There's no downside to the FAA for overblowing risks -- just like they've overblown the risk of cell phone use for years.
Even if there's one chance in a million of a cell phone affecting avionics or a small drone damaging a plane, the FAA's job is to minimize that risk. They aren't responsible for cost or inconvenience to anyone outside of the aviation industry.
They wouldn't mandate that Boeing install expensive and complicated parachutes in every plane due to the huge cost to the industry and dubious benefit, but there's really no drawback to the FAA for imposing a drone ban.
There is a big threat to the lower end of the aviation industry (crop dusters, news choppers etc) from drones. The threat is not physical but of them being replaced by drones. It is similar to the threat of Uber to the Taxi industry.
Expect much more fear-mongering about drones, and lobbying from the existing aviation industry. This is why much drone research takes place outside the ol' US of A.
The question was really about electronic devices during takeoff and landing. They were very conservative, though I can't really fault them for it--however annoying it was to both passengers and flight crews. But given the number of electronic devices--including phones--that you know weren't actually turned off or put into airplane mode, it became pretty obvious that there wasn't a systematic problem with having devices on.
Ofcourse there is a downside... The loss of liberty being the most basic and obvious.
The FAA regulating, or banning something is them taking a liberty from me. In a free society in order to take my liberty it must only be done after all other avenues of solving the perceived problem have been explored and eliminated.
It damn sure should not be allowed simply out of "an abundance of caution" over a perceived problems that may not actually exist.
Under your world view everything is banned by default unless the government chooses to allow it... That is the opposite of a free society.
Whilst I concur that there has to be a minimum risk level for something to require "the banhammer" I'm probably ok with that being a weighted result of probability and consequence. Which when it comes to planes in the US takes on an almost mythical level of fear for obvious reasons.
Freedom to do as you please is not a real thing - you have to temper that freedom with the requirement to consider the impact on other people. Because you[1] are not special, and your freedoms are no more important than their freedoms.
[1] Sorry I don't really mean to target at YOU but it's a narrative way to make the point. I'm sure you're very special <3
>freedom to do as you please is not a real thing - you have to temper that freedom with the requirement to consider the impact on other people. Because you[1] are not special, and your freedoms are no more important than their freedoms.
that can be a very dangerous statement depending on how you define or assess "impact on other people"
To me, I should be free to do as I please unless my actions cause or can be proven to likely cause serious injury or death to another person, or cause actual articuable direct damage to another persons legally obtained property.
When you say "impact" another person, that could mean me simply typing an controversial opinion into an online forum, should the government be allowed to ban my opinion simply because it "impacts" a person that reads it?
On the topic of Drones, I believe a more defined Airspace is enough. Carve out simple rules and enforce those simple rules. the FAA today is over complicating the issue, and is putting in place rules that will do nothing to increase actual safety, or address any actual safety issue. The Registration for example is a massive privacy violation with no real world impact on safety.
the FAA, like the FCC has mismanaged the public resource they were charged with managing.
So, how many drone related aviation accidents have there been? And how many fixed wing accidents due to pilot error?
A more sensible solution if we're talking about safety would be to ban human pilots. FWIW I've hundreds of hours of fixed wing and drone piloting experience, respectively, and I have way more control with a drone than with a tonne of grp and aluminium driven by whirling death.
Yup. Automate everything. Flight control software is now good enough. As much as I love flying in both formats, this is the logical end point of "safety first", and my personal feelings don't come into it. I'm not a proponent of this, just drawing the conclusion.
There are probably tens of millions of dollars (at least) of lost productivity every year due to the FAA's excessive heavy-handed rules on electronics use during taxi/takeoff/landing.
Banning cell phones during certain parts of flight is essentially just as nonsensical as the example in your last paragraph.
>but there's really no drawback to the FAA for imposing a drone ban.
That is extremely myopic. The most obvious downsides of excessive regulation of UAVs is the suppression of innovation and experimentation with cutting edge vehicle tech. And, of course, most people put some stock in the value of having fun.
You might have misread the parent comment. It said "no downside to the FAA for overblowing risks" and "no drawback to the FAA for imposing a drone ban".
I think the point was that FAA does useless and harmful things because they don't have to pay the price themselves.
genuinely curious (not trying to pick at your point at all), how many USA plane crashes could have been prevented if a parachute was present and working? (The amount of instant drag that parachute deploying would product at a jet's stall speed (> 150mph) is probably more than a fuselage would handle well, given the lightweight engineering.)
Depends; are we talking about small engine planes or big jet liners? Some Cirrus aircraft have them, but that's only one particular brand. As for larger aircraft, I'll refer to this link below [0]:
"taking into consideration the added complexity of design, installing and maintaining an emergency parachute system for a typical passenger jet, the amount of revenue lost by carrying at least 40-45 fewer passengers to compensate for installing such a heavy system, and the extremely unlikelihood such a recovery ever would be required, I can't see trying to scale up a parachute recovery capability for airliner use."
Parachutes actually increase the number of crashes, since instead of attempting a landing, the plane hits the ground.
Parachutes increase the cost of ownership, as they have to be replaced every 10 years or so.
A lot of the people buying Cirrus airplanes are taking off into marginal weather and just assume the parachute will save them when their luck runs out.
This article seems too statistics-y and not practical:
* Drones have interfered with firefighting activities in California before
* There's a difference between a jet sucking in a drone at cruise altitude (somebody got a cheaper model up 11000 feet last week, so not out of the question one of these days) and a jet at critical speeds (landing or taking off) sucking in a drone. Also, a drone into a windshield could cause panic in a pilot, a cause similar to the 2014 derailment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derail...). A drone could probably do a number on a radome or pitot tube as well, which wouldn't cause a terrible situation but an expensive fix.
* My friend who is a drone hobbiest has told me several stories of his drone "falling out of the sky" due to improper battery management. While newer drones address this with autoland, a sudden power failure still means a heavy piece of metal and plastic barreling out of the sky.
* People have a poor comprehension of 3d space from the ground. As drones get faster, operators could experience more tunnel vision trying to avoid an immediate collision and face a collision in their "blind spot"
I think FAA trying to make _some_ regulations for this is okay, just like I think the FCC regulating radio communications is okay (so you can't hear some 15 year olds radio chatter when you watch TV-highly illegal but technically possible if you built your own transmitter before TV went digital). A drone into an engine is not very likely to happen, but that's not the only bad thing a flying toy that can go up to 55mph can do.
>I think FAA trying to make _some_ regulations for this is okay...
YES! I recently built an acro/FPV hexacopter and am all for my right to fly, however, I understand I have some responsibilities when doing so and the FAA spelling out those responsibilities isn't a bad thing. Unfortunately others don't quite "get it" in quite the same way and pose a serious risk without rules and the threat of law. As an example, someone I'm associated with decided he'd take his new DJI out of the box on Christmas, toss in a newly charged battery (the most likely to fail in my experience) and have it follow his car from his house to town in a small community via the autonomous flight option. Along the way of course it flew within a mile of an airport, directly across the flight-path for the takeoff runway, without him even having eyes on his craft. He got excited and shared the video and of course everyone who knew anything about RC flight freaked out. He never understood any of the concern and thinks everyone was overblowing the situation and it was absolutely okay because DJI has an airport database. The problem is of course, that airport database doesn't contain listings for every airport. That and you should never toss a multi-rotor in the air without direct line of sight or a spotter for the entire flight and expect things will go as planned.
* Drones have interfered with firefighting activities in California before
That's what you would think from reading the headlines. "Hobbyists Imperil California Firefighters", "Firefighter-interrupting Drone Pilots...", "Drones Are Getting In The Way of Firefighters", "Drones impede air battle against Californian wildfires", etc. Here's a description of what actually happened:
> On the evening of June 24, he recalls, they noticed a drone. The aerial attack was immediately called off, out of fear of a midair collision; the three air tankers attacking the Lake Fire were parked the rest of the day. And the fire grew as a result.
A helicopter pilot saw a drone and grounded the helicopters.
The papers took a judgment call and twisted it into a story of active interference between drone and helicopter. And even that makes the generous assumption that this was an honest judgment call and not an intentional (and highly successful) attempt to grandstand.
While most reasonable people would agree that drones need to be regulated in some form, I'm afraid that they will be regulated with the goal of restricting their use rather than of ensuring people take reasonable precautions to reduce risk.
I wouldn't drive myself + passengers on the same freeway as amateurs trying to weave RC vehicles around my own. And I wouldn't be driving through the air hundreds of feet above the ground.
The fact that professional pilots and helicopter operators _have_ to make that judgment call for safety reasons because there are no regulations ensuring a safe flight is a concern.
The sky is a bigger place than a road. 3D vs 1D. No comparison.
My problem is not with the judgment call; my problem is with the fact that their judgment call is being used as evidence that they were in danger. As you yourself point out, nobody really knows how dangerous the situation was. Extreme uncertainty makes conservative action reasonable, but it doesn't make drones inherently dangerous.
It would be nice to get some laws on the books to eliminate the uncertainty. My fear is that the laws will lean absurdly on the side of caution; an analogy would be putting a literal tin-foil-hatter in charge of the FCC.
I'd argue the safety threat is greater for a helicopter's passengers when both the operator and the amateurs are trying to reach the same target.
I'd also argue that the ability to navigate that 3D space competently doesn't exist from a fixed point at a distance by an amateur. Especially in an emergency situation, especially if there is limited visibility due to smoke.
They were in a dangerous situation. The uncertainty makes it an inherently dangerous situation.
Drones are no inherently dangerous, no one is arguing that. Drones can create inherently dangerous situations, however. This was one.
I dunno, I think the people fighting a forest fire have a point when they say that they do not want to deal with some guy taking video (what better justification could the drone operator have?).
Imagine a hypothetical headline: "Black cat steps on mirror, firefighters let house burn for fear of upsetting spirits."
This would probably upset you and your frustration would probably not be aimed at the cat. Let this be one end of a spectrum and put "drone interferes with firefighting helicopter" at the other end.
I don't see one vested interest's hunch as strong evidence that reality lies near to one end or another of this spectrum.
I don't understand what you are getting at. What's the equivalence between a random black cat on a mirror and an intentionally operated drone?
If there was some meaningful need for random everybody to operate drones by forest fires, I might care that the pilots are serving some weird agenda, but I don't see any need for (especially private, unregistered, non-communicating) drones to operate near forest fires, so I don't even care if the pilots are just objecting for the lulz.
> What's the equivalence between a random black cat on a mirror and an intentionally operated drone?
It's possible that the drone was exactly as not-dangerous as the black cat in that it was far away from the helicoptor and would have backed off if the helicoptor had moved towards it.
It's also possible that the operator was incompetent (incapable of remaining far from the helicoptor) or maliciously trying to run it into the helicopter. But I'm not going to jump to that assumption on some guy's hunch -- which is what everyone else seems to be doing.
> I don't see any need for drones to operate near forest fires,
You almost certainly have hobbies that I don't see any need for. That wouldn't be justification for banning them.
Feel free to ban carrying out any of my hobbies in the proximity of forest fire control operations.
Let's make the silly analogy more accurate: Firefighters ask witches not to bring black cats and mirrors to active house fires. Witches outraged, no one else cares.
f there was some meaningful need for black cats to step on mirrors, I might care that the firefighters are serving some weird agenda, but I don't see any need for (especially private, unregistered) cats to be allowed near mirrors, so I don't even care if the firefighters are just objecting for the lulz.
If merely being present has stopped a course of action, then yes, merely being present is 'interfering' with things. Your quoted description matches the headlines you think are out of order - the drone did imperil the helicopters (or they wouldn't have been grounded), it did interrupt the firefighters, it did get in the way, and it did impede the battle against the fires. None of those headline need active malicious intent to 'work'.
> and not an intentional (and highly successful) attempt to grandstand.
Ah, right... the papers, they're being political about it and should be ignored as a result.... but labelling the judgement call 'grandstanding', that's not political at all...
> If merely being present has stopped a course of action, then yes, merely being present is 'interfering' with things.
No, it really isn't. Hypothetical scenario time: "Black cat steps on mirror, firefighters let house burn for fear of upsetting spirits." Was the black cat interfering with things? Or were the firefighters' beliefs about black cats and spirits interfering with things?
> the drone did imperil the helicopters (or they wouldn't have been grounded)
Sure, it follows -- if you assume their judgment was infallible.
> None of those headline need active malicious intent to 'work'.
I never accused anyone of acting maliciously.
> they're being political about it and should be ignored as a result.... but labelling the judgement call 'grandstanding', that's not political at all...
It's highly political, of course. I never pretended otherwise.
If you require intent for something to be considered interference, I guess you're not much of a wave physicist.
> I never accused anyone of acting maliciously.
No, my point was that that was what you were saying the papers were doing - you were saying that the papers were injecting malicious intent into the story. Okay, you didn't literally use the word 'malicious', but I think most people would not have a problem with it, given the context you were suggesting the papers were giving ("active interference" preventing firefighters from doing their work)
> Drones have interfered with firefighting activities in California before
Are you sure?? Every story about this turns out to be FUD.
Airports use drones to scare away the birds. Whenever there is a story of a pilot spotting a drone.... they forget to mention if they figured out if it belonged to the airport.
I've seen video footage of it. Don't have the link but it was bad enough to throw me into a fit of rage at the drone operators. There were like three or four drones flying directly in the path of a prop plane dropping some kind of retardant on a forest fire.
Except that safety is a statistical problem. The question is always whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
The FAA actually recognizes this. For example, you can build an airplane yourself for your own recreational use without having to comply with almost any of the rules for certified airplanes that are sold commercially, the rationale being that you know what you're getting into and you're risking mostly harm to yourself.
However, when it comes to risks imposed by third parties, like buying an airplane from a manufacturer, or an airplane being endangered by people on the ground as is the case with drones or people pointing lasers at airplanes, they are much more conservative. And I think that makes sense.
NO they DIDNT. Presence of one drone lead to scared people with agenda grounding whole operation. Do they ground those same planes in presence of birds?
This "research" has a glaring statistical error, principally that the researchers assumed that UAV locations are either uniformly distributed or follow the same distributions as birds. The problem, especially for small aircraft, is that the sites which attract concentrations of small aircraft - like Golden Gate Bridge, Hudson River, etc, are the same places which attract UAV operators.
Also, they seem to neglect the growth in populations of UAV. UAVs are exploding in popularity and capabilities. These numbers are going to get worse and the FAA is taking its usual caution-first approach.
I wonder what the true risk of flying a drone is. Lets say their number is 50 times greater than realistic. The 1.87 million years divided by 50 would be a more reasonable 37,400 years of flight time per accident. Assuming every plane has 200 passengers, that's about, or about 6.105×10^-7 deaths per hour of flight time. If I did my math right, that means it's about 0.6 micromorts per hour. By comparison, the average person has about 1.6 micromorts of unnatural causes of death per day, so it is a fairly large relative increase in risk.
If you were to require every drone operator to pay for insurance, assuming an economic value of life at about $9.1 million, then it would cost $5.56 per hour of flight time. Not cheap!
As with many things, there are a number of factors. Just of few of these include the weight and speed of the drone, the location that it is being flown, the competency of the operator, and so on...
You're also assuming that a drone vs aircraft incident would result in the complete loss of the aircraft. I would imagine that we will eventually see such an incident, but it probably won't result in catastrophic loss...
Right. I noticed that. They're assuming that drones are distributed randomly across the entire volume of US airspace. The analysis isn't based on data from pilot reports. The FAA tallies drone sightings from aircraft, and for 2015, they had 650 reports through August 9th.[1] That's a lot, considering that seeing a small drone from an aircraft means it is rather close.
Drone reports are available online.[2] Most of the reports are from near airports. Here are a few months of reports from LAX alone:
PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LOS ANGELES, CA/UAS INCIDENT/091658P/LOS ANGELES ARRIVAL REPORTED SOUTHWEST 366, B737, REPORTED SEEING AN UNIDENTIFIED HELICOPTER AT 4,000 FEET WHILE ON A 6 MILE FINAL TO RUNWAY 24R. LOS ANGELES PD AIR SUPPORT ADVISED, LOS ANGELES PD 18 RESPONDED.
PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LOS ANGELES, CA /UAS INCIDENT/1821P/SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TRACON REPORTED SOUTHWEST 366, B737, OBSERVED A QUADCOPTER TYPE UAS AT 4,000 FEET 6 MILE FINAL LAX. LAPD AVIATION UNIT NOTIFIED.
PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LAX/UAS INCIDENT/0815P/LAX ATCT ADVISED COMPASS 5680, E170, SEA-LAX, REPORTED UAS 200 FEET ABOVE ACFT ALTITUDE OF 600 FEET OFF RIGHT WING WHILE ON 2.5 MILE FINAL RWY 24R LAX. LA CO SHERIFF NOTIFIED.
"PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LAX/UAS INCIDENT/1625P CESSNA C525 OBSERVED AN REDDISH-ORANGE-YELLOW COLORED UAS, MODEL UNKN, WHILE SOUTHBOUND AT FL200. NO EVASIVE ACTION TAKEN.
"PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LOS ANGELES, CA/UAS INCIDENT/1357P/LAX ATCT ADVISED UNITED 701, B757, PAX REPORTED TO PILOT SEEING A UAS TURN TOWARDS ACFT ON LEFT SIDE WHILE ON FINAL RUNWAY 24R, 2,000 FEET.
Summary: POSSIBLE DRONE SIGHTING: UAL701 (B757), LANDED RY24R & LATER CALLED LAXT ON AN UNRECORDED LINE TO REPORT WHAT 2 PASSENGERS ADVISED HIM: ON 6-MILE FINAL TO RY24R, THE PASSENGERS CLAIMED TO SEE A DRONE BTWN 2000' - 2100' BTWN RY24L & RY24R TURN TOWARD THE AIRCRAFT; NO INJURIES REPORTED.
"PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LOS ANGELES, CA/UAS INCIDENT/2017P/UNITED 1600, B737, REPORTED SEEING A UAS FLY ABOVE ACFT AT 2,600 FEET 8 E LAX. LAPD AVIATION AIR SUPPORT WAS NOTIFIED AT 213-485-2600. NO EVASIVE ACTION TAKEN.
Summary: DRONE REPORT, UAL935, B772, ON FINAL RY25L. UAL935 REPORTED A DRONE OFF THEIR LEFT SIDE ON APPROXIMATELY A 1 MILE FINAL AT 300-400FT. PILOT, CAPT. JEFF GLEASON, RPTS WHITE QUAD DRONE (ABOUT THE SIZE OF A MEDIUM PIZZA BOX), STATIONARY JUST WEST OF THE 405 PASSED JUST UNDER THE LEFT WING. NO EVASIVE ACTION TAKEN. DEN NTFD.
PRELIM INFO FROM FAA OPS: LOS ANGELES, CA/UAS INCIDENT/0851P/LAX ATCT ADVISED JET BLUE 23, A320, REPORTED A WHITE UAS ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE ACFT WHILE WSW BOUND AT 500 FEET 1 E LAX. NO EVASIVE ACTION TAKEN. LAPD AERO BUREAU NOTIFIED.
Summary: DRONE REPORT FROM JBU23 (A321) 1 MILES EAST OF LAX, LEFT (SOUTH) OF RY25L FINAL @ 500 FEET, STATIONARY WHITE DRONE, NO EVASIVE ACTION, LA COUNTY SHERIFF AERO BEREAU NOTIFIED @ 1610Z, DEN NOTIFIED @ 1611Z.
That's just LAX. The distribution of reports is nowhere near random. In addition to airports, drones have been reported near stadiums; one crashed into a spectator.
The paper is from George Mason University's Mercatus Center, which is a right-wing "university source for market-oriented ideas." The authors are economics students. It's not from anybody involved in aviation safety.
Today's update: Near miss between drone and Lufthansa A380-800 near LAX. [1] Location 5000' over downtown LA, 14 miles east of the airport. The drone was above the aircraft.
Effort is being put into finding this drone operator. Not many drones can make it to 5000 feet. This isn't some small toy.
I'm not sure they've demonstrated adequate support that a bird strike can be equated to a drone collision. Drones are plastic and metal, versus the very light and porous structure of avian bones and musculature.
Additionally, you can't just do this sort of probability calculation when the human operator is an integral part of the equation. Birds don't fly in an area limited by their operator. And birds aren't (as far as we know) going to try to fly their drone over an airport (for one example) to get some unique footage that has market value.
This really seems like a vast oversimplification of the issue at hand. I'd much rather see them firing a drone out of a canon at high velocity into an aircraft cockpit (a la MythBusters chicken gun) to show what the actual damage of a comparable drone strike would be rather than just assuming "drone == small bird" based purely on a mass of 2kg.
Birds also know how to dodge airplanes. The correct response to a collision course with a flock of birds—a situation I've been in on final more than a few times—is not to try to maneuver out of the way. Birds will always dive or climb as they close with the airplane.
The FAA is a famously risk-adverse organization. But there's a huge cost to that conservatism; the FAA's foot-dragging has stalled the unmanned aircraft industry in the United States. There's a lot of commercial value in drones for things like agricultural surveys. FAA did finally take one baby step towards legitimizing commercial drone use but it's not nearly enough.
The Miracle on the Hudson airliner took four 14 lb geese into the engines which was clearly too much. But it would have been able to land at an airport if the damage had been restricted to one engine.
FAA standards require airliners be able to safely withstand a 4 lb bird strike.
By comparison, a DJI Phantom drone weighs around 2 lbs and is unlike to be flying in dense enough flocks to damage both engines.
Why is foreign object mass alone more relevant than its mass and density when it comes to ensuring turbine engine containment in an ingestion event?
Bird have a known density. Drones have variable density. And since the tests thus far are done with birds I think it's unknown what happens when drone X is ingested into a turbine engine.
The other fallacy is comparing birds were have minimal control over, vs man made aircraft that should be as capable of avoidance as the current regime.
Turbine engine containment isn't about containing the foreign object - it's about containing the ludicrously energized turbine blades. What breaks the blades is almost irrelevant.
I'm more concerned about damage to the non engine areas of the aircraft, but they routinely survive 18 lb bird impacts in the wild. Even with lithium batteries being about four times denser than a bird, the weight being so much less means that the penetrating power should be less than a half that of a goose.
What brought down Flight 1549 was damage to the core of both engines. If the birds just damaged the fans, then the aircraft probably would have been able to return and land safely.
I'd be more concerned about a DJI Phantom type drone going through the windscreen of a light aircraft and injuring the pilot.
I don't know what the new proposed regulations are, but, for recreational use, I think the current set are fair and appropriate:
Don't fly outside your unaided line of sight.
Don't intentionally fly over people.
Stay away from sensitive areas (Stadiums, etc...)
Don't fly near an airport without contacting the airport.
Stay under 400ft
Register it and label it, so that if it does fall and hit someone on the head, they can find you and let our legal system handle the repercussions.
Given the lack of inspection, that most of these rolled off an assembly line in China, have Lipo batteries that are prone to instantly shutting off if malfunctioning or overloaded(to prevent runaway thermal effect) meaning that these likely might fall out of the sky at any time, the restriction on flying within line of sight and not over people seems reasonable, along with the sensitive area restriction.
I can't think of a major recreational use for flying over 400ft AGL, besides wanting to snap a picture of your neighborhood from the air.
The most heavy handed one I can think of (and this one is enforced in DJI firmware) is the airport restriction. The official line is 'Don't fly within 5 miles of an airport without contacting the airport' -- There are enough airports that this covers a good bit of area, and, if a plane is below 500ft more than a mile or so from the airport, drones are probably not going to put it at any more risk.
A DJI drone will not leave the ground if it detects it's within a couple miles of an airport's radius, and there is no way to override it, even with the airport's consent.
The commercial regulations, as I understand them, are a bit more ridiculous. I haven't found the relevent text in the CFR, but I'm told that to fly a drone commercially(say, for a photographer to take pictures at a wedding) actually requires a full blown pilot's license, at least a 'sport pilots license'[1]. This seems a bit ridiculous for a photographer flying a drone 10ft above the ground. I hope some changes to this portion are coming.
I agree, the airport restriction is heavy. It isn't really '5 miles of an airport' but just not 'in regulated airspace', which is frequently around 5 miles around an airport. Sadly, there's no provision for just flying under 100 feet.
I didn't pull from the actual CFR, but, from the FCC UAS section[1]:
Don't fly within 5 miles of an airport unless you contact the airport and control tower before flying
But, for example, there is an airport near me that is not a controlled field, yet it is marked as a no-fly zone in DJI firmware. Some helipads are marked also even though they are not controlled fields
I paraphrased the rest from memory, left out the 55lb restriction(55lbs is pretty reasonable I think). If you are flying large(>55lbs) model aircraft, there is a clause that permits it as long as it is designed, inspected, tested, and flown within 'community-based safety guidelines'
I assumed it was, "Don't fly in regulated airspace" which would make sense. Some airspaces KSEA have a floor of 2,000ft pretty near them since planes pretty much always take off north/south
Thank you -- information I didn't have. Seems this, as well as the 400ft rule, is inline with the FAA's requirements for determining if an object is a hazard to the navigable airspace (Anything over 499ft, and -- within 3NM of the airport, anything over 200ft, adding 100ft for each NM in excess of 3) [1]
But, for the most part, this glideslope should extend only in the direction of the runways, correct? AFAIK There shouldn't be any aircraft approaching the airport below 500ft at a significant angle from a runway?
For the general masses, I can understand the FAA's reluctance to have everyone work out the angles of runways, glideslopes, etc... to see if they can fly and how high.
My main complaint is that DJI firmware won't let you leave the ground, even if you have worked out an agreement with the airport. For someone that lives near an airport, this pretty much grounds them.
Firmware seems overly restrictive - I thought drone rules were only to ask ATC if inside controlled airspace. Unless there's temporary airspace restrictions you should be OK.
Runway is typically set depending on the prevailing winds. Obviously if it's a single runway GA airport you only get two choices. If it's two or three runway, the active runway can change any time with the wind direction, and the pattern adjusts.
There's a few other factors that may influence the exclusion.
First is the VFR GA circuit (pattern) - which is 1000ft agl. You fly a rectangle - parallel to the runway, turn left, left again and you're on approach. You want as little as possible around you as it's a period of high workload doing landing checks, and other GA pilots will be joining and leaving the circuit, usually from the side. You'll be well outside the threshold for most of it. You're already scanning for potential impacts, but the traffic is arranged such that nothing should be coming at you, or from below you - they're the really difficult ones to spot.
If the weather is crap and the cloudbase lowers you'll do bad weather circuits - perhaps down to 500ft. You;ll be a lot tighter in to the field though.
Second, you'll sometimes extend circuit, usually downwind, to avoid commercial, military or heavy traffic (737 747 etc). ATC will sometimes (rarely) send you off in a random direction to keep separation with commercial or a heavy. You should still be circuit height agl though.
Commercial IFR stuff won't be mucking about in the pattern at 1000ft agl of course.
I doubt many drones are big enough to show on radar.
So a couple of miles out there shouldn't be anything at 500ft agl to the sides of the runway, unless something something exceptional is going on.
If it's a GA airfield like some of the more rural unmanned US ones, where you're the only thing in the sky, it's stupidly restrictive. If it's the airfield I learnt to fly at, with many aircraft in constant movement and two heleports, I don't want any more dots to scan for thanks very much.
It's probably more dangerous in whichever local area the instructors use to practice engine failures and emergency landings. Often a local beach or farm fields near the airfield, and usually uncontrolled airspace.
I'm guessing the rules are to try and limit things in the sky near airfields to those who know what they're doing, contact ATC, read NOTAMs and METARs, not scaring the students on their first solo and what have you.
I'm a big drone enthousiast. I'm all for some form of regulation in the form of registration or a license, provided that the cost won't prohibit getting into the hobby too much.
However, I'm afraid it's not going to work. The people that do crazy stupid things with their drones are the same people that buy their RTF drone at Walmart, thinking it's just a toy. Or import it from China. You can't regulate that. There have been adequate rules for decades, for instance that you can't fly near airfields with your RC plane.
Until a couple of years ago, flying RC planes was both rather expensive to get into, but there was also a steep learning curve. Nowadays you can buy a drone for under 200 bucks and it will practically fly itself. Anyone with half a brain can fly it. I'm torn about this. I love the fact that the entry point for getting into the hobby is lowered so more people can enjoy flying. OTOH, the entry point is now so low that there is a large group of people who are hurting the hobby with their thoughtless behaviour.
A couple of months ago I saw an ad for the Lily drone, I'm sure you saw it too. In the ad they launch and land BY HAND. If you value your fingers I wouldn't recommend this, it's really dangerous.
It's a bit like gun control in a fictional state where you can buy guns without a permit. You can regulate and registrate all you want, but that won't stop loonies from doing stupid things.
I'm a bit torn about this. I almost always come down on the side of 'less red tape' but I strongly suspect that putting in place a lightweight licensing framework for drone pilots is the best way to ensure the greatest amount of freedom for hobbyists going forward.
The other alternative is no regulation at all, and wait for the inevitable idiot to cause an incident and then the whole enterprise gets shut down as a knee-jerk reaction.
It is interesting to compare drones to the state of wireless a century ago. 100 years ago, every hacker with access to an oatmeal can and an old Model T spark coil was building a spark-gap transmitter. There was no licensing. It was pretty crazy with commercial wireless companies trying to contact ships at sea, the Navy, and hackers all on top of each other.
So, the Commerce Department regulated radio. It basically outlawed personal wireless. The "hams" put up a fuss, and the government gave them everything from "200 meters and down", subject to a license. This is because all the World Famous Professors had said that any wavelength shorter than 200 meters was completely useless and of no value. The hams whined a bit, but then got on with discovering short wave propagation. At which point, most of the short wave spectrum was taken away from them, but they were able to retain slivers this time.
So here we are again. Hackers have cool technology. Government takes it away as much as they can get away with, licenses a little bit back to the hackers. Next move: hackers.
The FAA isn't looking at the current level of risk - they're looking at the trajectory of that risk. The number of drones is rising rapidly and they're trying to get ahead of the problem before there's a serious incident. Can you imagine the headlines if they ignored the problem and even a single seater light aircraft was brought down?
The results of a study by the "Academy of Model Aeronautics" is probably fairly predictable, likely to have some bias (in the same way that a study by the FAA is likely to have bias the other way).
The FAA is aware that drones are not the same as birds. I remember recently reading that the FAA has commissioned a study into the effect of drone strikes and how the damage might be mitigated, but I now can't find the reference.
My understanding is that bird strike tests are conducted against jet engines. Am I missing something that prevents us from conducting a few tests with these everyday "drones"?
I have seen some experts speculating that apart from hitting the windscreen, a collision would not lead to complete catastrophe [1].
Regardless, I personally support these regulations, but would really like to see the outcome of a few empirical tests.
I'm all for the advancement of drone technology, and I think that the FAA was perhaps a little too conservative with the way they handled the usage of cell phones on flights for quite sometime, but I can't blame them for their stance on small drones as they don't want to bear any responsibility for the loss of life due to some miniscule probability of a phone causing a problem in-flight. It's worth looking at a the cause of the Flight 1549 incident:
"the bird encounter occurred at 3:27:11, when the airplane was at an altitude of 2,818 feet (859 m) above ground level (agl) and a distance of about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) north-northwest of the approach end of Runway 22 at LGA." [0]
This could've easily been a drone which caused the incident. Now, it's possible that the FAA can put limits on drones(e.g. 400ft AGL or whatever it is now), but there may be people who attempt to circumvent this. The fact that people will shine laser beams into flight decks from the ground doesn't inspire confidence that people will respect their usage in high traffic areas.
Even if there's one chance in a million of a cell phone affecting avionics or a small drone damaging a plane, the FAA's job is to minimize that risk. They aren't responsible for cost or inconvenience to anyone outside of the aviation industry.
They wouldn't mandate that Boeing install expensive and complicated parachutes in every plane due to the huge cost to the industry and dubious benefit, but there's really no drawback to the FAA for imposing a drone ban.