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Excerpt from above article:
Some very bad news for drone pilots this morning: An appeals board has ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration has wide latitude to make all drone flights illegal in the United States.
The decision, by the National Transportation Safety Board, determined that the FAA's existing "aircraft" regulations can apply to model aircraft, drones, and remote controlled aircraft, which is perhaps the most restrictive possible outcome for drone pilots in a legal saga that has dragged on for more than a year.
Comments
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!! Chicken Little was right, and he lives right here on DIYdrones!
Get a grip people, all that these insufferable fools (the FAA and their cohort NTSB) are doing is jamming their feet further and further into their mouths.
NTSB? These are the same lard-asses who sit drooling on their desks, slack-jawed, as they watch 33,000+ people per year being killed in their "jurisdiction" on US roadways. That's thirty-three thousand dead people per year, folks. Tell me again how many people have been killed by drones and why these buffoons are wasting five minutes on them?
Now they're all sweaty and panicky because they waited way to long to try to control something that is none of their business (as they have been told by Congress) and that has become uncontrollable. These guys are very much like Eastern European communists after the Berlin Wall fell - they just don't get it and soon they will be irrelevant. Go fly!
I welcome the introduction of each of these guidelines and clarifications. Current manned aircraft regulation and certification seems obvious correct? Seems like now it just removes allot of unnecessary ambiguity. This should help sort the professionals from the mass of entry to the market.
Having pre-set and approved flying areas helps, I would suggest other search out the same....
Model Rockets will be a thing of the past.
Sometimes the parachute does not deploy,
and the Lawyers will be ready if a foamy hits you on the head.
@Joe LaMantia, obviously your kid's show glossed over the part that special interest lobbying, payoffs, graft, and corruption play in law-making!
Guys (Joe and jg), no, that's not how it works. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to make laws. Two of these laws are the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 and the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2012. These laws give the FAA the authority to create regulations which are listed in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), a subset of which is called the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR). The creation, publishing, and other FAA conduct regarding these regulations has some limitations (they can't just declare something to be a regulation). Among the duly-created regulations is 14 CFR 91.13 which says that no person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner. The FAA says Pirker was violating this regulation. Previously, the court ruled that he couldn't have been because model aircraft are not the "aircraft" that this regulation was referring to (otherwise, things like Frisbees would be subject to much of the FAR as well). This ruling says that model aircraft are "aircraft" that this regulation was referring to. So no new laws or regulations have been made; the only thing that has changed is that now we "understand" that Congress meant for the regulations regarding "aircraft" that the FAA created to apply to paper airplanes.
I think a bunch of you guys should go get a wack of printer paper. Fold it into planes and write drone on the sides. Load into a large plastic bag and dump off the highest spots in the city's you can get to. Since a paper plane is now an aircraft and have some fun.
Great quote:
"With this decision, the NTSB has declared model aircraft, paper airplanes and even children's toys to be 'aircraft,' subject to the same regulations as 747s"
When it comes to federal agency rule-making, Franz Kafka would likely say, "Jeez, I was only writing a fictional story."
It says "can" not "did". It also mentions "careless and reckless" not a complete ban on drones. So they FAA "can" fine, penalize, regulate etc. It seems to me they other than a few cease and desist orders, and the case against pirker which brought about this ruling, the faa has not actually gone after people with the exception of asking to stop a certain flight profile or operator behavior. Also the FAA does not need to make rules with congress. Congress granted the faa power to make laws. They just need to properly promulgate the rule/law they intend to enforce. Far from doom and gloom. People need to learn how to work with a regulatory agency instead of being a thorn in the donkeys rear. Being like the latter is going to do nothing to preserve the hobby or gain small uav commercial activities rules any time soon.
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