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Just FYI...

Excerpt from "President's Perspective," Model Aviation magazine, November 2010


FAA Ruling May Be Challenging to AMA

Things continue to move forward, albeit relatively slowly, with the FAA regulatory process for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) that will have some collateral impact on model aviation.

AMA’s internal workgroup, comprising members with considerable experience representing a number of modeling disciplines, continues to draft an initial set of standards that we will present to the FAA. The purpose of these standards is to create a path in which model aviation enthusiasts may operate outside of the "default" set of regulations that were [proposed] to the FAA by an Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) in March 2009.

Rich Hanson, AMA’s Government Affairs Representative, and the Safety Committee chairperson, Jim Rice, traveled to Washington in early September to meet with representatives from the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Program Office (UAPO). The purpose of that meeting was to share with the UAPO the direction that we are taking with our standards and to ask for guidance to ensure that the form and format of our work was moving in the right direction.

The results of that meeting have raised some additional concerns for us. We have scheduled a follow-up meeting with UAPO manager Rick Prosek. This meeting will have taken place by the time this issue of MA reaches you. I will update you on the results of this meeting next month.