FAA Proposes Rules To Limit Commercial Drone Use

An anonymous reader sends this report from the NY Times: In an attempt to bring order to increasingly chaotic skies, the Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday proposed long-awaited rules on the commercial use of small drones, requiring operators to be certified, fly only during daylight and keep their aircraft in sight. The rules, though less restrictive than the current ones, appear to prohibit for now the kind of drone delivery services being explored by Amazon, Google and other companies, since the operator or assigned observers must be able to see the drone at all times without binoculars. But company officials believe the line-of-sight requirement could be relaxed in the future to accommodate delivery services.

Comments

Bureaucratic red tape

[Dereck1701]

"keep their aircraft in sight"

So they're basically negating the one major aspect of a drone, the ability to fly significant areas autonomously by tethering it to someone on the ground. Sounds like bureaucratic red tape to me, if you can't kill a thing make it useless to do it by wrapping it in so many "common sense" measures as to make it useless. I can understand some things, requiring insurance, constant tracking, keeping records, but maintaning line of sight either shows a complete lack of understanding of what a drone is or a blatant attempt to kill a (possibly) nascent industry.

Re:Bureaucratic red tape

[LWATCDR]

These are safety rules people Keeping the aircraft in sight means and having the ability to have the operator take control is actually a good rule. It should help keep down injuries and property damage. Remember this is for a vehicle of up to 50lbs. A 50lbs vehicle moving at say 80 mph can do a lot of damage.
And before anyone says it this is for all remote control aircraft and not just quadcopters! I have seen fixed wing RC aircraft moving a lot faster than 80mph.

These rules will allow for things like aerial photography for movies, news, and real estate, also for a lot of AG uses and other inspection tasks.
Nope these are good rules to start with and in a few years maybe opened up.
The last thing anyone wants is for a 50lbs drone to crash into a school bus full of Nuns taking orphans to a Christmas party and having it crash into an animal shelter killing all the kids, nuns, and puppies.