I'm delighted to announce that the Small UAV Coalition, an industry group led by 3DR, Amazon, Google, DJI, Parrot and Airware, is now up and running. You can visit the website here.
The mandate of the group is as follows:
The Small UAV Coalition advocates for law and policy changes to permit the operation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) beyond the line-of-sight, with varying degrees of autonomy, for commercial, consumer, recreational and philanthropic purposes. Our members, including leading consumer and technology companies such as 3DR, Airware, Amazon Prime Air, DJI Innovations, Google[x], GoPro, and Parrot, believe that U.S. leadership in the research, development, and production of unmanned aerial vehicles will benefit consumers in all walks of life. We believe that, working together, we will be able to remove unnecessary policy or regulatory hurdles that impede small UAV development, sales, job creation, and services.
The Coalition is being run by the Washington DC law firm of Akin Gump, with a full professional staff, including former FAA officials. In my 3DR CEO role, I'm also the Chairman of the Coalition.
Comments
Great idea with this coalition! Even though Denmark is a small country we also have our own community for the UAS/UAV industry www.uasdenmark.dk. In fact the Hans Christian Anderson Airport outside Odense is an upcumming UAS airport with testfacilities for testing and development of UAS! When we stand together it is much easier to get the laws to accept the use of UAS for professional uses and to develop the industry!
His entire rant was incompetent and hypocritical. All his talk about violating people's privacy... coming from the CEO of the undisputed world leader in datamining. And army of robots hell bent on destruction? Right. More likely, he was bullshitting his way through a speech targeted at an audience of fanatical privacy "activists" that are similarly incompetent on the matter.
And it was a year ago. Apparently their position has changed.
Coalition with Google? After Google's CEO Schmidtannounced that private drones should be banned?
Give me a break! It is a trojan horse!
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/21/drones-google-eri...
http://fortune.com/2013/12/06/googles-eric-schmidt-wants-a-ban-on-a...
in (some parts of) Europe there is a UAV working group
http://www.uavdach.org/Home/uav_dach.htm
Is this initiative also meant to lobby in Europe?
I want to join
Great to see this Chris,
We have sorely needed appropriate advocacy for some time.
Hopefully this can help in getting past the grid lock and the self serving old boy network.
In the US the FAA has so far proven to be remarkably unresponsive and the whole world needs a way to integrate UAS reasonably for everyone's benefit.
Best Regards,
Gary
Can other/smaller companies join?
Awesome. Put together the smaller voices to make a big voice. Not that Google and Amazon are small. But they're not Lockheed.
This is a real investment in the future, great news!
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