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FAA endorses AMA rules to govern personal use of sUAS for Precision Ag

Posted by Joshua Johnson on November 28, 2013 at 1:07am

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November 25th… In an online news story by Oklahoma City Channel 9 News, FAA effectively endorsed AMA’s safety guidelines for the personal use of sUAS for agricultural applications. As reported by Justin Dougherty…

“Farmers may operate an unmanned aircraft over their own property for personal use … Guidelines for the operation of model aircraft, such as those published by the Academy of Model Aeronautics, may be used by farmers as reference for safe model UAS operations.”

http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amagov/2013/11/26/faa-endorses-ama-rules-to-govern-personal-use-of-suas-for-precision-ag/

Tags: ama, endorses, faa, agriculture, for, govern, of, personal, precision, rules
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  • Moderator
    Gary Mortimer November 28, 2013 at 12:27pm

    The FAA have confirmed farmers are allowed to fly model aircraft. The way the ag business works in Europe is farmers buy in the service.

  • Gary McCray November 28, 2013 at 11:09am

    On looking further at the article, it was a simple restatement by the FAA that farmers could use them for personal use.

    There is probably an intentional ambiguity of what constitutes commercial versus personal use.

    The FAA can make its own choices as to what activities are commercial and which are personal.

    From a strict interpretation of commercial any video taken of a flying RC model and then used in marketing and selling that model can be certainly considered commercial.

    Many years ago the FAA tried to enforce that, but quickly relented.

    I suspect that in this case they are choosing to interpret farmers use on his own farm as personal rather than commercial regardless of the fact that his farm itself is a commercial venture.

    It is not clear that this is actual policy, nor is it at all clear what further implications it might have.

  • Rob_Lefebvre November 28, 2013 at 11:02am

    Yeah... it's not exactly clear what they are saying.  Is it just saying that farmers are allowed to fly just for fun over their own fields?  Well duh.  Or is it saying that farmers are allowed to do farming activities (business) over their fields if they follow AMA rules?

  • Tyler McGahee November 28, 2013 at 10:58am

    Still doesn't allow for business use, unfortunately

  • Gary McCray November 28, 2013 at 10:17am

    This is huge, at least one potential complete boondoggle avoided.

    The FAA finally did something and it is simple, effective, has a huge potential economic impact and actually makes sense.

    Of course this is really the easy one, basically farmers over their own land for their own use under 400' and LOS.

    Still a really good start and hopefully indicative of a more enlightened set of regulations than I have been expecting.                                              

  • criro1999 November 28, 2013 at 9:30am

    That is really very good news! Finally.

This reply was deleted.