Appeals court strikes down FAA drone registration

falconvalley said:
Drones are just too easy to fly to an airport. Registration won't fix that, unfortunately. I literally just had a Phantom 4 shipped to my house (the hard part was figuring out which CC would make a payment to DJI). I took that thing out of the box, figured out how to send the message to DJI to activate the drone, and within an hour, I had that thing rocketing straight up toward final approach course for 19R here in MKE. I respected the 400 AGL limit, but any user could choose to not do that because my village is "pretty far" away. You could very well hit an airplane in minutes and requiring registration will not help.

IMO, the drone industry is great and we will benefit from a limit on actual regulation. What we need is more protection/detection. The question I have is how close are we to TCAS-like detection for drones. They are technologically-advanced machines and surely we can come up with something that can detect the presence of a machine that uses stabilization and freqs for control. Heck, there are companies that are developing anti-drone technology for spacial use. That could be incorporated into aircraft.
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You'll find that the phantom won't fly within 3 miles of an airport runway- and, comes factory capped to 120 meters (~380ft ) above take off point. You can change the settings to allow 500m though, which at the 3 mile ring would still make it a threat. Rumor has it that the "3mile" NFZ actually expands with altitude though, so maybe they have provided decent FAP protection. I haven't tested it personally though
 
falconvalley said:
Drones are just too easy to fly to an airport. Registration won't fix that, unfortunately. I literally just had a Phantom 4 shipped to my house (the hard part was figuring out which CC would make a payment to DJI). I took that thing out of the box, figured out how to send the message to DJI to activate the drone, and within an hour, I had that thing rocketing straight up toward final approach course for 19R here in MKE. I respected the 400 AGL limit, but any user could choose to not do that because my village is "pretty far" away. You could very well hit an airplane in minutes and requiring registration will not help.

IMO, the drone industry is great and we will benefit from a limit on actual regulation. What we need is more protection/detection. The question I have is how close are we to TCAS-like detection for drones. They are technologically-advanced machines and surely we can come up with something that can detect the presence of a machine that uses stabilization and freqs for control. Heck, there are companies that are developing anti-drone technology for spacial use. That could be incorporated into aircraft.
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Just one example
https://www.uavionix.com/
 
NovemberEcho said:
Had a Lear report a drone at 10k' on the JAIKE3 today about 7 se of REGAL/BIGGY
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This is exactly why regulating this stuff is a double edged sword for me. There is no good reason for someone to be flying a drone at 10k, but the feds need should also stay out of it. If they don't, then you have a holes flying their drones at 10k feet.
 
mshunter said:
This is exactly why regulating this stuff is a double edged sword for me. There is no good reason for someone to be flying a drone at 10k, but the feds need should also stay out of it. If they don't, then you have a holes flying their drones at 10k feet.
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What?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
mshunter said:
This is exactly why regulating this stuff is a double edged sword for me. There is no good reason for someone to be flying a drone at 10k, but the feds need should also stay out of it. If they don't, then you have a holes flying their drones at 10k feet.
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That don't make no kind of sense.
 
mshunter said:
Sorry, was a drive by post.

I feel like the feds should stay out of hobby drone stuff. But then you have guys that'll fly their drones at 10k feet, and need their ass smacked around for doing dumb crap like this.

I wish they'd stay out of the hobby drone arena. But I don't think they can.
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PT 101 actually does a decent job of doing this- you must operate according to the rules of a nationally recognized association I.e AMA
 
I find it funny that we regulate and license the electromagnetic spectrum.... but F it if you want to fly in airspace with those big metal things they hold people in them.
 
NovemberEcho said:
Had a Lear report a drone at 10k' on the JAIKE3 today about 7 se of REGAL/BIGGY
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Does a Phantom flight battery even have the capacity to climb to 10,000' and return? The DJI Inspire climbs & descends at around 6 mph (9fps), meaning a 37 minute round-trip to 10,000'. Performance degrades as altitude increases, so those are optimistic numbers. And it also assumes that the Phantom made it down safely.
 
tomokc said:
Does a Phantom flight battery even have the capacity to climb to 10,000' and return? The DJI Inspire climbs & descends at around 6 mph (9fps), meaning a 37 minute round-trip to 10,000'. Performance degrades as altitude increases, so those are optimistic numbers. And it also assumes that the Phantom made it down safely.
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They don't hit max power until nearly 19,000 feet in hover so they have excess power. Climb speed is electronically limited.- there are videos and flight logs claiming 12,000ish before auto RTH
 
TUCKnTRUCK said:
PT 101 actually does a decent job of doing this- you must operate according to the rules of a nationally recognized association I.e AMA
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There seems to be a minimum skill level requirement that correlates to being a responsible hobbiest and overall good citizen.

When the ARFs, RTFs and cheap (relatively) turbines popped up, the skill level declined and you started to see an uptick in toolishness, but you still had some adults in the process that could call people out.

Drones require neither skill nor dollars, so it fails both barriers of toolbag entry, nor are they tied to traditional model fields where some kind of adult supervision can take place.

That's not to say that paragons of jackholishness didn't exist prior, but they were pretty limited.
 
Richman said:
There seems to be a minimum skill level requirement that correlates to being a responsible hobbiest and overall good citizen.

When the ARFs, RTFs and cheap (relatively) turbines popped up, the skill level declined and you started to see an uptick in toolishness, but you still had some adults in the process that could call people out.

Drones require neither skill nor dollars, so it fails both barriers of toolbag entry, nor are they tied to traditional model fields where some kind of adult supervision can take place.

That's not to say that paragons of jackholishness didn't exist prior, but they were pretty limited.
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The drone that takes down an airliner will probably be owned by a 13 yr old
 
NovemberEcho said:
The drone that takes down an airliner will probably be owned by a 13 yr old
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Actually spent a fair amount of time on the phone with the Portland FSDO today- originally I called to see if there was any relief from notifying all the "ghost" airports that pop up in b4ufly, which have either outdated phone numbers or simply don't exist anymore.

Discussion wandered - we spoke about the new grid systems for airspace, micro ADSB and various other stuff.

His final take was, " We understand that you're worried about protecting your ATP, but, we had these rules mandated without allocation of budget resources to draft them, impose them or enforce them- so they're far from perfect. The intent was to force non aviation users to exercise some due diligence, but in turn has created a nightmare. So long as you can document that you attempted to notify the airport/heliport/seaport which is non-responsive, they are ok with that. Strongly recommend issuing a notam at least a center one if you can't notify the airport directly.

Honestly, I won't mind if my little drone ends up with ADS-B and traffic advisories. It would make the airspace waiver much easier.
 
NovemberEcho said:
The drone that takes down an airliner will probably be owned by a 13 yr old
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Seriously, I don't think anything owned by a 13 year old is going to be able to take down an airliner. It might toast a single engine on a 3 to 4 engine airframe but it isn't going to lead to a crash unless something catastrophic beyond the damage the drone does. These things just don't have that much mass. I am willing to be a direct hit to the flight deck windows will deflect off and not leave a scratch. Anything going into the engine inlet will turn into confetti.

Now someone with intent to bring down an airliner can do that but would have to build something specific and robust enough.

You have to understand the thrust to weight ratio of the engines on a small commercial drone are pretty low. You are not going to get much weight off the ground with one of these things. I am referring to the ones you see at the mall drone stores. They are really lightweight and not very sturdy. That's what your average 13 year old is going to be flying. Even most of the commercial drones that are available to purchase are small and would not do much damage. But those are operated by people who should know better and are at risk of losing their remote operators license.

But if someone wanted to build something large enough to bring down an airliner the parts are readily available. But that person would be building something specific and robust to pull it off. It's going to take some special skills, tools, and parts to make that happen.

My point to all of this is the hobby folks are not the threat. The drones they purchase are just not going to do much damage. I think the community needs to stop going after the hobbyist. We do that alot in this country and go after the easy targets, not the real threat. The hobbyist isn't the threat.
 
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