enough to fly over populated areas. The experimental ones, generally, are not adequately designed to be able to characterize their safety. None of them meet the extant rules for aircraft design, nor can be flown in compliance with FAA operational rules outside of the (congress prohibited creating any) hobby RC aircraft rules.
Drones are inherently digital fly by wire aircraft. Standards exist for designing fly by wire aircraft, and have been learned the hard way ... people dying. None of the drones are anywhere close to meeting those design rules, and generally fail to comply with most other design rules except the structures ones. And, there is no ruleset yet for the datalinks to control the drones.
"but, but, but ... small drones" ... How many people are seriously injured every year by a flying object we call a "baseball". There's a reason that almost every baseball league requires batting helmets. And that's a very small flying object. Drones need a mature ruleset, and should not be allowed to fly anywhere near people until there's some ruleset, so we can start developing some maturity to that ruleset.
Presumeably the FAA doesn't think that hobbyists are much more responsible flyers than corporations doing business, so there must be another reason for this ban, yes? What could it be?
a) Corporate business use would amount to greatly increased drone flights, and the FAA just doesn't think its regulatory ability, or the safety aspects of the technology, is ready for prime time wide scale use yet? For example, the interaction of drones and conventional aviation would have to be worked out in great detail for safety, and more technology and rules would be needed.
b) Nuisance aspect of the technology? Noise? If widely deployed?
c) The FAA just likes banning stuff in general, and new stuff in particular?
d) Some vested competing interests (say, trucking industry? teamsters?,...?) are lobbying / bribing FAA senior administrators and/or politicians who have a say?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This is just like the ban slapped on amateur rocketry after 9/11. Knee-jerk reactions to non-existent problems. Amazon would never fly any drones without some massive insurance policy; they aren't even being given ANY chance to present a properly risk-assessed and due diligence plan forward - just a big NO from the FAA. This also reminds me of the recent cock-up over Russian rocket engines where SpaceX warned us the Russians would do just what they did a week later.
Henry Ford must be spinning in his grave seeing how much we clamp down on real innovation now. If he had to deal with this Brazil-style bureaucracy in his day his car wouldn't have ever seen the light of day; the Wright Brothers would have been issued a cease-and-desist and then raided by some fed SWAT team at Kitty Hawke. Just ridiculous and sad.