FAA Registration Rules Announced NOW

[bbfpv]

Isn't there some meme about arguing on the internet? Can't... seem... to find... it....

 

[aka1ceman]

Nothing to worry about with normal people, you appear a bit left of center to me, wouldn't share much with you.

Sorry, Im a little more Right of Center

 

[ianwood]

"Driving is a privilege, not a right."

This is a very appropriate point. Driving is not an inherent right. If you can't prove you can do it safely, you don't get to drive on public roads. Plain and simple. Same should apply for drones.

Many cities have enacted Draconian (and mostly illegal) drone laws to handle the knucklehead lowest common denominator.

The only way to fix it is to create a drone license. Make it hard to get. As in you have to actually demonstrate knowledge and skill (and not just have a pulse like a typical US driving license). Then cities can forego these ridiculous knee-jerk laws. Cops "pull over" unlicensed drone operators. The end.

 

[ianwood]

It's ok because he agrees with a moderator, to be nameless

Comments about moderation are to be made privately and to the moderators directly as per the guidelines. And to be clear, there is no favoritism here. If you see something you feel is in violation of the community guidelines, report it and it will be dealt with.

P.S. Your avatar has been removed. Political messages are not allowed.

 

[aka1ceman]

Nothing to worry about with normal people, you appear a bit left of center to me, wouldn't share much with you.

You've spent 2 days telling us how distrustful you are of the government, predicting the downfall of our hobby, and mouthing off to the moderators. Nope, not normal behavior.
And I'm done feeding you.

...yes the FAA has done nothing to show the public any kind of trust. As 1 poster said earlier, this was no more than a horse and pony show to quiet the media. It has done nothing but expose quad owners to law suits and nothing to protect the safety of the people. We have all agreed that the wrong doers will not register when planning on wrong doing. There's No test like a safety course, (probably coming) or anything for safety.
Meanwhile you sit in the corner and attack anyone who disagrees with you. What facts have you brought to the table? Speculating that everything will go on as normal? You have NO more proof that nothing will change then someone on the opposing side saying it will change.

 

[Helijoc]

You have to follow the money. Next will come mandatory insurance for your quad. No registration, no insurance. LE will then be able to impound your property.

 

[GoodnNuff]

202-267-6556

Direct number to the FAA - anyone called yet?

 

[Reed L]

Imagine this...
I'm driving around near my rural town, hoping to get some footage that can help my daughter with her "Farming the South" project she has to put together at Clemson (Go Tigers! Lol).
I see a great cornfield, so I pull over and pull out my P3. I get some great video from 50' up and just as I'm finishing up a county Sherriff pulls up.
He gets out and the exchange goes something like this after the common what are you doing type questions:
Officer: Do you have a permit to fly that drone?
Me: Yes sir. (And I show him my registration number)
Officer: Did you get the owner's permission to fly over his field?
Me: Ummm, no sir.
Officer: Did you file a flight plan with the FAA?
Me: No sir.
Officer: Well sorry sir, but I'm going to have to report you.

And then a month later I get a fine in the mail from the FAA for $500? $1000?
It's anybody's guess what they might try to do.
Now is this scenario likely? Right now, no. Not even a little bit. In two or three years? In my mind it's probable in that time frame.

You bring up a great point that will help clarify this difference to people from the east and west coasts. On the east coast most land is privately owned and though there are National parks and so on, there's not much in the way of national forests or places to fly that are publicly owned. So you fly over a corn field pretty much knowing that there won't be a problem even though it's private property on a rural road that maybe 4 or 5 cars drive down when you're there in the eastern US.
But right now out west this actually is a likely scenario because of private property laws out here coupled with the amount of traffic on many rural roads. Plus we do have millions of acres of national forests that we can fly in out west. Stopping on the side of the road next to someone's farm and flying my drone over it for a school paper is not something that really goes on out west without asking permission basically because there's a ton of cars on the roads here and it's easier to pull into the farm and ask permission from them. And that will mostly be met with a quick "Sure, go ahead" and no incident, but if we pull to the side of the road and a Sheriff goes by, he will pull over and make sure everything's ok. If you are flying, being that you are trespassing on someone's property where your car is parked, there is a good chance in California that she (the sheriff) will site you for trespassing under California Penal Code Section 602. (California’s law on trespass generally defines “trespass” as entry onto the property of another without permission or a right to do so.) There's really good chance that you will be fined the $75.00 first time trespassing fine, because many of the LEO's out here have a quota of tickets that they have to write... lol, and unfortunately this is the truth and you've made yourself an easy target. So there really is a big difference between the Atlantic and Pacific sides.

On another note, the not being able to fly in national parks is understandable basically because of the amount of people that are out hiking the trails below your drone and the possibility of it falling out of the sky on someone is there. I have thought about flying in Yosemite but then when I see the vast amount of people there, I want no part of flying there and taking that chance... Plus there's so many water falls and forests that can be filmed with basically no people in the area, that I prefer sticking to these extremely remote places out west.

Bringing up the registration the Japanese was a real good point that I had forgotten about. I have friends who were taken into the Tule Lake Internment Camp. And this is why I'm willing to fight this registration, because it is people who are having to register instead of just registering their UAV's. I referenced the Jews in one of my former posts but the same thing happened here in the US with the Japanese. Having to register myself definitely seems weird, where taking a test and getting a license to fly UAV's would be acceptable to me.

 

[aka1ceman]

202-267-6556

Direct number to the FAA - anyone called yet?

......actually I was there this morning.

 

[damitjim01]

Lawsuits inbound... Feds’ drone rules ignore public comment period; invite lawsuits - Watchdog.org

 

[ianwood]

I agree with this. It is operation of a vehicle of sorts, and when done in public, it only makes sense that it should be regulated to protect the public. I just think such regulation should be done like motor vehicles are done, at the State level rather than the federal level. Just like motor vehicles, roads and environments are different and rules should be, too, in order to tailor to that.

Although of course how good those laws would be would depend on the locale and such. Nothing's perfect. Would like to learn more about the Draconian and mostly illegal drone laws you were referencing to see how it has played out in the local political arena, if you can provide some more info or a link.

I appreciate the education I'm getting here from a variety of minds.

I would be in favor of it being done at the state level if there was reciprocity with all other states. I don't want to register in every state I fly in. That would be a royal pain. The additional challenge with that is all airspace is regulated federally. Having state level regs would be complicated to keep in sync with existing NAS regs.

As for the Draconian laws, Florida has enacted a law to prevent drones from overflying private property. And even Los Angeles has created criminal charges to mirror AC 91-57a which is highly suspect.

Many towns and some cities have considered outlawing drones altogether. There is a much legal debate about these laws. Technically once a drone is in the air, it is subject only to FAA regulations for the NAS.

Can state and local authorities also regulate a drone while it is in the air? There is a lot of debate around that. As it stands now, I don't see how it could be legal.

 

[damitjim01]

That being said, I don't see an actual lawsuit mentioned in that article. Has anybody actually filed one?

Hasn't been time and I imagine one would be thrown out at this point since registration hasn't happened and you can't show 'injury'. Similar to how no one was allowed to file on Obamacare until after it went into effect.... another case of, 'let us take something away from you first, then you can prove we shouldn't have'.

 

[damitjim01]

Can state and local authorities also regulate a drone while it is in the air? There is a lot of debate around that. As it stands now, I don't see how it could be legal.

Don't states regulate hot air balloons? I think they do... seem to remember reading something about that

 

[snerd]

I upgraded to 60Mb cable Internet today! Makes loading these 55 pages of bizarro-world a breeze!!

 

[Jeff48920]

bizarro-world!!

+100

 

[newdayoutdoors]

I'm not going to read through 55 pages of posts, but I'll give my 2 cents.

This is NOT about safety. This is NOT about the revenue through fees. This is NOT about liability. It is 110% about CONTROL. It is a model that appears innocent enough on the outside through small or free "fees" to lure in the sheeple. Once the sheeple have registered as owners of the inanimate object then they know who's door to knock on when they want to then control how that object is used, how many of that type of object the person is allowed, impose their might over the owner of the object at their will, determine who can and cannot have the object, and ultimately ban said object from the peasants at the government's will. It is a freaking flying "toy" for crying out loud. There are laws in place about where and how they can be flown. Yes some people will ignore these laws. Yes unfortunately a few people and/or property will get hurt. You cannot regulate stupidity. People and property are hurt or worse every day by many things we as a free society enjoy. It is a sad reality. But this "registration" of UAV's is simply another example of a bigger and more intrusive government that wants nothing more than to take away the freedoms of the citizens.

You all do what you want. As for me ... my UAVs all crashed into and sank to the bottom of a deep lake. I tried to recover them by rowing a boat out to them, but in my emotional distress over losing my expensive toys, I threw the controllers and POV equipment into the watery grave to reunite with their matching UAVs. Funny how my guns all sank to the bottom of the same lake in a duck hunting accident.

The FAA and our current socialist administration can kiss my backside.

 

[damitjim01]

I threw the controllers and POV equipment into the watery grave to reunite with their matching UAVs.

I kept mine as a reminder of the once cheap, part time hobby that became 'unfun', overly expensive and time consuming for compliance.

 

[GadgetGuy]

Um, yes there is. Basic web server security protocols will ban the IP of any machine that consecutively accesses the page X number of times / time frame. This is to thwart DoS attacks at the very least. Given average web latency (network, page loads, etc) let's say you can load the FAA search page once every 5 seconds (without getting flagged and banned). Now lets assume the registration number is a 10 digit alphanumeric case-insensitive string (to make the math easy). Thatp would be 36^10 registration number possibilities, or 360 billion. 360 billion * 5 seconds per try is 18 trillion seconds. There are 31,557,600 seconds in a year, so a single hacker trying to find everyone in the database and sell the information would have to wait 570385 years to sell his list. Even if there were 10000 computers trying the same thing in parallel it would take 5.7 years to crack the whole thing. In other words, the only way this would every be possible is if someone hacked the DB and did the brute force hacking offline, and even then it would take 9-12 months. And that's not taking into account whether the hacked db salts the stored reg numbers. It also doesn't account for the fact that there will be new registrations being added and deleted every day, so that hacked db is just a snapshot of that particular day. In other words, highly unlikely if not impossible, and certainly not profitable for the hacking party.

Interesting analysis. However, with the entire public able to freely poke around at will in the database, surely lots of gems could be extracted. Make it a senior high school project. Mining for gold in the FAA Drone database. It's not as though the media couldn't encourage all their viewers to try a few numbers at random and see what comes up, and then compile the hits for a nightly hit list of registered drone owners. Alternatively, the media could file a well-financed a FOIA request for the public information contents of the database. The FAA was asked to pre-empt FOIA requests as a condition of setting up the registration database. The FAA rejected that request. Then there is always the hacker who managed to break in and download every application for a U.S. government security clearance over the last 25 years. I hear he's for hire!

 

[damitjim01]

Then there is always the hacker who managed to break in and download every application for a U.S. government security clearance over the last 25

Or another Snowden, internal contractor that just decides the database should be public and takes it.

 

[aka1ceman]

I kept mine as a reminder of the once cheap, part time hobby that became 'unfun', overly expensive and time consuming for compliance.

Can always mount it over the mantle