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FAA Proposes $1.9 Million Fine For Unauthorized Drone Use
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has been under pressure to regulate the nascent drone industry. It's obvious they lack a clear idea of how to proceed — but they're trying. Today they announced a proposal to fine SkyPan International a whopping $1.9 million for allegedly conducting 65 unauthorized commercial drone flights over Chicago and New York City. The flights occurred over a period of almost three years, for the purpose of aerial photography. 43 of the flights impinged upon highly restricted airspace, and the FAA says none of them were "without risk." They bluntly allege that SkyPan "operated the aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger lives or property." SkyPan now has 30 days to respond.
Clear policies need to be established, particularly for those who think they can fly their drones over private property at their whim.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yeah, deliberately and knowingly entering reserved airspace dozens of times probably should earn someone a hefty fine, or rather should really earn prison time. Doodling around in the flights paths of commercial airliners constitutes a ridiculous and needless risk if the FAA complaint is accurate. People hate the idea of the FAA controlling drones, but the FAA will *need* power over drones if their pilots keep acting like reckless fuckers.
Maybe Congress could get off their ass and give the FAA a specific, bounded mandate for controlling and allowing drone flights so airspace regulations doesn't descent into a quagmire of confused case law and bureaucratic over-reach like the ATF handling of firearms has become. There's options, but again if drone pilots don't practice some fucking sense the realistic options for minimal regulation will just keep diminishing.
What the hell is that all about? I rather like the idea of being able to board an aircraft and not have any problems because some yokel with too much money decides it's fun to fly a piece of plastic into the engine of my plane. Please FAA - keep on fining!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Why do we need MORE government regulations? $1.9 million just for flying a quad copter?? Just another notch in the long string of big government regulations that are stifling innovation. They are going to kill the nascent drone boom before it even takes off, literally and figuratively.
Surely the purpose of a fine, or any other punishment, is to discourage similar behavior in future. I did a quick search on SkyPan and it looks like they have already obtained the proper authorization from the FAA (Drone startup issued biggest fine ever for flying without permission). So why hit them so hard if they have already adjusted their behavior? It's probably to set an example, but it seems very excessive for a legitimate company that appears to be adhering to the regulations already ...
It did not matter the Air Traffic Control violated 1 km horizontal separation and 1000 feet vertical separation without a mid air collision. If the rule was violated the incident report must be filed. All rule violations must be filed. Accidents are too infrequent to infer statistically significant conclusions.
Among the federal agencies FAA has a very good track record of amending the rules and regulations to help improve safety. It does not simply issue fines for incident violations. When some rule violation becomes too frequent it analyses the situation and comes up with a solution too.
For example, when the pilots go through the check lists, if it gets interrupted, the rule is to start from the top all over again. Pilots should NOT try to remember what was done and continue from the middle. But this rule was getting violated too often. They analyzed and found that the check lists were getting too long and it was quite tedious to start from the top. They broke the check list into sections, and amended the rule "Start from the top of section. Each section should start in its own page. No section should have more than so many checks". This is how we achieved the safety in air travel. It might hurt the free market fanatics to accept it, but FAA is one federal agency that is doing its job right.
May be a little too slow to respond, and may be it has some conflict of goals in its charter, "to promote safety" as well as "to promote air travel". It is high time we remove the requirement for it to promote air travel and make safety its single goal.
In fact its procedures draw universal acclaim and some medical researchers are arguing for check lists for surgeons for their procedures.
If FAA says this drone operator flew their machines with reckless disregard for safety, they did. They should pay the fine.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Obvious on what grounds? That some random fuckwad on the internet disagrees with them?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
SkyPan operated the 43 flights in the New York Class B airspace without receiving an air traffic control clearance to access it, the FAA alleges. Additionally, the agency alleges the aircraft was not equipped with a two-way radio, transponder, and altitude-reporting equipment. The FAA further alleges that on all 65 flights, the aircraft lacked an airworthiness certificate and effective registration, and SkyPan did not have a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization for the operations. SkyPan operated the aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger lives or property, the FAA alleges.
If you have flown to New York and Chicago between March 21, 2012, and Dec. 15, 2014 you might have been endangered by this company. It operated drones which were not airworthy, it operated drones without the transponder to alert the ATC about its altitude, location and speed. These machines are too small to show up in radar. Without a transponder they are nearly invisible to radar.
New York is where both engines of USAir flight were hit by soft bodied geese weighing less than 20 pounds each and forced the plane to crash land in the Hudson river. The drones have hard metal parts and hard plastic. They would do far more damage to the plane.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How about FAA define the *laws* first, then the *punishment* later.
Pretending a drone is a plane and fining it for not having a two way radio to the pilot and transponder, really doesn't make sense. FAA have to define what a drone is (as opposed to a toy or a manned or manned rotocraft or manned balloon) and then what the rules are for drones.
Trying to apply aircraft rules to drones, like certificate of airworthiness, taxiing rules, requriing certified parts etc. is a silliness. Claiming that it comes under normal rotocraft rules because it has less than 9 passenger seats and weighs under 7000 lbs???? Ridiculous.
I get that you don't like drones, but rabid "throw them all in prison" won't be funny when your kid is arrested for making a clock ^h^h^h flying a drone.
FAA needs to get its shit together, define what the rules for drones are, because there is no way a drone will comply with taxi rules or required to have metal rotars, or follow the rules on how its yaw controls work (as if a pilot is sitting in it!), all just meaningless.
Maybe Drone manufacturers need to step up to help understand the regulations better. Do you think these regulations are clearly defined and easily acceptable? Vote here -> http://www.yanoit.com/#/Questi...
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I understand the safety issues, but I think some drone operating at under 1000 feet should not be considered any kind of danger to aircraft away from an airport. This technology should not be shut down with regulations, as it may one day find it's way into normal aircraft and you can bet it's a testbed for us ever having flying cars. This stuff needs to be supported not banned over "privacy" and overzealous safety requirements. Planes don't fly between buildings in cities, they also don't fly under 1000 feet unless they are landing or doing some sort of aerial photography or sightseeing themselves. Maybe the flight ceiling should be mandated to be controlled by software and limited to 500 feet or something, that seems fair to me - the only things that would go that low would be helicopters and I don't think a drone would be a big danger to those rotors. Indeed eventually police and news helicopters will be replaced by drones entirely and that's a boon for safety and cost savings. I think there's too much panic about this stuff and it should be considered more fairly on the merits and benefits of the tech vs these risks instead of just making them the boogeyman. They enable a lot of creativity and utility in a wide array of areas both professionally and otherwise, and I think a lot of these ban the drones fine the drones shoot the drones things completely ignores those aspects and just demonizes them and anyone who uses one for any purpose. It seems very short sighted. These safety and privacy concerns can be worked out legally and otherwise while being good for both sides instead of bad for only one.
It's not the manufacturers, it's the users. Those of us who fly rockets - and all the traditional RC aircraft pilots - know the regs and we stick to them pretty damned closely because it's safety. The manufacturers are selling a product, and while it needs to be airworthy and safe to operate, they have no control over where it's operated.
I can only fly certain impulse rockets near my house because of air traffic restrictions. That doesn't mean manufacturers should make bigger engines - it just means if I want to fly them I have to take them somewhere where they will be safe and legal (like Black Rock).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Air safety is achieved by rigorous enforcement of rules. One can not show the lack of adverse consequences for a violated rule as defense for violating the rule. At the time the rule violation happened, the violator did not know it would have no adverse consequences.
As an engineer, I like this kind of thinking because it is fair and predictable--a person who breaks a rule gets the same punishment regardless of whether it causes harm, because the rule is deigned to prevent the *possibility* of harm.
As a human being, I know our society is too emotional to do that in the real world. We punish drunk driving differently if it causes a death, for example, and let the *luck* of whether someone dies greatly determine the outcome.
Why can't these fines be a set amount? For example: 300% of the cost of the drone PER flight if there is no camera or anything attached, 500% of the cost of the drone per flight if there is a camera. That's in addition to any damages and the public immediately owns any content from the drones, such as photos, videos, flight data, etc.. Big companies have bigger drones... it should scale? It's annoying that America's laws are supposed to be "for the people" but the people never really benefit from them.
mapbox has a really useful map https://www.mapbox.com/drone/n.... FAA have a really simple description https://www.faa.gov/regulation...
It shows the exclusion zones around the airports. Defined as Class B airspace.
The rules are fairly simple. Ground or above is controlled airspace. ATC must know and must be able to know where your aircraft is. You could possibly argue that below the treeline/building line should be considered safe, but the rules are clear.
Likely the company repeatedly flew in the area north of central park which is restricted. In particular this company has been doing it for a while with both UAV and manned aircraft, and should have known better. For this type of fine, likely they had been warned too.
While they are at it, they should require all drone operating systems to have a kill switch too. Think of the children, a terrorist lurks in every corner, freedom!
The press release (and the news articles that use it) are pretty thin on details. It kind of reads as "you didn't have your papers in order" which is technically true, but doesn't go to the real heart of the matter: what were they doing that was dangerous (other than flying an aircraft in Class B airspace without a transponder, which *might* be dangerous, but is not imminently dangerous per se).
It's called asking for a Certificate of Authorization.
Kind of like getting a driver's license to use a car on the road.
But no, in this modern "be disruptive, do what you want, and ask for rule changes later" model, I guess they didn't want to do that.
The way police "fight" drunk driving is by creating very heavy punishment, but enforce it lackadaisically. The probability of getting caught is low, but if you do get caught the punishment is severe. The ExpectedCost = Sum over the driving population (probability of getting caught * severity of punishment). This leads to widespread rule violation, gaming the system, using apps to minimize getting caught etc. Add to it the conflict of interest due to the fines being used as revenue source for the municipality.
FAA approach would be: Something along the lines of "all drivers who drove drunk must file an incident report voluntarily". You will be surprised how much FAA relies on voluntary disclosure from all the parties, airlines, pilots, ATC, maintenance logs etc. It would collect the reported incident data and try to get to the root of the problem. It would not set up a single blood alcohol limit for all roads and all locations. It would eventually classify roads as Class A, Class B etc with different blood alcohol levels. Will encourage a combination of public transport or shared transportation of drunk passengers through Class A and Class B thoroughfares to park-and-ride lots accessible by Class C and Class D thoroughfares. The drunks would be allowed to reach their homes on their own. They really don't want to kill you or damage their cars or die in accidents. They just want to go home. It is as much in their interest to avoid an accident as it is yours. Will allow drunk drivers to install "I'm driving drunk" warning lights on their cars to alert others and voluntarily install speed limiting devices.
Of course FAA will not get any financial incentive in punishing the drunk drivers. It would beg for handouts from the government for its operating budget. The free market fanatics would attack it continuously and hamper it in every possible way.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Liberals will never let the government be defunded. Liberals hate that you have money and they want to take it away from you and give it to other people. They hate that you keep what you earn. So much hate. So much. Hate.
Can you explain why you are so stupid?
By and large the FAA does a pretty good job of making the regulations readable. They are not intended for lawyers, they are intended for the pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, and everybody else to read. Now, they DO have technical words in them, but they provide (often in the same book) a helpful guide called the Aeronautical Information Manual to explain things. It is also clearly and concisely written, with many, many diagrams. If you can't understand what to do after that, I have serious doubts as to whether you should be in the airspace at all.
The solution is obvious. The time has come to equip our commercial aircraft with fricken laser beams. That way they can knock drones and geese alike out of the sky before they hit the aircraft. (I'm only mostly joking.)
First off, let me say that I am not against creating laws that make sense but things are going way overboard. There are just way too many laws in this country and at this rate our rights are being signed away more and more every day. There is already laws surrounding restricted air space which drones could easily fall within, or, at the very least trespassing. This is just yet another example of government paranoia infringing on peoples rights. Under pressure...? By whom, themselves? I don't see Americans protesting for million dollar fines and jail time. Not to mention, this is an innocent infraction, equivalent to flying hobby RC toys. This is rubbish.
The National Airspace works because there is a published set of regs (mostly written in blood), flyers understand it, and occasionally the FAA needs to enforce when they don't.
The first step is a clear, published set of regs (as opposed to guidelines), then educated pilots, then occasional enforcement.
The FAA appears to be skipping steps 1 and 2 and jumping to step 3.
I don't see how this in any way increases safety. It may be a diversion which saps energy from what is actually needed and so decreases safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Causby
Seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about airspace property ownership here. There isn't much case law on airspace but there is some, at least 83ft seems to be what is defined, but "navigable airspace" starts at 500'. Somewhere between there is probably the "limits of ownership" as defined by current US law. Also I'd watch the FAA accusations that the flights "impinged upon highly restricted airspace". A while back they were trying to build windmills near me in the most rural part of the region, the site was over 10 miles from the nearest major airport and apparently they needed a special permit because the airport claimed to have control over hundreds of square miles of airspace anywhere near them.
Here's the problem: If you allow the FAA to get away with this crap, then you have lost the war and have given up power to yet another byzantine bureaucracy. This five-mile rule is ridiculous for several reasons: 1) Airports generally don't have 360-degree approach patterns (heliports notwithstanding and even they have approach and departure rules), 2) No airport pattern is lower than 800 feet except on final and departure legs which are clearly defined and those don't need 5 miles, 3) Where did they come up with that figure for the fine and who gets the money?
I don't recognize their claim to authority anymore.
Criminality in the face of legal constraints.
That is an impressively paranoid screed.
You really should stay in the basement, but keep up on the Vitamin D pills, you'll need them.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Usta be tiny.
Usta be foam.
Usta be flown at insignificant altitude.
Usta be niche hobby.
Usta be just like RC toys.
Usta be . . .
People obviously aren't policing themselves, so you most certainly do know what the answer is.
You change the toys, you change the regulations.
I about doubled over laughing after reading thi......oh, wait, you were serious?
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
that if a government bans civil usage of drones, the country inevitably and hopelessly falls behind in development of the technology. This is already happening. Chinese civil drones produced by the DJI company are much better technologically than anything US or European.
The US and Canada plans to increase no-fly areas around airport to 9 or even 20 miles for civil UAVs. It means basically banning civil drones. While there was not a single serious accident yet involving a civil drone. In the whole world, ever.
At the same time military drones, which should be banned in my opinion, always get green light, even though thousands innocent people were killed as a collateral damage.
I doubt it is serious, it is just the Liberal version of the conservative troll. He attributes incorrect policies to a political movement, then demonizes them for it.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
commercial
As far as I know not a single test was ever done of a collision between a quadcopter and a manned aircraft.
All we need is a testing facility and frangible design of civil UAVs. After a collision with the speed of more than 150 - 200 km/h UAV should just fall apart as if made from sand. Problem solved.
Of course someone would hack the app and circumvent the safeguards. And when they get caught they can be sent to jail. Given a legal and reasonable way to do something, most of the people will follow the law.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There used to be stars up there, light pollution killed them, so let's kill the daytime sky as well. Fill it with drones!
For science, for agriculture, surveying, checking something like a railroad track in some remote locations, great, but much beyond that, there are issues.
I don't ever want to see some drone dragging a banner ad for the local ambulance chaser across my sunset.
And what about changing people's behavior in public? Say I'm out with some hippies protesting Monsanto? Or some real crazies out Tea Bagging for Jesus, and I see a drone. I'm going to assume video is being taken, and I'm going to assume facial recognition sw will be used to find my identity.
My employer wouldn't like some of the things I protest. I understand there is no right to privacy in public, but a drone with a camera is a camera on steroids. It gathers up everything in it's view, not unlike the NSA spying program.
Or how about we just get video of people doing people things, scratching their asses, picking their noses, and post them to youtube. How do we deal with that on a vast scale? Do we have any right to freedom from camera's at all? Do we have to be on guard at all times?
And then what? Infrared camera's watching us whack off? Weapons on drones? Oops, both of those things are already here.
I'm pretty sure we can reverse engineer whatever China is cranking out just as well as they've been reverse engineering our stuff. I think there are bigger things to consider.
isn't the FAA ruling on drones less than a year old? Wasn't before this, the drone space pretty much unregulated?
I'm not seeing the supposedly "obvious" -- namely that they "lack a clear idea of how to proceed." This seems pretty dang clear; what's more, I kind of agree with it. And so will you in 20 years when the sky is filled with drones.
you can fly in any airspace other then no fly under 500 feet. as there is no risk of hitting any aircraft at that height, these laws have been around for a long time and i hope this company challenges them on there bs.
So the FAA misses their deadline for establishing policies for drone use.....and there just like.... "Yeah....we're gonna fine you guys for flying drones over NYC for the last 3 years" They just ran out of cubans.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:
"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)
Hypocrite - You admit you use admin priv
&
How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?
---
"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)
You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!
FACT:
Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!
---
Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
---
* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?
---
Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!
I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )
I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
You told me you learn from guides?
I write good ones that MILLIONS USE& was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...
+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS that are endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
You did all that? No!
(& that's ONLY a SMALL part of what I could put out...)
APK
P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" as far as security...apk
YOU say "hosts=bad" (but they add security, speed, & reliability) & bitch on admin privelege to UPDATE vs. threats:
"So, have you figured out why privilege escalation is a bad thing yet?" - by Coren22 on Tuesday September 22, 2015 @05:15PM (#50577809)
Hypocrite - You admit you use admin priv
&
How else can I programmatically update hosts minus it in Windows?
---
"Of course it requires elevation to write to the hosts file" - by Coren22 (1625475) on Wednesday September 23, 2015 @05:35PM (#50585879)
You FINALLY later admit there's no other way!
FACT:
Even MalwareBytes AntiMalware (best one) DEMANDS you use admin privelege (you saying it's "bad" too?) it can't do its job fully otherwise, like many security tools do!
---
Aryeh Goretsky NOD32/ESET says hosts = good security-> http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
Oliver Day (Symantec) does-> http://www.securityfocus.com/c...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts hosts & recommends my APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit-> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
---
* HOW MANY SECURITY PROS DO I NEED TO KNOCK THE CHOCOLATE OUTTA YOU?
---
Those security pros INCLUDE me: I work w/ guys from malwarebytes' hpHosts on a regular basis!
I've professionally worked for decades as a combined domain-wide network admin & software engineer since 1994 (Even showing you HOW to migrate a hosts across an enterprise-> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )
I've also been securing computers + WRITING GUIDES using CIS Tool (who took fixes from me http://slashdot.org/comments.p... - bonus) http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
You told me you learn from guides?
I write good ones that MILLIONS USE& was PAID FOR IT http://pcpitstop.com/news/winn...
+ WARES TO PROTECT USERS that are endorsed & hosted by security pros -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
You did all that? No!
(& that's ONLY a SMALL part of what I could put out...)
APK
P.S.=> You're all TALK -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... & a "ne'er-do-well" as far as security...apk