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Disclaimer: I'm a licensed private pilot and have a registered drone. I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remai

Disclaimer: I'm a licensed private pilot and have a registered drone. I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks. Pilots have areas they can't fly below a certain altitude because the noise would rile up wildlife, like flocks of birds; jerk drone pilots, oblivious to this, started zipping through those areas and national parks, scaring up the wildlife (and annoying people), which led to them being banned around national monuments and parks. Drones have also interfered with commercial approaches at airports in Class B airports so they became banned around airports, unless permission is granted from the airport. The FAA came out with regs requiring you to register, and you had to make sure you acknowledged that you had to be permission to fly in class B airport, from the airport. Simply stated, it was so that if you were an jerk and your drone crashed, or you injured anyone on the ground they could find you. Seems reasonable to me. The new regs are just an incremental update. Many flights operate on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), which is basically "see and avoid." Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. Of course, they can't see small drones on radar, so they can't vector you around them or talk to the drone operator. There was a case where a black hawk was struck by a drone last year, requiring an emergency landing. The NTSB ultimately found the guy through the manufacturers serial number, because he his drone never returned. There have been many, many bad actors using drones to harass neighbors, spy on women, and it's getting ridiculous. When a licensed pilot has an accident, they know the NTSB and FAA will investigate. You file a safety report and own up to any mistakes, or it will be very bad. The NTSB is very thorough and is primarily interested in keeping future accidents from happening. However, drone pilots run away abandoning their hardware. I think the next iteration will be drones required to have transponders, so air traffic control can see them, and a pilot who has TCAS can see them also. This just means they will be become more expensive, and over time, hopefully transponders and ancillary avionics will become cheaper on aircraft as these companies push into general aviation.

yason 8y ago
That's the problem with jerks. The other problem with jerks is that they don't follow any rules anyway while the good guys get to deal with the added bureaucratic overhead. How do the rules prevent a jerk from buying a drone (with cash, to remove even the faintest connection to himself) and go fly it near the local approach to film landing planes from air? There's no way to trace it back to you even if the authorities found the serial number from the wreckage.
- vkou 8y ago
  Laws don't prevent me from murdering my neighbour. But they do give the authorities a hammer that they can use, should I choose to.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    yes, but people who violate section 336 were already subject to fines up to $250k and possible jail time. they don't need a bigger hammer to threaten hobbyists with.
  - yason 8y ago
    A lone drone pilot from the bush can easily avoid that hammer with trivial precautions.
specialp 8y ago
The class B restriction is draconian and unnecessary. I live about 4 miles from an airport (Class B). The B zone is 5miles. There has never been an aircraft I have ever seen 400ft over my house, and if they were making a 4 mile <400 ft approach they would have a hell of a lot more to worry about than drones when coming in. (Engine failure with seconds of glide ratio, birds, objects). The "inverted wedding cake" of airspace needs to exclude below 400ft AGL besides areas very close to the airport. You as a pilot must know that besides when you are making your final approach or taking off you are well above 400ft for safety reasons other than unaccounted for aircraft.
- cameldrv 8y ago
  A normal ILS approach is about 300 ft/mile. Many airports have runways that are a couple of miles long, so the center of the Class B could be roughly as much as 1.5 miles from the touchdown point. At your distance, a nominal approach would be at 750 feet. At a mile closer, a nominal approach would be 450 feet. If the pilot is a little low on the glideslope, you're a little closer to the airport than you think, and your drone is a little higher than you think, you've got a collision. Now, these are all worst case deviations, and it might make sense for the FAA to draw the lines more closely, orient them with the actual approach paths, and perhaps have a lower altitude restriction (maybe 150 feet or so) close to an airport. As it is though, the 5 mile ring is a pretty reasonable, if conservative choice given the potential consequences of a drone hitting an aircraft on takeoff or landing.
  - Terretta 8y ago
    With DJI, at least, it’s not easy for your drone to be “higher than you think”. Phantom 3, Phantom 4, Mavic, all track within a foot or so of the designated coordinates in 3D space. Default settings have an altitude cap, no matter your momentum, you can’t accidentally or intentionally cross the cap. You have to go into configuration settings to override the cap and set manually to go any higher. Modern models also come with awareness of FAA zones.
- nraynaud 8y ago
  I think the zones are purposefully big for emergency situation.
syshum 8y ago
While I am sure this is the public feel good justification for massive new regulations, it is unlikely to be the actual reason which will be steeped in commercialization of the Hobbyist Airspace. To remove hobby / amateur flying to make way for the Pizza Delivery and Police Surveillance Drones in that valuable airspace
nraynaud 8y ago
Remember that pilots (mostly private) make mistakes and kill people, a lot, and they get a lot of goodwill from the authorities and the press for just wearing an uniform. And also they tend to lie on their drone encounters. No actual drone incident has even been reported where the owner of the drone was not violating an obvious rule (either line of sight or zoning), ie the rules don't need to change. The other thing to consider is that drones are not more dangerous than birds, and they don't fly near airports and they don't form flocks. Now there will be way more use for small UAV than manned aviation, so one logical thing to do is strictly separate the airspace (400ft- for drones 500ft+ for planes, increase 100ft every 5 years) by preventing manned aircrafts from flying low, in particular on near the coasts, just give them a few dedicated zones for airports and helicopter work, and open most of the rest to unmanned.
- ticviking 8y ago
  This tends to support my notion that the issue is insufficient enforcement of existing rules, requiring registration is one way to make enforcement easier. Which may be a major goal of revising the rules.
- syshum 8y ago
  What we really need is 0-100 property Owner controlled 100-400 Hobby non-commercial -400 the FAA does not need to be involved at all 400+ Commercial and this is where the FAA comes in and provides regulations for Commercial UAV and Manned Aircraft to operate in this Commercial Zone leave us Hobbyist alone.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    If a flying drone was as quiet as a flying bird, I would have no problem with them flying around the city where I live. That is not the case, so anywhere not next to a busy road and the drone noise is going to be easily heard and annoying to many people. Over your own property or places where you have permission, fine. Over public or someones else's property, no thank you. Maybe we could let quite drones (not sure of the dB at ground level that would be acceptable) fly over cities and that would push the development of quieter flying systems.
philipodonnell 8y ago
Yeah but this is _always_ the reason that any industry gives for criminalizing competition. There's never any justification for the entirety of the thing being done, just a list of the most egregious problems (as you have listed here) and then everything else just gets lumped in and hand-waved away with "you can ask for an exception and/or pay money in fees".
- madrox 8y ago
  An engineer wants to push some code live to a large, production software project worked on by hundreds of engineers. It hasn't been peer reviewed, tested or evaluated in any way except by the engineer. It isn't a mission critical update, but he doesn't seem to think it'll be a problem. "No way!" you say, without hesitation, because it's a rightly stupid thing to do. It's a pointless risk. That's always how bad stories start. The engineer points out the bad stories are just a list of the most egregious problems. You wouldn't even let the engineer ask for an exception or pay a fee to do it. He then says the only reason you're doing this is to hold back his career. And that's just for software where a mistake doesn't mean someone dies. Tell me again how this is about "criminalizing competition" because that rings a little hollow.
  - myrryr 8y ago
    This is a bad example. 825,000 drones were sold in the U.S. in 2016 alone. If you had 825,000 developers, who on many days did commits and didn't have any real issues, you may think differently. I again, am pro regulation, but this is a _terrible_ argument.
    - madrox 8y ago
      > didn't have any real issues Citation needed. If you want better arguments, you merely need read the rest of this thread. I wasn't arguing pro regulation. I was arguing how silly it sounds when someone calls this a move to "criminalize competition."
      - 8y ago
snuxoll 8y ago
As someone who just bought their first drone, registered under section 336 and has been following the rules (including calling the hospital heliport since their five-mile radius covers my house and every public park nearby) I really can't say I'm shocked that this has happened. My county has even gone so far as to pass an extremely onerous ordinance requiring drone operators get a sign off from every person whose property you may film from a UAS because irresponsible people have made it an issue. I could argue how childish this rule is in the first place, since I can take a picture of somebody's back yard with a high power zoom lens from a hill and be in the clear - but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care. I just hope the FAA finds a sensible middle ground between the ill-fated section 336 regs and section 107. I'm more than willing to pass a knowledge test, and if I need to buy a $X (where X is $200 or less, hopefully) transponder to affix to my UAS then fine - but can we at least make it easy to do online?
- ticviking 8y ago
  >but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care. I'm inclined to think this is more a consequence of insufficient enforcement. We have a lot of laws and regulations and are rarely enforced, and thus often violated. That this happens with drones is hardly a surprise.
  - myrryr 8y ago
    This is also a case of where people are rampantly violating what rules there are without a care, and, since they don't actually have problems - they don't see the laws as useful. When you regulate something and cover far far more stuff then you should, you get this behaviour.
at-fates-hands 8y ago
> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks. THIS. A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS. When I first got into flying drones and getting into it as a hobby, I read almost daily about idiots flying it within downtown areas and losing control, only to have them fall out of the sky. Or stories about spying on their next door neighbors, or flying so high they were in the airspace of commercial planes and near misses when a plane was approaching a runway. I was just counting the days when this would happen. I knew it would happen because the reckless behavior of a few have ruined it for everybody. Having been doing this for almost 5 years, I felt like the FAA has to get involved sooner rather than later with all this stuff going on. I'm frankly surprised it took this long. Clearly they kept giving these people the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed time and again. The Casey Neistat FAA case was clear evidence something had to be done.
sokoloff 8y ago
Good post. Small nit: > Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. IFR traffic is only separated from other IFR traffic and participating VFR traffic. At FL180 (~18000' MSL) and above-0, it's all IFR, but below FL180, IFR is not separated from non-participating VFR and is still responsible for "see and avoid" when meteorological conditions permit in all airspaces (even above FL180). 0 - Yeah, yeah, above FL600, you could be VFR again... ;)
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  Since we're nitpicking, ATC also provides separation of all aircraft in Class B airspace. In Class C, they provide separation of IFR aircraft from all other aircraft (VFR-VFR gets advisories).
dahart 8y ago
> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks. When were drones ever unregulated? I don’t remember any such time. I remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, which most people ignored yet scoffed and complained about endlessly. In 2016 they made flying drones less than 55 pounds in class G airspace under 400 feet with line of sight without a pilot’s license or registration legal, but it was not unregulated. I don’t think that jerks is the main problem here. Use of drones in the last 5 years has skyrocketed. The percentage of jerks could be going down dramatically, and still the accident rates will rise due to the sheer number of people playing with drones. There are many many times more people flying drones now than there were in 2010. Anyone who’s used a drone more than a handful of times has crashed their drone, or had their drone lose control, or run out of battery mid-flight. Having flown many times and crashed a few, I might be a jerk and not know it, but I’m also 1) lucky I haven’t hurt anyone, and 2) in favor of mandatory registration and some, any, mandatory safety training for drones. Even ignoring FUD about airports and spying neighbors, I still think a little regulation is a good idea.
- syshum 8y ago
  >>remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, This is false, section 336 prohibited the FAA from making such a requirement for Model Aircraft which quad's and other UAV's are. in 2016 the FAA attempted to impose new regulations on Model Aircraft, these regulations where found to be in-violation of section 336 and where struck down by the courts last year This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby
  - dahart 8y ago
    I should have said the legal requirement “according to the FAA”, because before 2016, the FAA wasn’t acknowledging 336 on the FAA.gov web site. That’s the year they decided to clarify that small model aircraft were allowed under 336. 336 was passed in 2012. Between 2012 and 2016, and probably before that, the FAA’s web site stated that UASs fall under their jurisdiction and could be legally flown by licensed pilots. Any commercial drone use at all still requires certification with a remote pilot’s license, which is still being largely ignored & scoffed at by people who want real estate photos and sports videos. In any case, the point still stands that there was never a time in recent history that drones were unregulated. 336 is a regulation. > This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby We’ve only had a limited, regulated freedom to fly for a short 6 years, and in those six years the drone market has changed to the tune of more than 10x [1]. In the last 6 years, accident rates have grown in proportion to the market size, and more than half the accidents are caused by technical failures [2]. What used to be a relatively inaccessible hobby by a few tens of thousands of people flying gas powered model airplanes, and only in parks because model airplanes require wide open spaces, is now tens of millions of people flying drones than can launch literally anywhere. I never used to see model airplanes flying around tourist destinations, and today I can’t go without seeing one. If you were flying before 2012, think about the fact that more than 90% of the people flying today have less than 5 years experience, and about half have less than 1 year experience. Also pretty likely is that the majority of drone pilots today are children under 20 years old. If that doesn’t make you think a small amount of regulation is a good idea, consider that the drone market is still expected to triple or quadruple in the next 5 years, so in short order the majority of drones flown will be piloted by someone who hasn’t flown yet, and has never thought about any of these issues, or about safety, nor ever considered flying some sort of god given right. For both our sakes, I think asking those people to register and do a small amount of safety training is a good idea. While you can, you don’t have to view this as intervention, there are legitimate reasons to regulate hobbies that cause potential harm to others. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/drone-sales-in-us-chart-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/drone-sales-in-us-chart-2017... [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/drone-statistics/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/drone-statistics/

yason 8y ago

That's the problem with jerks. The other problem with jerks is that they don't follow any rules anyway while the good guys get to deal with the added bureaucratic overhead. How do the rules prevent a jerk from buying a drone (with cash, to remove even the faintest connection to himself) and go fly it near the local approach to film landing planes from air? There's no way to trace it back to you even if the authorities found the serial number from the wreckage.

vkou 8y ago
Laws don't prevent me from murdering my neighbour. But they do give the authorities a hammer that they can use, should I choose to.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  yes, but people who violate section 336 were already subject to fines up to $250k and possible jail time. they don't need a bigger hammer to threaten hobbyists with.
- yason 8y ago
  A lone drone pilot from the bush can easily avoid that hammer with trivial precautions.

specialp 8y ago

The class B restriction is draconian and unnecessary. I live about 4 miles from an airport (Class B). The B zone is 5miles. There has never been an aircraft I have ever seen 400ft over my house, and if they were making a 4 mile <400 ft approach they would have a hell of a lot more to worry about than drones when coming in. (Engine failure with seconds of glide ratio, birds, objects). The "inverted wedding cake" of airspace needs to exclude below 400ft AGL besides areas very close to the airport. You as a pilot must know that besides when you are making your final approach or taking off you are well above 400ft for safety reasons other than unaccounted for aircraft.

cameldrv 8y ago
A normal ILS approach is about 300 ft/mile. Many airports have runways that are a couple of miles long, so the center of the Class B could be roughly as much as 1.5 miles from the touchdown point. At your distance, a nominal approach would be at 750 feet. At a mile closer, a nominal approach would be 450 feet. If the pilot is a little low on the glideslope, you're a little closer to the airport than you think, and your drone is a little higher than you think, you've got a collision. Now, these are all worst case deviations, and it might make sense for the FAA to draw the lines more closely, orient them with the actual approach paths, and perhaps have a lower altitude restriction (maybe 150 feet or so) close to an airport. As it is though, the 5 mile ring is a pretty reasonable, if conservative choice given the potential consequences of a drone hitting an aircraft on takeoff or landing.
- Terretta 8y ago
  With DJI, at least, it’s not easy for your drone to be “higher than you think”. Phantom 3, Phantom 4, Mavic, all track within a foot or so of the designated coordinates in 3D space. Default settings have an altitude cap, no matter your momentum, you can’t accidentally or intentionally cross the cap. You have to go into configuration settings to override the cap and set manually to go any higher. Modern models also come with awareness of FAA zones.
nraynaud 8y ago
I think the zones are purposefully big for emergency situation.

syshum 8y ago

While I am sure this is the public feel good justification for massive new regulations, it is unlikely to be the actual reason which will be steeped in commercialization of the Hobbyist Airspace. To remove hobby / amateur flying to make way for the Pizza Delivery and Police Surveillance Drones in that valuable airspace

nraynaud 8y ago

Remember that pilots (mostly private) make mistakes and kill people, a lot, and they get a lot of goodwill from the authorities and the press for just wearing an uniform. And also they tend to lie on their drone encounters. No actual drone incident has even been reported where the owner of the drone was not violating an obvious rule (either line of sight or zoning), ie the rules don't need to change. The other thing to consider is that drones are not more dangerous than birds, and they don't fly near airports and they don't form flocks. Now there will be way more use for small UAV than manned aviation, so one logical thing to do is strictly separate the airspace (400ft- for drones 500ft+ for planes, increase 100ft every 5 years) by preventing manned aircrafts from flying low, in particular on near the coasts, just give them a few dedicated zones for airports and helicopter work, and open most of the rest to unmanned.

ticviking 8y ago
This tends to support my notion that the issue is insufficient enforcement of existing rules, requiring registration is one way to make enforcement easier. Which may be a major goal of revising the rules.
syshum 8y ago
What we really need is 0-100 property Owner controlled 100-400 Hobby non-commercial -400 the FAA does not need to be involved at all 400+ Commercial and this is where the FAA comes in and provides regulations for Commercial UAV and Manned Aircraft to operate in this Commercial Zone leave us Hobbyist alone.
- njarboe 8y ago
  If a flying drone was as quiet as a flying bird, I would have no problem with them flying around the city where I live. That is not the case, so anywhere not next to a busy road and the drone noise is going to be easily heard and annoying to many people. Over your own property or places where you have permission, fine. Over public or someones else's property, no thank you. Maybe we could let quite drones (not sure of the dB at ground level that would be acceptable) fly over cities and that would push the development of quieter flying systems.

philipodonnell 8y ago

Yeah but this is _always_ the reason that any industry gives for criminalizing competition. There's never any justification for the entirety of the thing being done, just a list of the most egregious problems (as you have listed here) and then everything else just gets lumped in and hand-waved away with "you can ask for an exception and/or pay money in fees".

madrox 8y ago
An engineer wants to push some code live to a large, production software project worked on by hundreds of engineers. It hasn't been peer reviewed, tested or evaluated in any way except by the engineer. It isn't a mission critical update, but he doesn't seem to think it'll be a problem. "No way!" you say, without hesitation, because it's a rightly stupid thing to do. It's a pointless risk. That's always how bad stories start. The engineer points out the bad stories are just a list of the most egregious problems. You wouldn't even let the engineer ask for an exception or pay a fee to do it. He then says the only reason you're doing this is to hold back his career. And that's just for software where a mistake doesn't mean someone dies. Tell me again how this is about "criminalizing competition" because that rings a little hollow.
- myrryr 8y ago
  This is a bad example. 825,000 drones were sold in the U.S. in 2016 alone. If you had 825,000 developers, who on many days did commits and didn't have any real issues, you may think differently. I again, am pro regulation, but this is a _terrible_ argument.
  - madrox 8y ago
    > didn't have any real issues Citation needed. If you want better arguments, you merely need read the rest of this thread. I wasn't arguing pro regulation. I was arguing how silly it sounds when someone calls this a move to "criminalize competition."
    - 8y ago

snuxoll 8y ago

As someone who just bought their first drone, registered under section 336 and has been following the rules (including calling the hospital heliport since their five-mile radius covers my house and every public park nearby) I really can't say I'm shocked that this has happened. My county has even gone so far as to pass an extremely onerous ordinance requiring drone operators get a sign off from every person whose property you may film from a UAS because irresponsible people have made it an issue. I could argue how childish this rule is in the first place, since I can take a picture of somebody's back yard with a high power zoom lens from a hill and be in the clear - but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care. I just hope the FAA finds a sensible middle ground between the ill-fated section 336 regs and section 107. I'm more than willing to pass a knowledge test, and if I need to buy a $X (where X is $200 or less, hopefully) transponder to affix to my UAS then fine - but can we at least make it easy to do online?

ticviking 8y ago
>but it's the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons that has come from not only lax rules, but people rampantly violating what rules there are without a care. I'm inclined to think this is more a consequence of insufficient enforcement. We have a lot of laws and regulations and are rarely enforced, and thus often violated. That this happens with drones is hardly a surprise.
- myrryr 8y ago
  This is also a case of where people are rampantly violating what rules there are without a care, and, since they don't actually have problems - they don't see the laws as useful. When you regulate something and cover far far more stuff then you should, you get this behaviour.

at-fates-hands 8y ago

> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks. THIS. A THOUSAND TIMES, THIS. When I first got into flying drones and getting into it as a hobby, I read almost daily about idiots flying it within downtown areas and losing control, only to have them fall out of the sky. Or stories about spying on their next door neighbors, or flying so high they were in the airspace of commercial planes and near misses when a plane was approaching a runway. I was just counting the days when this would happen. I knew it would happen because the reckless behavior of a few have ruined it for everybody. Having been doing this for almost 5 years, I felt like the FAA has to get involved sooner rather than later with all this stuff going on. I'm frankly surprised it took this long. Clearly they kept giving these people the benefit of the doubt, only to be disappointed time and again. The Casey Neistat FAA case was clear evidence something had to be done.

sokoloff 8y ago

Good post. Small nit: > Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft. IFR traffic is only separated from other IFR traffic and participating VFR traffic. At FL180 (~18000' MSL) and above-0, it's all IFR, but below FL180, IFR is not separated from non-participating VFR and is still responsible for "see and avoid" when meteorological conditions permit in all airspaces (even above FL180). 0 - Yeah, yeah, above FL600, you could be VFR again... ;)

travisjungroth 8y ago
Since we're nitpicking, ATC also provides separation of all aircraft in Class B airspace. In Class C, they provide separation of IFR aircraft from all other aircraft (VFR-VFR gets advisories).

dahart 8y ago

> I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything. Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks. When were drones ever unregulated? I don’t remember any such time. I remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, which most people ignored yet scoffed and complained about endlessly. In 2016 they made flying drones less than 55 pounds in class G airspace under 400 feet with line of sight without a pilot’s license or registration legal, but it was not unregulated. I don’t think that jerks is the main problem here. Use of drones in the last 5 years has skyrocketed. The percentage of jerks could be going down dramatically, and still the accident rates will rise due to the sheer number of people playing with drones. There are many many times more people flying drones now than there were in 2010. Anyone who’s used a drone more than a handful of times has crashed their drone, or had their drone lose control, or run out of battery mid-flight. Having flown many times and crashed a few, I might be a jerk and not know it, but I’m also 1) lucky I haven’t hurt anyone, and 2) in favor of mandatory registration and some, any, mandatory safety training for drones. Even ignoring FUD about airports and spying neighbors, I still think a little regulation is a good idea.

syshum 8y ago
>>remember that before 2016, the legal requirement for drone piloting was to have a pilot’s license, This is false, section 336 prohibited the FAA from making such a requirement for Model Aircraft which quad's and other UAV's are. in 2016 the FAA attempted to impose new regulations on Model Aircraft, these regulations where found to be in-violation of section 336 and where struck down by the courts last year This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby
- dahart 8y ago
  I should have said the legal requirement “according to the FAA”, because before 2016, the FAA wasn’t acknowledging 336 on the FAA.gov web site. That’s the year they decided to clarify that small model aircraft were allowed under 336. 336 was passed in 2012. Between 2012 and 2016, and probably before that, the FAA’s web site stated that UASs fall under their jurisdiction and could be legally flown by licensed pilots. Any commercial drone use at all still requires certification with a remote pilot’s license, which is still being largely ignored & scoffed at by people who want real estate photos and sports videos. In any case, the point still stands that there was never a time in recent history that drones were unregulated. 336 is a regulation. > This new law repeals section 336 stripping Americans of their freedom to fly model aircraft free from government intervention into their hobby We’ve only had a limited, regulated freedom to fly for a short 6 years, and in those six years the drone market has changed to the tune of more than 10x [1]. In the last 6 years, accident rates have grown in proportion to the market size, and more than half the accidents are caused by technical failures [2]. What used to be a relatively inaccessible hobby by a few tens of thousands of people flying gas powered model airplanes, and only in parks because model airplanes require wide open spaces, is now tens of millions of people flying drones than can launch literally anywhere. I never used to see model airplanes flying around tourist destinations, and today I can’t go without seeing one. If you were flying before 2012, think about the fact that more than 90% of the people flying today have less than 5 years experience, and about half have less than 1 year experience. Also pretty likely is that the majority of drone pilots today are children under 20 years old. If that doesn’t make you think a small amount of regulation is a good idea, consider that the drone market is still expected to triple or quadruple in the next 5 years, so in short order the majority of drones flown will be piloted by someone who hasn’t flown yet, and has never thought about any of these issues, or about safety, nor ever considered flying some sort of god given right. For both our sakes, I think asking those people to register and do a small amount of safety training is a good idea. While you can, you don’t have to view this as intervention, there are legitimate reasons to regulate hobbies that cause potential harm to others. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/drone-sales-in-us-chart-2017-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/drone-sales-in-us-chart-2017... [2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/drone-statistics/ https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/drone-statistics/