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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.
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
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