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.

Comments

That's not the answer!

[EzInKy]

Clear policies need to be established, particularly for those who think they can fly their drones over private property at their whim.

Air safety relies on enforcement of rules

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

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.

Re:Were you endangered?

[CrimsonAvenger]

It operated drones which were not airworthy

It operated drones without an Airworthiness Certificate. Note quite the same thing as (not airworthy).

Note that very few, if any, of the RC model aircraft that have been flying since before most of you were born had Airworthiness Certificates, and yet there was no screaming, wailing, and tearing of clothes.

Problem seems to be that EVVVVIIIIILLLL!!!! word "drone", not the actual physical object in question....