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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.
There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."
It doesn't matter. That's not what the rule is about. The Line-Of-Site rule is meant to make up for the fact that there is no pilot onboard the aircraft, and thus no way (if you're beyond line of site) to do the duty of seeing and avoiding other air traffic. If your UAS is a couple of kilometers away, invisible beyond something like a big tree line, you've got no idea how to quickly maneuver it if it's entering the path of, say, something like an air ambulance that's descending through 500' to land at an accident site. That's exactly the sort of scenario they're worried about: somebody like a journalist trying to get overhead shots of something like an accident scene, and sending his flying camera robot half a mile away BLOS to the location - and in comes a properly piloted traffic, S&R, or police helicopter. Or two. The journalist might be able to hear them, but if he can't even see, unaided, his own machine in the air, that's a serious hazard. Hence, LOS operations.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I honestly don't get what your point is Like, are you saying that if commercial operators can't fly drones nobody should, or maybe the other way round? Either way it is an absurd false equivalence.
I'm just telling you what the actual situation is. You can decide for yourself if you think that means that a journalist flying a 4-pound plastic quadcopter with a GoPro should be able to do the same things as the hobbyist who's standing right next to him doing exactly the same thing with the same equipment in exactly the same way, or whether you think the enthusiast should be subject to the same limitations as the journalist. Think what you will. I'm pointing out that the Obama administration thinks that the journalist should be currently banned from flying at all while the guy standing next to him can carry on unmolested. And that the proposed rules, once they go into effect in a couple of years, will still make strangely arbitrary distinctions between the two uses (and users).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A lot of cases where drones are being used commercially (aerial photography / site surveys / inspection of industrial installations) can still be done within the line-of-sight restriction. Because the operator still enjoys the other major aspects of drones: stable flight characteristics, and a telemetry+video downlink. I'm not a ig fan of regulations, but in this case I understand why they take a conservative stance for now.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...