When I started my first coding job, I once made the joke that "testing is hard. I'll just push the code to production and see what happens." An old, crusty engineer just looked at me and said, "you're the kind of person that gets people killed."
I feel like 99% of the engineers who comment on HN don't work in fields where their technology could kill someone if it messes up. If an error meant someone's death, you'd probably think a little harder for committing. That's why I'm not taking anyone who calls this "draconian" or derisively "risk averse" seriously.
Being a safety-first industry is not a punch line. Life is stochastic, not deterministic, and the FAA exists to add as many 9s to the likelihood of success as possible. Sorry your fun is ruined, but when I fly in a plane I don't want to be worrying if some hobbyist with more money than accountability will put my life at risk because they wanted to make a cool video to put on YouTube.
I agree completely. This coming from a flight software dev, instrument pilot and EAB aircraft builder: embrace the FAA and it's regulation. Don't be afraid to work with them either. If you think for a second that the UAV industry (both hobby and commercial) is going to stop at little quadcopters and 400ft, you're sorely mistaken. Not even the sky is the limit if you learn to work within the mindset that your decisions have consequences, so you very very much want to be treated as equals to manned systems. I know it sounds restrictive but manned aircraft can basically do anything and go anywhere, they just have to take certain precautions.
Tangential - any advice for software devs looking for entry level experience in the industry? It's a topic I'm passionate about and would love to branch into, but I started in computer science and don't have any aerospace experience.
Man, your comment hits home. I desperately want a drone as a toy but under the guise to check my gutters if they’re clogged.
However, next to where I live is a small airfield and, at times, we have small private jets and sesnas flying next to us.
What always stopped me from buying the drone was because I simply didn’t want to put myself in a position to have that one malfunction that causes the drone to soar and accidentally damage the plane. Regardless of how improbable or unlikely, I just didn’t want to be “that guy”.
Like the sibling commenter, I recommend a $50 TINY7 quad as by far the most fun per buck I've had. It's indoor-only, as it's too small to fly in any sort of wind, but it's super fun and you can learn to do loops, tricks and fly over/under/through furniture.
EDIT: The UR65 the sibling commenter mention looks better, it's brushless, which means much better speed/agility.
Few years ago I was watching across some YouTube video about drones. In one video, some guy was flying a hacked DJI drone to workaround the limitation so just he can fly it higher.
I of course concerned about it because the altitude he have reached is well above the limit set by FAA. So I wrote a comment to ask about hes acknowledgement on those FAA rules. And what's followed was a debate that lasted almost a week.
Today, you can still found that kind of videos on YouTube where people are flying hacked drones to "Break/Test the limits".
I hope somebody like FAA can do something to prevent people from doing stupid things (Hack their drone so it can fly higher etc), and make the sky safer.
> as many 9s to the likelihood of success as possible
If that were the actual mission of the FAA, that would be easy to accomplish with near-infinite 9s: Stop flying entirely, ban all flying machines of all types. You'd have zero aviation incidents if there was no aviation.
There are a finite number of 9s that are needed before the cost of adding more safety is detrimental to humanity.
And note that I do work in a field where my work could kill someone if it messes up. I build industrial equipment, typically to ISO 13849 PLd or PLe standards - that's 7 nines of probability that there will be no dangerous failure in any given hour, which requires reliable components, fault sensing/fault tolerant safety controllers, and redundant wiring .
I could make equipment I produce more safe, if that was my only goal. For example, each E-stop button has two contacts and two pairs of wires in parallel which monitor its state, and this button removes power from the machine by turning off two contactors in series. If any one of these components should fail - a contact on the E-stop gets shorted out, or a contactor gets welded closed - the system will detect this and remove energy from the system. I could, in theory, make this "more safe" with three pairs of wires and three contactors in series. But while I've had to fight hard against those who try to reduce the safety level in favor of production efficiency, I've never tried to add a third set of redundant contacts.
In the end, an operator standing next to the E-stop button and supplying one of my robots outside the safety gate and light curtain means that there are 6 guys who are not using high-power hand tools to do what the robot is doing. Adding excessive 9s to this system means not that people are safer, instead there's less automation and the world is worse off.
A simple registration process, knowledge test, and inexpensive transponders on RC aircraft would make the world a better place. Requiring hundreds of hours of training and certification, and adding prohibitively expensive transponders, would kill off RC aviation. I want you to fly in a plane safely. That's harder to do if your pilot didn't grow up at the model airfield.
Explain to me how my flying a 4 pound drone at a height of 100 ft to take a photo of my home is putting someones life in danger to the point where the FAA should require me to register my activity and pass a license program?
Edit:
"my kid are playing in our backyard. Do I have the right of privacy?": No you do not have a Right to privacy, I can put a camera on my roof or pole and record your backyard if I wanted and there is nothing legally you could do about it
Drones falling from the sky: General liability laws would apply no different than if I am mowing my lawn and a rock flys out and hits you, or if I am play yard Darts and I toss one over your fence which injures you.
I can not prove it is safe: That is not how a free society works, the burden is not on me to prove my actions are safe, the burden is on YOU to prove that my actions have a more likely than not probability of causing physical harm to others or their property
Other Air Traffic Hitting a Wing: Why are they below 400ft, or the less than 100 ft I would fly but still be under the FAA Regulations, My entire point is that under 100ft should not be under the FAA at all,
1. If you don't understand how you flying 4pound drone at 100ft is putting somebody's life in danger, you absolutely under no circumstances should own or use a drone of any kind. Sorry if that sounds personal or insulting, but I'll stand by that statement.
2. I have a Mavic Air plus a few smaller drones. I'm extremely aware that I can push this thing to 65km/h and do some solid damage, either maliciously, but much much more likely carelessly
3. I have lent several drones to several intelligent, typically safe friends, either under my supervision or alone in a field. Universally they pushed them too hard too fast and lost control quickly.
[I don't care if you're going to say "but that's not me". a) Every one of my friends said that, and b) how is anybody else to trust that _your_ claim specifically is truthful? Prove it.]
4. The more intelligent the drone, unfortunately the more likely the person is to underestimate its danger because "these things fly themselves" and "it has collision avoidance". My nerd friends have started using them like Tesla's autopilot - perfectly safe and awesome until the very moment it isn't, at which point it's too late if you don't have your hands actively on controls.
So as much as it'll HUUUUUGELY inconvenience me, I fully understand that if I need to register and license my car, motorcycle, boat, plane, etc... I need to register and license my other fast-moving piece of dangerous machinery.
I can't, but here's the kicker...neither can you. In this business, you're not allowed to presume safety. Unless you've been trained to understand the ramifications on airspace, you really don't know. That's not how a safety first culture works. You don't make a change to a business critical production system without going through change control...why is it so absurd to consider registering your activity in airspace before you do it? The only reason I can think of is that it's inconvenient for you, which sucks but that's not good enough.
You should write the Uniform Law Commission to enact private property rights up to 200’. [1] They are already considering this. You should have the right to fly a drone just over your property the same way you could drive an unregistered, non-street-legal vehicle on your property. You can’t go on public roads (or over public property or other peoples property), but you should have rights over your own property.
It's not that the drone is the problem, it's what else is up there. Just yesterday I had 2 f-16s fly over my apartment [0]. Their height, by my estimate, was about 500 ft. Could I be wrong about the height? Sure, but I could see them quite clearly and hear them very well. Since I live near an AFB, I'm used to low bypass jets overhead. But yesterday was different, they were easily 5x as low as they should have been. Heck, they commonly fly low over games and that's as good a place to fly a drone as ever. The risk of an f-16 coming down near a stadium event is very very low, yes, but not a chance worth taking.
How do you know an airplane won't fly at 100 feet over your backyard?
I actually get some nice airshows at my house: their is a field across the street, and so one a year the farmer flys in some fungicide. He flys at ~1 meter over the corn, then at the end he climbs just enough to get over the power lines and my house, turns around in my backyard and returns for the next pass.
I have a friend who travels the country taking pictures of houses, and then going door-to-door trying to sell them. I'm not sure how low he flies, but this job is best done from low.
I think your comment makes a lot of sense and makes some good points. Sorry you were downvoted. HN is very pro regulation of drones. I never understood why.
1000ft or 100ft it doesn't matter. You could kill someone operating at 10ft in the wrong place (near a helipad). The standard glidepath flown by jets is 3deg. From the touchdown zone, 100ft covers a 1900ft arc.
Seriously. It's like this phony electronics ban on flights. Eliminating all risks in one are is insane and unreasonable because it's so often to the detriment of everything and everyone else. Next, laser pointers will be outlawed because some idiot might shine them towards a plane. Instead of eliminating RC planes and model rockets for an edge-case that can never happen, maybe the FAA should focus on things that matter like human factors.
From an air traffic perspective this is very similar to asking "Why can't I erect a 100 foot unlit unmarked pole in my back yard without having to register my activity?"
There shouldn't be aircraft flying 100 feet above your house but I can think of a ton of scenarios where it could happen, and in most of them running into a drone takes the situation from "dangerous, but not an incident" to "fatal incident."
If that drone falls, it will hit the ground at ~55 mph (ignoring wind resistance etc.). I would rather not have a 4 pound object smack into my head at 55 mph just because some parent thought their child could handle it
OK, you have your drone and fly it over your home. But me and my kid are playing in our backyard. Do I have the right of privacy? And, what if your drone smashes in my head? Unless you own a 10,000 acre ranch...they are legitimate concerns. What we do about it is the question.
Disclaimer: I'm a licensed private pilot and have a registered drone.
I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.
Pilots have areas they can't fly below a certain altitude because the noise would rile up wildlife, like flocks of birds; jerk drone pilots, oblivious to this, started zipping through those areas and national parks, scaring up the wildlife (and annoying people), which led to them being banned around national monuments and parks.
Drones have also interfered with commercial approaches at airports in Class B airports so they became banned around airports, unless permission is granted from the airport. The FAA came out with regs requiring you to register, and you had to make sure you acknowledged that you had to be permission to fly in class B airport, from the airport. Simply stated, it was so that if you were an jerk and your drone crashed, or you injured anyone on the ground they could find you. Seems reasonable to me.
The new regs are just an incremental update. Many flights operate on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), which is basically "see and avoid." Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. Of course, they can't see small drones on radar, so they can't vector you around them or talk to the drone operator. There was a case where a black hawk was struck by a drone last year, requiring an emergency landing. The NTSB ultimately found the guy through the manufacturers serial number, because he his drone never returned.
There have been many, many bad actors using drones to harass neighbors, spy on women, and it's getting ridiculous. When a licensed pilot has an accident, they know the NTSB and FAA will investigate. You file a safety report and own up to any mistakes, or it will be very bad. The NTSB is very thorough and is primarily interested in keeping future accidents from happening. However, drone pilots run away abandoning their hardware.
I think the next iteration will be drones required to have transponders, so air traffic control can see them, and a pilot who has TCAS can see them also. This just means they will be become more expensive, and over time, hopefully transponders and ancillary avionics will become cheaper on aircraft as these companies push into general aviation.
As someone who just bought their first drone, registered under section 336 and has been following the rules (including calling the hospital heliport since their five-mile radius covers my house and every public park nearby) I really can't say I'm shocked that this has happened.
My county has even gone so far as to pass an extremely onerous ordinance requiring drone operators get a sign off from every person whose property you may film from a UAS because irresponsible people have made it an issue. I could argue how childish this rule is in the first place, since I can take a picture of somebody's back yard with a high power zoom lens from a hill and be in the clear - but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care.
I just hope the FAA finds a sensible middle ground between the ill-fated section 336 regs and section 107. I'm more than willing to pass a knowledge test, and if I need to buy a $X (where X is $200 or less, hopefully) transponder to affix to my UAS then fine - but can we at least make it easy to do online?
>but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care.
I'm inclined to think this is more a consequence of insufficient enforcement. We have a lot of laws and regulations and are rarely enforced, and thus often violated. That this happens with drones is hardly a surprise.
The class B restriction is draconian and unnecessary. I live about 4 miles from an airport (Class B). The B zone is 5miles. There has never been an aircraft I have ever seen 400ft over my house, and if they were making a 4 mile <400 ft approach they would have a hell of a lot more to worry about than drones when coming in. (Engine failure with seconds of glide ratio, birds, objects). The "inverted wedding cake" of airspace needs to exclude below 400ft AGL besides areas very close to the airport. You as a pilot must know that besides when you are making your final approach or taking off you are well above 400ft for safety reasons other than unaccounted for aircraft.
You can’t just barge into a system that’s being used to safely transport human beings in a high-risk environment and expect to be allowed to do whatever you want with no forethought, planning, or coordination with other users. The system as it exists protects people from violent and catastrophic death. It would be patently insane to start making big changes to it without thinking very hard about the impact of those changes.
Is it strictly necessary to protect airspace around major airports all the way to the surface for five miles? Probably not. But we have designed a hugely complex, life-critical system around that and many other assumptions, and we can’t just go changing things willy-nilly. This is aviation, not computing. We do not “move fast and break things.” The consequences of
getting this wrong aren’t just tweaking some syntax and trying again. The consequences are destruction, death and bereavement.
I’m sure we’ll eventually get to a point where drones are more readily integrated into the system. For now, humans have the priority. And if that means you have to fill out a little web form while the people charged with maintaining the system work through all the implications, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
A normal ILS approach is about 300 ft/mile. Many airports have runways that are a couple of miles long, so the center of the Class B could be roughly as much as 1.5 miles from the touchdown point. At your distance, a nominal approach would be at 750 feet. At a mile closer, a nominal approach would be 450 feet.
If the pilot is a little low on the glideslope, you're a little closer to the airport than you think, and your drone is a little higher than you think, you've got a collision. Now, these are all worst case deviations, and it might make sense for the FAA to draw the lines more closely, orient them with the actual approach paths, and perhaps have a lower altitude restriction (maybe 150 feet or so) close to an airport. As it is though, the 5 mile ring is a pretty reasonable, if conservative choice given the potential consequences of a drone hitting an aircraft on takeoff or landing.
I agree. Before a recent move, I flew a model airplane and “large” drone about a half mile from a regional airport (but not in the approach path). I called them up, explained to them what and where I was flying, and they basically told me it would be fine to do whenever as long as I kept an eye out for any low flying planes.
There are a number of assumptions missing in this.
Emergency approaches are by their very nature often well below glide slope.
Perhaps more statistically relevant is that not everyone's altimeters always function correctly, are set to the correct airfield's most recent numbers, that in the potentially 50+ minutes since the last ATIS update the ambient pressure hasn't changed significantly, and lastly that all pilots–drone pilots included–are doing what they're supposed to and leaving sufficient margins.
Shoot enough approaches and you will likely realize that small, potentially dangerous objects piloted by untrained, unregulated, unmonitored, non-communicating pilots at 400' could quickly become a problem for you more readily than it appears from the ground.
Take off on a high-density-altitude day in an underpowered aircraft and you'll also appreciate the additional headroom.
To say nothing of the fact that I've owned drones that under LoS conditions just continue the last input received, which with inexperienced or irresponsible operators would be an input to climb.
Yeah but this is _always_ the reason that any industry gives for criminalizing competition. There's never any justification for the entirety of the thing being done, just a list of the most egregious problems (as you have listed here) and then everything else just gets lumped in and hand-waved away with "you can ask for an exception and/or pay money in fees".
An engineer wants to push some code live to a large, production software project worked on by hundreds of engineers. It hasn't been peer reviewed, tested or evaluated in any way except by the engineer. It isn't a mission critical update, but he doesn't seem to think it'll be a problem.
"No way!" you say, without hesitation, because it's a rightly stupid thing to do. It's a pointless risk. That's always how bad stories start. The engineer points out the bad stories are just a list of the most egregious problems. You wouldn't even let the engineer ask for an exception or pay a fee to do it. He then says the only reason you're doing this is to hold back his career.
And that's just for software where a mistake doesn't mean someone dies. Tell me again how this is about "criminalizing competition" because that rings a little hollow.
Yep, we have gone from a society that values freedom first, and government must present a case to have that freedom limited in a vary narrow band
To Wholesale regulations of all activity where by you have to seek "permission" from the regulators to do anything, and hope they will grant you a coveted "exception" to their prohibition.
> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.
THIS. A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS.
When I first got into flying drones and getting into it as a hobby, I read almost daily about idiots flying it within downtown areas and losing control, only to have them fall out of the sky. Or stories about spying on their next door neighbors, or flying so high they were in the airspace of commercial planes and near misses when a plane was approaching a runway.
I was just counting the days when this would happen. I knew it would happen because the reckless behavior of a few have ruined it for everybody. Having been doing this for almost 5 years, I felt like the FAA has to get involved sooner rather than later with all this stuff going on. I'm frankly surprised it took this long. Clearly they kept giving these people the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed time and again.
The Casey Neistat FAA case was clear evidence something had to be done.
That's the problem with jerks. The other problem with jerks is that they don't follow any rules anyway while the good guys get to deal with the added bureaucratic overhead.
How do the rules prevent a jerk from buying a drone (with cash, to remove even the faintest connection to himself) and go fly it near the local approach to film landing planes from air? There's no way to trace it back to you even if the authorities found the serial number from the wreckage.
> Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft.
IFR traffic is only separated from other IFR traffic and participating VFR traffic. At FL180 (~18000' MSL) and above-0, it's all IFR, but below FL180, IFR is not separated from non-participating VFR and is still responsible for "see and avoid" when meteorological conditions permit in all airspaces (even above FL180).
0 - Yeah, yeah, above FL600, you could be VFR again... ;)
Since we're nitpicking, ATC also provides separation of all aircraft in Class B airspace. In Class C, they provide separation of IFR aircraft from all other aircraft (VFR-VFR gets advisories).
> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.
When were drones ever unregulated? I don’t remember any such time. I remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, which most people ignored yet scoffed and complained about endlessly. In 2016 they made flying drones less than 55 pounds in class G airspace under 400 feet with line of sight without a pilot’s license or registration legal, but it was not unregulated.
I don’t think that jerks is the main problem here. Use of drones in the last 5 years has skyrocketed. The percentage of jerks could be going down dramatically, and still the accident rates will rise due to the sheer number of people playing with drones. There are many many times more people flying drones now than there were in 2010.
Anyone who’s used a drone more than a handful of times has crashed their drone, or had their drone lose control, or run out of battery mid-flight. Having flown many times and crashed a few, I might be a jerk and not know it, but I’m also 1) lucky I haven’t hurt anyone, and 2) in favor of mandatory registration and some, any, mandatory safety training for drones. Even ignoring FUD about airports and spying neighbors, I still think a little regulation is a good idea.
>>remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license,
This is false, section 336 prohibited the FAA from making such a requirement for Model Aircraft which quad's and other UAV's are.
in 2016 the FAA attempted to impose new regulations on Model Aircraft, these regulations where found to be in-violation of section 336 and where struck down by the courts last year
This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby
While I am sure this is the public feel good justification for massive new regulations, it is unlikely to be the actual reason which will be steeped in commercialization of the Hobbyist Airspace.
To remove hobby / amateur flying to make way for the Pizza Delivery and Police Surveillance Drones in that valuable airspace
Remember that pilots (mostly private) make mistakes and kill people, a lot, and they get a lot of goodwill from the authorities and the press for just wearing an uniform. And also they tend to lie on their drone encounters. No actual drone incident has even been reported where the owner of the drone was not violating an obvious rule (either line of sight or zoning), ie the rules don't need to change.
The other thing to consider is that drones are not more dangerous than birds, and they don't fly near airports and they don't form flocks.
Now there will be way more use for small UAV than manned aviation, so one logical thing to do is strictly separate the airspace (400ft- for drones 500ft+ for planes, increase 100ft every 5 years) by preventing manned aircrafts from flying low, in particular on near the coasts, just give them a few dedicated zones for airports and helicopter work, and open most of the rest to unmanned.
This tends to support my notion that the issue is insufficient enforcement of existing rules, requiring registration is one way to make enforcement easier. Which may be a major goal of revising the rules.
Drones are more dangerous than birds. Birds at least try to see and avoid other aircraft. And upon impact drones cause a lot more damage than birds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-xg0
Anti-drone policies are good for pilots and manned aircraft operators. The bootleggers-and-baptists theory of political incentives would predict that the agency in charge of manned pilot licensing would find morally positive reasons for banning UAVs. They don’t mention the fact that unmanned aviation could be an existential threat to large sectors of manned aviation, and therefore their political influence.
Nor do they mention the enormous costs imposed on society because they have banned potentially cheaper or more effective means to productive ends.
O.o Most aircraft are highly automated, with humans running checklist programs as the backup system. I doubt that "banning automation" is the motive here as much as, "preventing interference with already functioning automation"
I hope these regulations will finally address bird ownership. Anyone can walk into a pet shop and buy one with no Id. And if one of those birds escapes from a careless owner it could easily hit a plane or ambulance!
Hah! You joke (?) but this is a very real and valid point. They offer equal danger.
The reason the FAA is getting support for making these changes in radio controlled craft is because they give individuals powers they didn't have before. No government wants that.
There hasn't been a single example of a radio controlled craft causing harm to people on commercial flights or the like.
Curious to see where this puts first person view (FPV) flying. I very much enjoy watching this sport grow, but with these new regulations the operator would have to be in line sight at all times.
Maintaining VLOS was already a requirement for section 336 pilots, nothing has changed. There was one way around this which was to have dedicated spotters that kept line of sight on the UAS, I'm curious if the FAA will continue to allow this.
when cars were first coming into use pennsylvania passed a law which would require all motorists piloting their "horseless carriages", upon chance encounters with cattle or livestock to (1) immediately stop the vehicle, (2) "immediately and as rapidly as possible ... disassemble the automobile", and (3) "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes" until equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified.
In the UK self-propelled vehicles had to be led by a pedestrian waving a red flag or carrying a lantern to warn bystanders of the vehicle's approach
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I feel like 99% of the engineers who comment on HN don't work in fields where their technology could kill someone if it messes up. If an error meant someone's death, you'd probably think a little harder for committing. That's why I'm not taking anyone who calls this "draconian" or derisively "risk averse" seriously.
Being a safety-first industry is not a punch line. Life is stochastic, not deterministic, and the FAA exists to add as many 9s to the likelihood of success as possible. Sorry your fun is ruined, but when I fly in a plane I don't want to be worrying if some hobbyist with more money than accountability will put my life at risk because they wanted to make a cool video to put on YouTube.
However, next to where I live is a small airfield and, at times, we have small private jets and sesnas flying next to us.
What always stopped me from buying the drone was because I simply didn’t want to put myself in a position to have that one malfunction that causes the drone to soar and accidentally damage the plane. Regardless of how improbable or unlikely, I just didn’t want to be “that guy”.
Or a Blade Inductrix FPV RTF kit that comes with everything, even a charger!
These quads are so tiny and won't do any damage even to walls, I fly them around the house, so they won't mess up any airplane traffic!
EDIT: The UR65 the sibling commenter mention looks better, it's brushless, which means much better speed/agility.
Are you missing the point of the regulations and guidelines?
Few years ago I was watching across some YouTube video about drones. In one video, some guy was flying a hacked DJI drone to workaround the limitation so just he can fly it higher.
I of course concerned about it because the altitude he have reached is well above the limit set by FAA. So I wrote a comment to ask about hes acknowledgement on those FAA rules. And what's followed was a debate that lasted almost a week.
Today, you can still found that kind of videos on YouTube where people are flying hacked drones to "Break/Test the limits".
I hope somebody like FAA can do something to prevent people from doing stupid things (Hack their drone so it can fly higher etc), and make the sky safer.
If that were the actual mission of the FAA, that would be easy to accomplish with near-infinite 9s: Stop flying entirely, ban all flying machines of all types. You'd have zero aviation incidents if there was no aviation.
There are a finite number of 9s that are needed before the cost of adding more safety is detrimental to humanity.
And note that I do work in a field where my work could kill someone if it messes up. I build industrial equipment, typically to ISO 13849 PLd or PLe standards - that's 7 nines of probability that there will be no dangerous failure in any given hour, which requires reliable components, fault sensing/fault tolerant safety controllers, and redundant wiring .
I could make equipment I produce more safe, if that was my only goal. For example, each E-stop button has two contacts and two pairs of wires in parallel which monitor its state, and this button removes power from the machine by turning off two contactors in series. If any one of these components should fail - a contact on the E-stop gets shorted out, or a contactor gets welded closed - the system will detect this and remove energy from the system. I could, in theory, make this "more safe" with three pairs of wires and three contactors in series. But while I've had to fight hard against those who try to reduce the safety level in favor of production efficiency, I've never tried to add a third set of redundant contacts.
In the end, an operator standing next to the E-stop button and supplying one of my robots outside the safety gate and light curtain means that there are 6 guys who are not using high-power hand tools to do what the robot is doing. Adding excessive 9s to this system means not that people are safer, instead there's less automation and the world is worse off.
A simple registration process, knowledge test, and inexpensive transponders on RC aircraft would make the world a better place. Requiring hundreds of hours of training and certification, and adding prohibitively expensive transponders, would kill off RC aviation. I want you to fly in a plane safely. That's harder to do if your pilot didn't grow up at the model airfield.
Edit:
"my kid are playing in our backyard. Do I have the right of privacy?": No you do not have a Right to privacy, I can put a camera on my roof or pole and record your backyard if I wanted and there is nothing legally you could do about it
Drones falling from the sky: General liability laws would apply no different than if I am mowing my lawn and a rock flys out and hits you, or if I am play yard Darts and I toss one over your fence which injures you.
I can not prove it is safe: That is not how a free society works, the burden is not on me to prove my actions are safe, the burden is on YOU to prove that my actions have a more likely than not probability of causing physical harm to others or their property
Other Air Traffic Hitting a Wing: Why are they below 400ft, or the less than 100 ft I would fly but still be under the FAA Regulations, My entire point is that under 100ft should not be under the FAA at all,
2. I have a Mavic Air plus a few smaller drones. I'm extremely aware that I can push this thing to 65km/h and do some solid damage, either maliciously, but much much more likely carelessly
3. I have lent several drones to several intelligent, typically safe friends, either under my supervision or alone in a field. Universally they pushed them too hard too fast and lost control quickly. [I don't care if you're going to say "but that's not me". a) Every one of my friends said that, and b) how is anybody else to trust that _your_ claim specifically is truthful? Prove it.]
4. The more intelligent the drone, unfortunately the more likely the person is to underestimate its danger because "these things fly themselves" and "it has collision avoidance". My nerd friends have started using them like Tesla's autopilot - perfectly safe and awesome until the very moment it isn't, at which point it's too late if you don't have your hands actively on controls.
So as much as it'll HUUUUUGELY inconvenience me, I fully understand that if I need to register and license my car, motorcycle, boat, plane, etc... I need to register and license my other fast-moving piece of dangerous machinery.
[1] https://www.unmannedairspace.info/uncategorized/ulc-proposes...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Denver/comments/9m8b6s/what_was_wit...
I actually get some nice airshows at my house: their is a field across the street, and so one a year the farmer flys in some fungicide. He flys at ~1 meter over the corn, then at the end he climbs just enough to get over the power lines and my house, turns around in my backyard and returns for the next pass.
I have a friend who travels the country taking pictures of houses, and then going door-to-door trying to sell them. I'm not sure how low he flies, but this job is best done from low.
If someone has to explain this to you, you shouldn't be the person flying a four pound drone at a height of a hundred feet. Seriously, it's not ok.
There shouldn't be aircraft flying 100 feet above your house but I can think of a ton of scenarios where it could happen, and in most of them running into a drone takes the situation from "dangerous, but not an incident" to "fatal incident."
Are you next to high tension power lines? Is there a helicopter coming in to do maintenance?
The point is that you don't know, and neither does anybody else unless people are filing and reading flight plans.
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I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.
Pilots have areas they can't fly below a certain altitude because the noise would rile up wildlife, like flocks of birds; jerk drone pilots, oblivious to this, started zipping through those areas and national parks, scaring up the wildlife (and annoying people), which led to them being banned around national monuments and parks.
Drones have also interfered with commercial approaches at airports in Class B airports so they became banned around airports, unless permission is granted from the airport. The FAA came out with regs requiring you to register, and you had to make sure you acknowledged that you had to be permission to fly in class B airport, from the airport. Simply stated, it was so that if you were an jerk and your drone crashed, or you injured anyone on the ground they could find you. Seems reasonable to me.
The new regs are just an incremental update. Many flights operate on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), which is basically "see and avoid." Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. Of course, they can't see small drones on radar, so they can't vector you around them or talk to the drone operator. There was a case where a black hawk was struck by a drone last year, requiring an emergency landing. The NTSB ultimately found the guy through the manufacturers serial number, because he his drone never returned.
There have been many, many bad actors using drones to harass neighbors, spy on women, and it's getting ridiculous. When a licensed pilot has an accident, they know the NTSB and FAA will investigate. You file a safety report and own up to any mistakes, or it will be very bad. The NTSB is very thorough and is primarily interested in keeping future accidents from happening. However, drone pilots run away abandoning their hardware.
I think the next iteration will be drones required to have transponders, so air traffic control can see them, and a pilot who has TCAS can see them also. This just means they will be become more expensive, and over time, hopefully transponders and ancillary avionics will become cheaper on aircraft as these companies push into general aviation.
My county has even gone so far as to pass an extremely onerous ordinance requiring drone operators get a sign off from every person whose property you may film from a UAS because irresponsible people have made it an issue. I could argue how childish this rule is in the first place, since I can take a picture of somebody's back yard with a high power zoom lens from a hill and be in the clear - but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care.
I just hope the FAA finds a sensible middle ground between the ill-fated section 336 regs and section 107. I'm more than willing to pass a knowledge test, and if I need to buy a $X (where X is $200 or less, hopefully) transponder to affix to my UAS then fine - but can we at least make it easy to do online?
I'm inclined to think this is more a consequence of insufficient enforcement. We have a lot of laws and regulations and are rarely enforced, and thus often violated. That this happens with drones is hardly a surprise.
Is it strictly necessary to protect airspace around major airports all the way to the surface for five miles? Probably not. But we have designed a hugely complex, life-critical system around that and many other assumptions, and we can’t just go changing things willy-nilly. This is aviation, not computing. We do not “move fast and break things.” The consequences of getting this wrong aren’t just tweaking some syntax and trying again. The consequences are destruction, death and bereavement.
I’m sure we’ll eventually get to a point where drones are more readily integrated into the system. For now, humans have the priority. And if that means you have to fill out a little web form while the people charged with maintaining the system work through all the implications, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Class B airspace is already a Cone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_(United_States)... But, it's a cone people can understand without needing to know anything about the local airport which makes it very conservative.
If the pilot is a little low on the glideslope, you're a little closer to the airport than you think, and your drone is a little higher than you think, you've got a collision. Now, these are all worst case deviations, and it might make sense for the FAA to draw the lines more closely, orient them with the actual approach paths, and perhaps have a lower altitude restriction (maybe 150 feet or so) close to an airport. As it is though, the 5 mile ring is a pretty reasonable, if conservative choice given the potential consequences of a drone hitting an aircraft on takeoff or landing.
Emergency approaches are by their very nature often well below glide slope.
Perhaps more statistically relevant is that not everyone's altimeters always function correctly, are set to the correct airfield's most recent numbers, that in the potentially 50+ minutes since the last ATIS update the ambient pressure hasn't changed significantly, and lastly that all pilots–drone pilots included–are doing what they're supposed to and leaving sufficient margins.
Shoot enough approaches and you will likely realize that small, potentially dangerous objects piloted by untrained, unregulated, unmonitored, non-communicating pilots at 400' could quickly become a problem for you more readily than it appears from the ground.
Take off on a high-density-altitude day in an underpowered aircraft and you'll also appreciate the additional headroom.
To say nothing of the fact that I've owned drones that under LoS conditions just continue the last input received, which with inexperienced or irresponsible operators would be an input to climb.
"No way!" you say, without hesitation, because it's a rightly stupid thing to do. It's a pointless risk. That's always how bad stories start. The engineer points out the bad stories are just a list of the most egregious problems. You wouldn't even let the engineer ask for an exception or pay a fee to do it. He then says the only reason you're doing this is to hold back his career.
And that's just for software where a mistake doesn't mean someone dies. Tell me again how this is about "criminalizing competition" because that rings a little hollow.
To Wholesale regulations of all activity where by you have to seek "permission" from the regulators to do anything, and hope they will grant you a coveted "exception" to their prohibition.
it is sad that people still call that freedom
THIS. A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS.
When I first got into flying drones and getting into it as a hobby, I read almost daily about idiots flying it within downtown areas and losing control, only to have them fall out of the sky. Or stories about spying on their next door neighbors, or flying so high they were in the airspace of commercial planes and near misses when a plane was approaching a runway.
I was just counting the days when this would happen. I knew it would happen because the reckless behavior of a few have ruined it for everybody. Having been doing this for almost 5 years, I felt like the FAA has to get involved sooner rather than later with all this stuff going on. I'm frankly surprised it took this long. Clearly they kept giving these people the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed time and again.
The Casey Neistat FAA case was clear evidence something had to be done.
How do the rules prevent a jerk from buying a drone (with cash, to remove even the faintest connection to himself) and go fly it near the local approach to film landing planes from air? There's no way to trace it back to you even if the authorities found the serial number from the wreckage.
> Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft.
IFR traffic is only separated from other IFR traffic and participating VFR traffic. At FL180 (~18000' MSL) and above-0, it's all IFR, but below FL180, IFR is not separated from non-participating VFR and is still responsible for "see and avoid" when meteorological conditions permit in all airspaces (even above FL180).
0 - Yeah, yeah, above FL600, you could be VFR again... ;)
When were drones ever unregulated? I don’t remember any such time. I remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, which most people ignored yet scoffed and complained about endlessly. In 2016 they made flying drones less than 55 pounds in class G airspace under 400 feet with line of sight without a pilot’s license or registration legal, but it was not unregulated.
I don’t think that jerks is the main problem here. Use of drones in the last 5 years has skyrocketed. The percentage of jerks could be going down dramatically, and still the accident rates will rise due to the sheer number of people playing with drones. There are many many times more people flying drones now than there were in 2010.
Anyone who’s used a drone more than a handful of times has crashed their drone, or had their drone lose control, or run out of battery mid-flight. Having flown many times and crashed a few, I might be a jerk and not know it, but I’m also 1) lucky I haven’t hurt anyone, and 2) in favor of mandatory registration and some, any, mandatory safety training for drones. Even ignoring FUD about airports and spying neighbors, I still think a little regulation is a good idea.
This is false, section 336 prohibited the FAA from making such a requirement for Model Aircraft which quad's and other UAV's are.
in 2016 the FAA attempted to impose new regulations on Model Aircraft, these regulations where found to be in-violation of section 336 and where struck down by the courts last year
This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby
To remove hobby / amateur flying to make way for the Pizza Delivery and Police Surveillance Drones in that valuable airspace
The other thing to consider is that drones are not more dangerous than birds, and they don't fly near airports and they don't form flocks.
Now there will be way more use for small UAV than manned aviation, so one logical thing to do is strictly separate the airspace (400ft- for drones 500ft+ for planes, increase 100ft every 5 years) by preventing manned aircrafts from flying low, in particular on near the coasts, just give them a few dedicated zones for airports and helicopter work, and open most of the rest to unmanned.
0-100 property Owner controlled
100-400 Hobby non-commercial
-400 the FAA does not need to be involved at all
400+ Commercial and this is where the FAA comes in and provides regulations for Commercial UAV and Manned Aircraft to operate in this Commercial Zone
leave us Hobbyist alone.
Nor do they mention the enormous costs imposed on society because they have banned potentially cheaper or more effective means to productive ends.
The reason the FAA is getting support for making these changes in radio controlled craft is because they give individuals powers they didn't have before. No government wants that.
There hasn't been a single example of a radio controlled craft causing harm to people on commercial flights or the like.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcjJFnVzZzY
He thinks that larger organizations such as amazon want the airspace and are lobbying for it.
In the UK self-propelled vehicles had to be led by a pedestrian waving a red flag or carrying a lantern to warn bystanders of the vehicle's approach
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws