What? The NHS pays for is medicines and technology at prices negotiated with the pharmaceutical companies. It doesn't get them for free.
Prescription drug prices in the US market are much higher than the NHS negotiated prices; without the US market and the high amount of US consumer spending on drugs, drug companies would have little incentive to invest in new drugs.
Of course, once the US has paid for the development of new drugs, drug companies aren't going to say "no" to as much revenue from the British NHS as they can negotiate.
You should think of what the choice of language says about a company. Any company that built its business on Clojure, Scala, or Haskell has a management problem in my opinion: while those languages may be more productive than, say, plain Java, hiring and tool support has always much more difficult. COBOL is indicative of lots of legacy code and a company that has been in business for a long time. That has some advantages, but also means a work environment that's likely very different from others in the industry. R is something used by statisticians and scientists; if you get hired solely as a programmer (rather than a scientist/analyst) to do R programming, your job is likely to clean up other people's messy R code. Can you make money with any of those languages? Sure, but the job may not be quite what you expect or what you are used to.
And then they are broadcasted through the world for free, which quite makes a moot point of this entire discussion.
No, it doesn't. The BBC is a non-commercial, publicly financed operation, and it doesn't cease to be that just because the rest of the world benefits from that as well. There are also plenty of things US tax payers pay for that the rest of the world gets for free.
The BBC implement geo-blocking to ensure that their content is only viewed by those that pay for it: those that pay TV license fees in England (or is it Britain/GB/UK?)
That line of reasoning is not a good path to go down for the UK. There are, in fact, a lot of public goods that countries make available to each other for free. If we started accounting for them all, the UK would be SOL.
For example, American consumers and taxpayers are paying for most of the medical research that the UK's single payer system would never be able to finance on its own; maybe the US should start demanding that the NHS start paying up? The US spends a lot more on defense than its NATO allies; maybe the US should start demanding that Europeans pay up? You get the picture.
The BBC is financed primarily by mandatory TV license fees. Everything they do should be in the public domain, just like other government-financed data and media. Why the hell should they weigh in on issues related to "piracy" at all?
I'm not sure Americans really understand what it's like for smaller countries who lack the population or money to compete with American media productions.
Who cares? Let America make the movies and Canada the Maple syrup.
that it's hard to maintain a national identity
And you want to maintain the fiction of a separate culture... why?
Eh, can you blame them for wanting to "keep jobs in their country"?
Yes, I can, because "keeping jobs in their country" is just another name for crony capitalism: it doesn't actually do sh*t for jobs, but it does do something for uncompetitive industries.
Unfortunately, capitalism tends to centralize things to make it more efficient. The only way to force things to change is by legislation.
You got it backwards. The primary reason for "centralization" and lack of competitiveness is legislation, as powerful corporate interests lobby for legislation that keeps pesky competitors out of the market.
Yes, i sell millions of my product there but i owe you nothing. And you better have a good infrastructure for me to be able to sell"
Here, too, you are rather confused: if people by stuff by the millions, that means they see a benefit to buying that stuff. Taxing it and making it more expensive won't hurt the manufacturer as much as the people who now need to pay more for it.
"Repealing laws that make this possible" is a bit vague. What we need is to let people take governments to court, both on civil and on criminal charges.
Also allow class action lawsuits for police stops. That way, juries can sort out which police stops are reasonable and which are unreasonable. That's much better than the political football these issues have become through civil rights enforcement.
Can't you tell the difference between a fixed wing aircraft and a small drone? The minimums you quote are for fixed wing aircraft.
Correct. That is how "minimum safe altitude" is defined: in terms of fixed wing aircraft. That's the term the rest of the laws and regulations make reference to. The FAA and pilots appear to try to stretch the meaning of that, something that should be stopped through explicit and clear legislation.
I never sait the FAA can force anything. I said the land owner can not deny use unless there is a building.
Yes, we agree on that. Where you are confused is in believing that that constitutes a loss of property rights, when in fact it really just means that aviation has a limited license to use unused airspace.
Of course, pilots, airlines, airports, and the FAA have a strong motivation to create the impression that they have more rights and authority than they actually have, and to extend their rights and authority beyond what was originally envisioned.
That's what I was warning about in regards to rulemaking about drones. The responses from you and other pilots strongly suggest that there is a culture of disdain for property rights and an inflated sense of entitlement among aviators that also means that more legislation is needed to restore a balance.
Yes you do if it is attached to the ground but you don't have the right to deny an aircraft from flying under 500 feet if there is no building there. That is evidence you don't own it.
If that were "evidence that you don't own it", there would be no personal property at all, because for just about any property you own, there are analogous restrictions: many people have a legal right to transit through your yard and even through your house. Yet, it is still your personal property.
That is your interpretation. For example it definitely does not apply around airports.
In fact, it does. The FAA cannot force property owners to accommodate aircraft even near airports (if you disagree, cite the law that you think gives the FAA that power). Generally, what happens is that local zoning boards force property owners to accommodate the FAA's requests, but all the FAA can do on its own is close airports and stop flights.
The FAA has jurisdiction over all navigable airspace.
It has jurisdiction over commercial aviation through navigable airspace, but not over other uses of that airspace. In addition, US citizens have a right of transit through navigable airspace, and the FAA has the right to regulate that use. 49 U.S. Code 40103 http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
"Navigable airspace" is defined as the airspace above the minimum safe altitudes of flights. Minimum safe altitude is defined generally at least as 500ft above ground and away from structures, or more. Helicopters are exempt from minimum safe altitude requirements. Although the act is not completely clear, the reasonable interpretation is that the right of public transit starts at the minimum safe altitude as defined in the act, disregarding the exceptions for helicopters. You're free to choose a different interpretation, but unless you have some case law to back it up, pardon me for not taking you very seriously; your opinion really isn't interesting.
Nevertheless, given problems with drones and helicopters, we should probably take this out of the hands of the FAA and make binding laws.
The airspace over private land has never been entirely private.
That's completely wrong. The traditional legal principle, for at least a millennium, was "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos". The current principle, established by SCOTUS in 1946, is that "owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land, while the "upper reaches" of the airspace were actually a public space (practically, that means at least 500 ft, possibly more). The space in between those two extremes is legally largely unsettled because there hasn't been much conflict or use in the past.
If your house is 20 feet tall the air above 100 feet is public not private.
If it were "public", I couldn't build in it. But, in fact, I have a right to build in the air 100 ft above my property (or 500 ft or whatever), and nobody else does. The FAA has no authority to stop me even if it interferes with aviation. That's what makes it my property and not public property.
The FAA is not trying to gain control over private airspace as what you think is private airspace is actually public airspace.You can repeat you incorrect assumption as many times as you want but it will still be wrong
You're confusing "public airspace" with "public property". And if things were as simple as you pretend, we wouldn't be having this discussion. In fact, legally, it's unclear whether the FAA has authority to regulate my use of drones over my private property below 500 ft in any way. It's also unclear whether the FAA has the authority to permit others to fly drones through my airspace below 500 ft.
The best thing for Congress would be to clarify this with a law, spelling out clear height limits for private property and public use of airspace, as opposed to the current legal uncertainty.
A court might well decide that your right to build a 10 story apartment building just past the airport fence is outweighed by the public's use of the runway you're interfering with, and take away those "air rights" via eminent domain
Yes, a court can decide that. Local zoning boards can decide that. They can also decide to do that for land you own. Hence, your property rights to your airspace are really no different from your property rights to other property you hold, and it makes no sense to say that you own the land but don't own the airspace.
Most people who attempt to exercise far-reaching ideas about their property rights discover that they aren't as far-reaching as they'd imagined.
I made no point about how "far reaching" property rights are. My point is simply that normally, you have roughly the same rights to several hundred feet of airspace over your property as you do to the land itself. Both are limited by various laws, both may be affected by licenses or easements (numerous people have a legal right to enter land you own too), but normal people still refer to them as "ownership" and "property rights".
Furthermore, pilots and airlines decidedly do not have "property rights" to the airspace, and that makes a big difference to courts when balancing interests.
Of course, there is a streak of regulatory overreach in the government right now, where federal bureaucracies believe that if they think something is good for society, they can just ignore the rights of property owners. I expect that will get reversed in coming decades as voters get sick of it. Helicopters, for example, face stiff new regulations as homeowners have been pissed off by noise.
You're missing the point. My reference to minimum safe altitude is simply a point about a height at which you can reasonably argue that you are not interfering with air navigation in most areas, so even FAA safety regulations impose few limits on your property rights. The arguments about Class B zones are a red herring. A Class B zone just means that pilots are no longer automatically prohibited from descending to 0 ft by the FAA, not that property owners are required to accommodate such behavior.
If I fly over your house at 200ft above the ground, I might be causing a hazard, I might be a public nuscisance, but I am not trespassing in your private airspace.... The original poster was trying to imply that the air above their propert was personal property. It isn't. It is more shared common use space.
What you have is a license to use that space, temporary and revocable. You don't even have an easement. Neither licenses nor easements turn private property into "common use space". The distinction matters, because if it were "common use space", courts and lawmakers would have to balance property rights against aviation rights, but since aviation is merely licensed, courts and lawmakers can restrict that license as they see fit. Ultimately, your license to fly depends on the collective good will of property owners all across the country; if too many pilots abuse that, you'll see your license to fly become more and more limited (e.g. through the imposition of limits on helicopter flights). Behave accordingly, instead of parading a sense of entitlement.
I can fly through it and I don't require permission from anyone but the FAA.
That's because the FAA issues your license to fly. You still have to comply with all applicable rules, not just FAA rules.
Your right to build up into the sky isn't what I was talking about. I was replying to someone who claimed that someone flying overhead was "trespassing". They are not.
More fabrications on your part; this is the first time the word "trespass" appears in this thread. And, again, the reason why you are not trespassing is not because airspace is somehow "common use", it's simply because you have a license (i.e., your pilot's license) to use other people's unused, idle private property temporarily, safely, and responsibly.
Are you for real? I stopped reading after those two sentences. You clearly have never seen the inside of a scientific journal review system.
Apparently you don't. Journals generally have a large database of potential reviewers that editors pick from, many of which the editor doesn't know personally. For most of them, the editor has to rely on their self-assessment of competency. A large fraction of the database is incorrect. Even if the paper makes it to a competent scientist with a Ph.D., he will often just pass the paper on to a student. That's the reality of most scientific peer review today.
I have found that many people in general see the world as black and while, "the FAA doesn't have direct legal authority, thus they can kiss off".
Well, good thing I didn't say that. What I said was "the airspace over your land is yours, up to the lower limit of flight space". That's the same sense in which the land itself "is mine": I can generally determine what happens with it, but I do have to take other people and regulations into account when making decisions. The existence of the FAA no more abrogates my property rights to my airspace than the existence of the EPA abrogates my property rights to my land. You put up the black-and-white straw man and then started furiously arguing against yourself.
You are right that FAA is increasingly a means by which powerful industry and lobbying groups try to impose their will on property owners. That's what my original post was warning about, after all. You seem to think that's inevitable and you seem to think you are entitled to it; you will likely find out that you are mistaken as your license to fly will become more restricted over the coming years.
That should have been... My obligation is really just not to create unnecessary and unreasonable hazards for aviation, and keeping well below the minimum for fixed wing aircraft is one reasonable way of achieving that (but not the only one).
Right now there are no laws for commercial drones.
And that means that (1) you should be able to fly drones over your own property as long as you don't interfere with commercial aviation, and (2) other people can't fly drones over your property without permission. That seems like a good default, and the fact that the FAA tries to mess with that default ought to be cause for concern.
Bye the way the 500-1000ft minimums are for fixed wing aircraft. Helicopters have different rules
True, but as a property owner, I am under no strict obligation to make life easy even for fixed wing aircraft. My obligation is really just not to create unnecessary and unreasonable hazards for aviation, and keeping well below the minimum for fixed wing aircraft is a reasonable dividing line for that. If a helicopter flies below 500ft, it's really the pilot's job to be extra careful.
Most small drones are helicopters of some sort. Notice they talk about hazard and not annoyance.
FAA compliance is necessary but not sufficient for legal operation of an aircraft.
You probably can't understand that unless you have had some training, but you'll see that there is an inner ring that extends around the airport and out from it for about 10 miles in most directions.
The classes you are referring to are regulations for pilots; they restrict where you can fly, they don't restrict where people can build. And even if you can fly to 0 ft according to the zone, as a pilot, you are still obligated to stay away from man-made obstacles.
Rest assured, I know far more about this than you do.
Knowing how to fly doesn't make you a legal expert on property rights. As a pilot, your obligation is to fly safely and avoid obstacles, and if you don't, you lose your license. But the FAA has no direct legal authority to regulate property owners. As you can see from the below fight about property rights and FAA regulations near airports, the FAA can't even impose height limits on property owners near airport flight paths themselves, they can only hope zoning boards and insurance companies will make people comply.
The US legal system has tried to make some reasonable accommodations to make aviation possible, but that doesn't mean property rights to airspace have just evaporated and pilots and airlines now own the airspace. Generally, if I behave reasonably as a property owner, you as a pilot have to accommodate me, not the other way around.
"Just one flight path could cover hundreds and hundreds of acres in densely developed areas," Bazeli said. "You are going to be bumping up against some very valuable property rights."
The FAA doesn't have the authority to tell owners how high a building can be. But property owners near airports are supposed to apply to the FAA before construction for a determination on whether a proposed building or renovation presents a hazard to navigation. Erecting a building that the FAA says is a hazard is akin to building in a flood plain — insurance rates go up, mortgages are harder to get and property values decrease. Local zoning laws often don't permit construction of buildings determined to be an aviation hazard.
Well, that's my point: right now, if your RC plane collides with a drone over your property, it's not your problem (in fact, you can recover damages from the drone operator). But if the FAA gets away with classifying drone traffic as legitimate public use of the airspace above your property, any way you interfere with drone traffic is going to have serious consequences for you. And, yeah, they'll know what happened and where it happened.
Actually it is. The legal principle is that rights to your airspace are balanced against the use of airspace for air navigation. Since air navigation over populated areas generally is not considered safe by the FAA below 500-1000ft, you don't have to do any balancing below that if you live in such an area (in less populated areas, pilots must accommodate humans and structures by keeping a distance, not the other way around).
You cannot generally put up anything taller than 200ft without a permit
That doesn't mean that you don't own the airspace, it simply means that you need to alert the FAA to this particular use and wait for them to acknowledge. If the need for permits were an indication that something isn't private property, we wouldn't have private property at all, because almost every use of private property requires some permit or another these days.
There is no "lower limit" of flight space, Class B, C, D, E or G airspace goes all the way to the ground, everywhere in the USA.
That's irrelevant. Class B airspace, for example, extends to the ground at the airport. It does not (generally) extend to the ground on other private property. Therefore, it doesn't limit the rights people have to the airspace over their property. Nor, for that matter, does the existence of class X airspace mean that government is free to declare any property to be class X airspace without compensation for the resulting loss of property rights.
- more than 10 years of professional aviation experience speaking, certified flight instructor in both airplanes and helicopters, more than 4,000 hours flown, more than 1,000 hours of instruction given
I don't see why you think that contradicts what I said. Minimum safe altitude according to the FAA for airplanes is 500-1000ft. Therefore, currently, for anything below that altitude, there is no "balancing" required, since the property owner currently won't interfere with any "air navigation". But once drones are treated like other aircraft, you will all of a sudden have to accommodate them at lower altitudes over your property.
That is a big change. Whether the FAA can get away with it legally or not is not the issue. The issue is whether the FAA actually should have the authority to force you to let Amazon put a busy drown delivery route 50 ft above the roof of your house without any review, oversight, or positive act by Congress. I don't think they should.
At best, they'll just hire a thousand new "drone inspectors" to deal with the increased volume, burdening your and my taxes with it.
Or they might simply drag you into court and have you prove that you're a fake operator; then, they might stick you with court costs for frivolously misleading the government.
This isn't about the FAA protecting you from drone flights. Right now, you're well protected from drone flights over your private land because the airspace over your land is yours, up to the lower limit of flight space, generally 500-1000ft above the tallest structures.
With these actions, the FAA is effectively trying to gain the power to regulate airspace that previously was either entirely private (over private land) or entirely public (over public land).
In part, that will likely mean actually allowing commercial drone operators to fly over your land at heights where they currently can't fly. Whether that's their intent right now or not doesn't matter; lobbying down the road will force that to happen. So, far from protecting you from drones, this is likely a prelude to be able to force you to let drones pass at low altitude over your property.
Slashdot Mirror
Prescription drug prices in the US market are much higher than the NHS negotiated prices; without the US market and the high amount of US consumer spending on drugs, drug companies would have little incentive to invest in new drugs.
Of course, once the US has paid for the development of new drugs, drug companies aren't going to say "no" to as much revenue from the British NHS as they can negotiate.
You should think of what the choice of language says about a company. Any company that built its business on Clojure, Scala, or Haskell has a management problem in my opinion: while those languages may be more productive than, say, plain Java, hiring and tool support has always much more difficult. COBOL is indicative of lots of legacy code and a company that has been in business for a long time. That has some advantages, but also means a work environment that's likely very different from others in the industry. R is something used by statisticians and scientists; if you get hired solely as a programmer (rather than a scientist/analyst) to do R programming, your job is likely to clean up other people's messy R code. Can you make money with any of those languages? Sure, but the job may not be quite what you expect or what you are used to.
No, it doesn't. The BBC is a non-commercial, publicly financed operation, and it doesn't cease to be that just because the rest of the world benefits from that as well. There are also plenty of things US tax payers pay for that the rest of the world gets for free.
That line of reasoning is not a good path to go down for the UK. There are, in fact, a lot of public goods that countries make available to each other for free. If we started accounting for them all, the UK would be SOL.
For example, American consumers and taxpayers are paying for most of the medical research that the UK's single payer system would never be able to finance on its own; maybe the US should start demanding that the NHS start paying up? The US spends a lot more on defense than its NATO allies; maybe the US should start demanding that Europeans pay up? You get the picture.
The BBC is financed primarily by mandatory TV license fees. Everything they do should be in the public domain, just like other government-financed data and media. Why the hell should they weigh in on issues related to "piracy" at all?
Who cares? Let America make the movies and Canada the Maple syrup.
And you want to maintain the fiction of a separate culture... why?
Yes, I can, because "keeping jobs in their country" is just another name for crony capitalism: it doesn't actually do sh*t for jobs, but it does do something for uncompetitive industries.
You got it backwards. The primary reason for "centralization" and lack of competitiveness is legislation, as powerful corporate interests lobby for legislation that keeps pesky competitors out of the market.
Here, too, you are rather confused: if people by stuff by the millions, that means they see a benefit to buying that stuff. Taxing it and making it more expensive won't hurt the manufacturer as much as the people who now need to pay more for it.
"Repealing laws that make this possible" is a bit vague. What we need is to let people take governments to court, both on civil and on criminal charges.
Also allow class action lawsuits for police stops. That way, juries can sort out which police stops are reasonable and which are unreasonable. That's much better than the political football these issues have become through civil rights enforcement.
Correct. That is how "minimum safe altitude" is defined: in terms of fixed wing aircraft. That's the term the rest of the laws and regulations make reference to. The FAA and pilots appear to try to stretch the meaning of that, something that should be stopped through explicit and clear legislation.
Yes, we agree on that. Where you are confused is in believing that that constitutes a loss of property rights, when in fact it really just means that aviation has a limited license to use unused airspace.
Of course, pilots, airlines, airports, and the FAA have a strong motivation to create the impression that they have more rights and authority than they actually have, and to extend their rights and authority beyond what was originally envisioned.
That's what I was warning about in regards to rulemaking about drones. The responses from you and other pilots strongly suggest that there is a culture of disdain for property rights and an inflated sense of entitlement among aviators that also means that more legislation is needed to restore a balance.
If that were "evidence that you don't own it", there would be no personal property at all, because for just about any property you own, there are analogous restrictions: many people have a legal right to transit through your yard and even through your house. Yet, it is still your personal property.
In fact, it does. The FAA cannot force property owners to accommodate aircraft even near airports (if you disagree, cite the law that you think gives the FAA that power). Generally, what happens is that local zoning boards force property owners to accommodate the FAA's requests, but all the FAA can do on its own is close airports and stop flights.
It has jurisdiction over commercial aviation through navigable airspace, but not over other uses of that airspace. In addition, US citizens have a right of transit through navigable airspace, and the FAA has the right to regulate that use. 49 U.S. Code 40103 http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
"Navigable airspace" is defined as the airspace above the minimum safe altitudes of flights. Minimum safe altitude is defined generally at least as 500ft above ground and away from structures, or more. Helicopters are exempt from minimum safe altitude requirements. Although the act is not completely clear, the reasonable interpretation is that the right of public transit starts at the minimum safe altitude as defined in the act, disregarding the exceptions for helicopters. You're free to choose a different interpretation, but unless you have some case law to back it up, pardon me for not taking you very seriously; your opinion really isn't interesting.
Nevertheless, given problems with drones and helicopters, we should probably take this out of the hands of the FAA and make binding laws.
That's completely wrong. The traditional legal principle, for at least a millennium, was "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos". The current principle, established by SCOTUS in 1946, is that "owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land, while the "upper reaches" of the airspace were actually a public space (practically, that means at least 500 ft, possibly more). The space in between those two extremes is legally largely unsettled because there hasn't been much conflict or use in the past.
If it were "public", I couldn't build in it. But, in fact, I have a right to build in the air 100 ft above my property (or 500 ft or whatever), and nobody else does. The FAA has no authority to stop me even if it interferes with aviation. That's what makes it my property and not public property.
You're confusing "public airspace" with "public property". And if things were as simple as you pretend, we wouldn't be having this discussion. In fact, legally, it's unclear whether the FAA has authority to regulate my use of drones over my private property below 500 ft in any way. It's also unclear whether the FAA has the authority to permit others to fly drones through my airspace below 500 ft.
The best thing for Congress would be to clarify this with a law, spelling out clear height limits for private property and public use of airspace, as opposed to the current legal uncertainty.
Yes, a court can decide that. Local zoning boards can decide that. They can also decide to do that for land you own. Hence, your property rights to your airspace are really no different from your property rights to other property you hold, and it makes no sense to say that you own the land but don't own the airspace.
I made no point about how "far reaching" property rights are. My point is simply that normally, you have roughly the same rights to several hundred feet of airspace over your property as you do to the land itself. Both are limited by various laws, both may be affected by licenses or easements (numerous people have a legal right to enter land you own too), but normal people still refer to them as "ownership" and "property rights".
Furthermore, pilots and airlines decidedly do not have "property rights" to the airspace, and that makes a big difference to courts when balancing interests.
Of course, there is a streak of regulatory overreach in the government right now, where federal bureaucracies believe that if they think something is good for society, they can just ignore the rights of property owners. I expect that will get reversed in coming decades as voters get sick of it. Helicopters, for example, face stiff new regulations as homeowners have been pissed off by noise.
You're missing the point. My reference to minimum safe altitude is simply a point about a height at which you can reasonably argue that you are not interfering with air navigation in most areas, so even FAA safety regulations impose few limits on your property rights. The arguments about Class B zones are a red herring. A Class B zone just means that pilots are no longer automatically prohibited from descending to 0 ft by the FAA, not that property owners are required to accommodate such behavior.
What you have is a license to use that space, temporary and revocable. You don't even have an easement. Neither licenses nor easements turn private property into "common use space". The distinction matters, because if it were "common use space", courts and lawmakers would have to balance property rights against aviation rights, but since aviation is merely licensed, courts and lawmakers can restrict that license as they see fit. Ultimately, your license to fly depends on the collective good will of property owners all across the country; if too many pilots abuse that, you'll see your license to fly become more and more limited (e.g. through the imposition of limits on helicopter flights). Behave accordingly, instead of parading a sense of entitlement.
That's because the FAA issues your license to fly. You still have to comply with all applicable rules, not just FAA rules.
More fabrications on your part; this is the first time the word "trespass" appears in this thread. And, again, the reason why you are not trespassing is not because airspace is somehow "common use", it's simply because you have a license (i.e., your pilot's license) to use other people's unused, idle private property temporarily, safely, and responsibly.
Because TFA tells us what it's about, and I don't think that approach is any better than what we currently have.
How the hell does an attack Diane Ravitch as a hypocritical 1%-er translate into an accusation of Bill Gates being evil?
Apparently you don't. Journals generally have a large database of potential reviewers that editors pick from, many of which the editor doesn't know personally. For most of them, the editor has to rely on their self-assessment of competency. A large fraction of the database is incorrect. Even if the paper makes it to a competent scientist with a Ph.D., he will often just pass the paper on to a student. That's the reality of most scientific peer review today.
Well, good thing I didn't say that. What I said was "the airspace over your land is yours, up to the lower limit of flight space". That's the same sense in which the land itself "is mine": I can generally determine what happens with it, but I do have to take other people and regulations into account when making decisions. The existence of the FAA no more abrogates my property rights to my airspace than the existence of the EPA abrogates my property rights to my land. You put up the black-and-white straw man and then started furiously arguing against yourself.
You are right that FAA is increasingly a means by which powerful industry and lobbying groups try to impose their will on property owners. That's what my original post was warning about, after all. You seem to think that's inevitable and you seem to think you are entitled to it; you will likely find out that you are mistaken as your license to fly will become more restricted over the coming years.
That should have been... My obligation is really just not to create unnecessary and unreasonable hazards for aviation, and keeping well below the minimum for fixed wing aircraft is one reasonable way of achieving that (but not the only one).
And that means that (1) you should be able to fly drones over your own property as long as you don't interfere with commercial aviation, and (2) other people can't fly drones over your property without permission. That seems like a good default, and the fact that the FAA tries to mess with that default ought to be cause for concern.
True, but as a property owner, I am under no strict obligation to make life easy even for fixed wing aircraft. My obligation is really just not to create unnecessary and unreasonable hazards for aviation, and keeping well below the minimum for fixed wing aircraft is a reasonable dividing line for that. If a helicopter flies below 500ft, it's really the pilot's job to be extra careful.
FAA compliance is necessary but not sufficient for legal operation of an aircraft.
The classes you are referring to are regulations for pilots; they restrict where you can fly, they don't restrict where people can build. And even if you can fly to 0 ft according to the zone, as a pilot, you are still obligated to stay away from man-made obstacles.
Knowing how to fly doesn't make you a legal expert on property rights. As a pilot, your obligation is to fly safely and avoid obstacles, and if you don't, you lose your license. But the FAA has no direct legal authority to regulate property owners. As you can see from the below fight about property rights and FAA regulations near airports, the FAA can't even impose height limits on property owners near airport flight paths themselves, they can only hope zoning boards and insurance companies will make people comply.
The US legal system has tried to make some reasonable accommodations to make aviation possible, but that doesn't mean property rights to airspace have just evaporated and pilots and airlines now own the airspace. Generally, if I behave reasonably as a property owner, you as a pilot have to accommodate me, not the other way around.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article...
Well, that's my point: right now, if your RC plane collides with a drone over your property, it's not your problem (in fact, you can recover damages from the drone operator). But if the FAA gets away with classifying drone traffic as legitimate public use of the airspace above your property, any way you interfere with drone traffic is going to have serious consequences for you. And, yeah, they'll know what happened and where it happened.
Actually it is. The legal principle is that rights to your airspace are balanced against the use of airspace for air navigation. Since air navigation over populated areas generally is not considered safe by the FAA below 500-1000ft, you don't have to do any balancing below that if you live in such an area (in less populated areas, pilots must accommodate humans and structures by keeping a distance, not the other way around).
That doesn't mean that you don't own the airspace, it simply means that you need to alert the FAA to this particular use and wait for them to acknowledge. If the need for permits were an indication that something isn't private property, we wouldn't have private property at all, because almost every use of private property requires some permit or another these days.
That's irrelevant. Class B airspace, for example, extends to the ground at the airport. It does not (generally) extend to the ground on other private property. Therefore, it doesn't limit the rights people have to the airspace over their property. Nor, for that matter, does the existence of class X airspace mean that government is free to declare any property to be class X airspace without compensation for the resulting loss of property rights.
I hope you fly better than you reason.
I don't see why you think that contradicts what I said. Minimum safe altitude according to the FAA for airplanes is 500-1000ft. Therefore, currently, for anything below that altitude, there is no "balancing" required, since the property owner currently won't interfere with any "air navigation". But once drones are treated like other aircraft, you will all of a sudden have to accommodate them at lower altitudes over your property.
That is a big change. Whether the FAA can get away with it legally or not is not the issue. The issue is whether the FAA actually should have the authority to force you to let Amazon put a busy drown delivery route 50 ft above the roof of your house without any review, oversight, or positive act by Congress. I don't think they should.
At best, they'll just hire a thousand new "drone inspectors" to deal with the increased volume, burdening your and my taxes with it.
Or they might simply drag you into court and have you prove that you're a fake operator; then, they might stick you with court costs for frivolously misleading the government.
This isn't about the FAA protecting you from drone flights. Right now, you're well protected from drone flights over your private land because the airspace over your land is yours, up to the lower limit of flight space, generally 500-1000ft above the tallest structures.
With these actions, the FAA is effectively trying to gain the power to regulate airspace that previously was either entirely private (over private land) or entirely public (over public land).
In part, that will likely mean actually allowing commercial drone operators to fly over your land at heights where they currently can't fly. Whether that's their intent right now or not doesn't matter; lobbying down the road will force that to happen. So, far from protecting you from drones, this is likely a prelude to be able to force you to let drones pass at low altitude over your property.