Drone Flight Takes To Living Rooms, Gymnasiums, and Parking Garages (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: The FAA can regulate the skies, but they don't own the airspace inside of buildings. There are many ways to get your flying fix indoors. Perhaps the most obvious is flying tiny quadcopters (about 1 inch on each side) in your living room. But for years, hobby groups have formed relationships with schools and churches to have meetups in their gymnasiums. It's not limited to propeller-aircraft; ultralight rubberband power fixed-wing is a popular indoor option. And FPV enthusiasts can get competitive by setting up race courses in parking garages.

Comments

Re:Gymnasiums?

[ScentCone]

Oh yeah sure, lots of churches have gymnasiums.

Obviously your town hasn't yet been infested with mega-churches. Those have at least one gymnasium. It's just down the hall from the coffee bar, past the giant child-care facility, and around the corner from the logo-wear t-shirt kiosk, the artisan bakery, and the acupuncture practice. Jesus isn't the savior anymore, he's the CEO of a retail empire.

Re:Gymnasiums?

[ScentCone]

BTW, mega-churches exist because people want them. It's a bit presumptuous of you to claim that your town has been infested simply because a facility doesn't cater to your point of view.

Actually, they exist in our area because of a perverse loophole in zoning laws. Most are financed by third parties with a business interest in the proceeds from the church-run retail operations, and the bigger the facility, the more cash they make as a non-profit, paid out through very high salaries to key figures, and very high returns on the got-nothing-to-do-with-religion investors. Yes, people want them. Because they are very large recreational facilities that get to benefit from a tax dodge, and they are killing off attendance at the little mom-and-pop social institutions that we used to think of as churches.

It's not "presumptuous" of me to correctly relate the nature of these facilities and the way they interact with (or don't) the county, municipal, state and federal governments as they move millions and millions of dollars around while enjoying special zoning exemptions, tax avoidance, and all sorts of hiring and labor exemptions. These are large businesses that throw on the hair-think veneer of religiosity in order to avoid operating and real estate expenses that any other operation of that size would have to pay. Investors see that it's a good business model, and clone them until there's literally no room to do it any more.