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I hope DJI responds with a firmware update preventing flight in temporary no-fly zones. Right now they respect static no fly zones, but when temporary ones get

I hope DJI responds with a firmware update preventing flight in temporary no-fly zones. Right now they respect static no fly zones, but when temporary ones get put up you can still fly inside them. It's a real shame that large ready-to-fly drones aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones. About half of the DJI pilots I know actively prevent their firmware from being upgraded to the one that will respect static no-fly zones.

mopsi 7y ago
> It's a real shame that large ready-to-fly drones aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones. What if I have a permission to fly there? A friend of mine struggles with this a lot. He does real estate photography and has photographed even at international airports (under strict supervision).
- bsamuels 7y ago
  The FAA establishes complete "no-fly" zones where you may never fly a UAS period. These are zones like active landing/takeoff routes and areas with low flying aircraft like the fire fighting aircraft in the article. I have never heard of someone obtaining FAA authorization to fly a UAS in one of these zones, so I seriously doubt someone using a ready-to-fly kit would be able to do so. One common misconception is the difference between a no-fly zone and controlled airspace. If you want to fly in controlled airspace (within 3 miles of an airport or so), you can obtain said authorization using the LAANC system. It's extremely easy, you just install an app, verify your phone number, and submit the flight request.
  - dvtrn 7y ago
    There are actually a couple classes of airspace that are technically “controlled” but don’t require authorization from nearby towers. May want to refresh your 107 information.
    - bsamuels 7y ago
      For the purpose of non-aviation people reading a comment thread about drones, it's good enough. I could edit my post and include all the weird side cases about controlled airspace but at the end of the day it's not relevant to the reader.
  - beamatronic 7y ago
    Visualizing these areas with an AR headset would be really useful
- SimonPStevens 7y ago
  DJI already have a process for getting clearance to fly in restricted zones. It's called flysafe self unlock. [Edit: changed "no-fly" to restricted]
mindslight 7y ago
I was with you for your first half. Defaults matter - it's likely this situation was caused by someone who obtained a drone with little effort, and is blissfully taking pictures of the fire operations. And then wondering why the helicopters have stopped flying and there's nothing to photograph. Hence the TV ads. But it's no wonder why many device owners would push back having their devices implanted with inescapable third party controls. The people with enough awareness to do this also likely have a enough awareness to not disrupt emergency air traffic as well! Generally if someone wants to direct their drone to do illegal things, the common sense assumption is that they're going to make that happen somehow, rather than reacting by trying to bake in technological authoritarianism. It's naive to think that since it's possible to write code to enforce a condition, that this can scale to the level of society! It could be someone in fire operations themselves that wants to try out using off the shelf technology to improve their operation, but instead stuck budgeting and requisitioning a single "government priced" drone rather self-purchasing a few expendable ones on a lark. Or sure, it could also be some shithead who laughs as they help the fire spread. Despite the amount of hypothetical attention, the latter asshole is extremely rare, and the right way to deal with them is heavy civil and criminal punishment as going around the safety defaults has established their firm intent.
- afiori 7y ago
  I would actually draw the parallel with cars here; the airspace/roads are similarly regulated and should require a license to use. For sure some uses can be less regulated than other (like bicycles or kites), but drones have demonstrated to be clearly more complex. I realize that we should not be rushed in disturbing a blooming industry and I have a lot of respect for the progress made in recent years, but as things stand in my (uninformed) opinion something akin to license plate registration/piloting license is the best long term choice to protect good actors.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    Broadcasting an identity would indeed be a good way to do post-facto enforcement instead of resorting to technological authoritarianism. However, it's worth remembering that car license plates have become a major surveillance vector in the modern age. It would be straightforward to fix this - imagine RF or eink transponders with a number that changes every minute, with a cryptographic key required to tie the broadcasted nym to anything else, and a public audit trail every time it is done - but government inertia is huge. This regime should really be fixed before it is expanded.
reaperducer 7y ago
The sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would fly a drone over a wildfire are the same sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would flash their drone with hacked firmware to bypass any restrictions. Rules are for other people.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Probably many people are just ignorant, not deliberately mischievous.
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    That’s pretty much the reason Europeans don’t allow people to own guns.
    - mikejb 7y ago
      This is not correct. The details of gun ownership rights depends on the individual European state, but it's absolutely possible for a civilian to own guns. In fact, some do. It's just not engrained in the general culture or connected to the protection of rights, and subject to stricter regulation.
      - heavenlyblue 7y ago
        Look, I didn’t say “all Europeans”. And “stricter regulation” is literally “you need to prove you need a gun and that you are sane” in most of the cases.
        catalogia 7y ago
        "Prove you need it" isn't really an accurate summation of European gun laws, since as far as I'm aware they all allow ownership of firearms in cases where somebody wants a gun, rather than needs it. Who in Europe needs to hunt for substance, or needs to participate in marksmanship sports? These are recreational hobbies that the gun laws of all European nations I'm aware of accommodate.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones Arming? Are these drones carrying some kind of weapon or explosive?
- finnthehuman 7y ago
  arm - Verb (transitive) To prepare a tool or a weapon for action; to activate.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Do you arm your car when you turn it on? No, so why use it for a drone?
    - hexaga 7y ago
      The terminology and practice comes from the time when drones were primarily built by hobbyists. Rotors are dangerous for fleshy things, and it's easy to leave controls in an unsafe state (throttles especially, they usually don't have a spring return). An arming sequence prevents accidents when tinkering and requires the controls to be reset. Like if you're connecting a battery preflight, you don't want the rotors to suddenly spin up and slice your arms to bits. Exposed CF blades spinning at 5k RPM can really mess you up.
    - finnthehuman 7y ago
      No, but I arm the alarm when I get out.
    - scbrg 7y ago
      This may be shocking to you, but natural languages aren't consistent and logical :-) See also: http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/arming_the_motors.html http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/arming_the_motors.html
madsmith 7y ago
Sometimes he still no fly zones can be quite large. I currently live about 40 minutes away from the St. Louis airport and last year President Trump decided to visit St. Louis it is continuing campaigning for 2020 and made a stop at that airport. The FAA no-fly zone prevented me from taking off my drone 100 m in the air to take pictures of wildlife over my pond for something happening 25+ miles away. I am all for maintaining user discretion over absolute lockouts and work on education, situational awareness and heavy fines and punishment on meaningful infractions. And lastly if the systems are to encumbered people are just going to roll their own software which is an avenue I then investigated for my Mavic after that incident.
georgeburdell 7y ago
Why bother pushing this onto hardware makers? Just authorize authorities to shoot the things down.
- 14 7y ago
  Well I think with ample threats and a few examples made we could seriously help deter some of these events. Would anyone be crazy enough to fly a drone over area 51? I don't think so because they would know as soon as they were caught they would be going to some hole in the earth of a prison. We don't just tend to let fires burn on their own so any active fire should by default be considered actively fought by firefighters therefore keep your drones away. I would just make it illegal to be within "x" distance from any active fire with threat of 5 years in prison, loss of vehicle, ect... or whatever the punishment should be.
- cma 7y ago
  Shooting drones could cause additional fires.
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    > Shooting drones could cause additional fires. But would clear the pass to helicopters that could just send a shoot of water in the same area to grant that this would not occur and then keep doing their job. The result would be still less hectares burnt than if keeping the helicopters parked.
    - cma 7y ago
      Send a shoot of water on a lithium fire?
      - pvaldes 7y ago
        Ok, maybe more than one shoot. So you can identify quickly the point of drone landing. Honest question. What would be worst, a lithium fire surrounded by soaked soil, or a match fire surrounded by dry combustible? Of course if the landing happens in an area burnt yet, would not have anything more to burn except this battery and some plastics.
swiley 7y ago
That sounds more difficult to implement and I doubt it would work as well. This is a country that expects people to be responsible enough that we don’t require pilot licenses to fly homebrew aircraft, I think we should encourage more personal responsibility rather than hacking around stupid people with firmware updates.
hirundo 7y ago
We have the tech to create no-fly zones around the paths of individual aircraft, including other drones. It could become cheap enough for cheap drones. That could let the skies be densely filled with flying machines while being safer than now. Imagine a swarm of personal and news drones hovering around a fire, but in harmony with assorted emergency response craft, dodging away with a generous safety envelope. Hopefully the current chaos is transitional and we can have our own eyes in the sky without getting in the way of the solution.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  I direct your attention now to the existence of software bugs, in particular to their frequency of occurrence and the infrequency of patching in firmware devices. You know what works better than everyone's software being correct, up to date, not affected by a log file filling the flash stick unexpectedly or the heat or a battery getting a bit hot or a null pointer error or being overloaded by needing to track too many other drones or sheer murphyesque buggery? Empty air. It's a well-proved safety technology, empty air. Doesn't require much in the way of upgrades to make it work, reverse and forward compatibility is assured, it's simple to implement and has an excellent record against catastrophic failure modes of the not-enough-space variety.
  - hirundo 7y ago
    The amount of empty air required for safety decreases as the technology improves. And there is life saving value in being able to launch your own drone or tune in to a news drone, to decide on the right response. How many die because they don't know when to evacuate or which way to go? Too large of a safety envelope can reduce safety by slowing the diffusion of info about the fire.

mopsi 7y ago

> It's a real shame that large ready-to-fly drones aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones. What if I have a permission to fly there? A friend of mine struggles with this a lot. He does real estate photography and has photographed even at international airports (under strict supervision).

bsamuels 7y ago
The FAA establishes complete "no-fly" zones where you may never fly a UAS period. These are zones like active landing/takeoff routes and areas with low flying aircraft like the fire fighting aircraft in the article. I have never heard of someone obtaining FAA authorization to fly a UAS in one of these zones, so I seriously doubt someone using a ready-to-fly kit would be able to do so. One common misconception is the difference between a no-fly zone and controlled airspace. If you want to fly in controlled airspace (within 3 miles of an airport or so), you can obtain said authorization using the LAANC system. It's extremely easy, you just install an app, verify your phone number, and submit the flight request.
- dvtrn 7y ago
  There are actually a couple classes of airspace that are technically “controlled” but don’t require authorization from nearby towers. May want to refresh your 107 information.
  - bsamuels 7y ago
    For the purpose of non-aviation people reading a comment thread about drones, it's good enough. I could edit my post and include all the weird side cases about controlled airspace but at the end of the day it's not relevant to the reader.
- beamatronic 7y ago
  Visualizing these areas with an AR headset would be really useful
SimonPStevens 7y ago
DJI already have a process for getting clearance to fly in restricted zones. It's called flysafe self unlock. [Edit: changed "no-fly" to restricted]

mindslight 7y ago

I was with you for your first half. Defaults matter - it's likely this situation was caused by someone who obtained a drone with little effort, and is blissfully taking pictures of the fire operations. And then wondering why the helicopters have stopped flying and there's nothing to photograph. Hence the TV ads. But it's no wonder why many device owners would push back having their devices implanted with inescapable third party controls. The people with enough awareness to do this also likely have a enough awareness to not disrupt emergency air traffic as well! Generally if someone wants to direct their drone to do illegal things, the common sense assumption is that they're going to make that happen somehow, rather than reacting by trying to bake in technological authoritarianism. It's naive to think that since it's possible to write code to enforce a condition, that this can scale to the level of society! It could be someone in fire operations themselves that wants to try out using off the shelf technology to improve their operation, but instead stuck budgeting and requisitioning a single "government priced" drone rather self-purchasing a few expendable ones on a lark. Or sure, it could also be some shithead who laughs as they help the fire spread. Despite the amount of hypothetical attention, the latter asshole is extremely rare, and the right way to deal with them is heavy civil and criminal punishment as going around the safety defaults has established their firm intent.

afiori 7y ago
I would actually draw the parallel with cars here; the airspace/roads are similarly regulated and should require a license to use. For sure some uses can be less regulated than other (like bicycles or kites), but drones have demonstrated to be clearly more complex. I realize that we should not be rushed in disturbing a blooming industry and I have a lot of respect for the progress made in recent years, but as things stand in my (uninformed) opinion something akin to license plate registration/piloting license is the best long term choice to protect good actors.
- mindslight 7y ago
  Broadcasting an identity would indeed be a good way to do post-facto enforcement instead of resorting to technological authoritarianism. However, it's worth remembering that car license plates have become a major surveillance vector in the modern age. It would be straightforward to fix this - imagine RF or eink transponders with a number that changes every minute, with a cryptographic key required to tie the broadcasted nym to anything else, and a public audit trail every time it is done - but government inertia is huge. This regime should really be fixed before it is expanded.

reaperducer 7y ago

The sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would fly a drone over a wildfire are the same sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would flash their drone with hacked firmware to bypass any restrictions. Rules are for other people.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Probably many people are just ignorant, not deliberately mischievous.
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  That’s pretty much the reason Europeans don’t allow people to own guns.
  - mikejb 7y ago
    This is not correct. The details of gun ownership rights depends on the individual European state, but it's absolutely possible for a civilian to own guns. In fact, some do. It's just not engrained in the general culture or connected to the protection of rights, and subject to stricter regulation.
    - heavenlyblue 7y ago
      Look, I didn’t say “all Europeans”. And “stricter regulation” is literally “you need to prove you need a gun and that you are sane” in most of the cases.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        "Prove you need it" isn't really an accurate summation of European gun laws, since as far as I'm aware they all allow ownership of firearms in cases where somebody wants a gun, rather than needs it. Who in Europe needs to hunt for substance, or needs to participate in marksmanship sports? These are recreational hobbies that the gun laws of all European nations I'm aware of accommodate.

chrisseaton 7y ago

> aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones Arming? Are these drones carrying some kind of weapon or explosive?

finnthehuman 7y ago
arm - Verb (transitive) To prepare a tool or a weapon for action; to activate.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Do you arm your car when you turn it on? No, so why use it for a drone?
  - hexaga 7y ago
    The terminology and practice comes from the time when drones were primarily built by hobbyists. Rotors are dangerous for fleshy things, and it's easy to leave controls in an unsafe state (throttles especially, they usually don't have a spring return). An arming sequence prevents accidents when tinkering and requires the controls to be reset. Like if you're connecting a battery preflight, you don't want the rotors to suddenly spin up and slice your arms to bits. Exposed CF blades spinning at 5k RPM can really mess you up.
  - finnthehuman 7y ago
    No, but I arm the alarm when I get out.
  - scbrg 7y ago
    This may be shocking to you, but natural languages aren't consistent and logical :-) See also: http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/arming_the_motors.html http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/arming_the_motors.html

madsmith 7y ago

Sometimes he still no fly zones can be quite large. I currently live about 40 minutes away from the St. Louis airport and last year President Trump decided to visit St. Louis it is continuing campaigning for 2020 and made a stop at that airport. The FAA no-fly zone prevented me from taking off my drone 100 m in the air to take pictures of wildlife over my pond for something happening 25+ miles away. I am all for maintaining user discretion over absolute lockouts and work on education, situational awareness and heavy fines and punishment on meaningful infractions. And lastly if the systems are to encumbered people are just going to roll their own software which is an avenue I then investigated for my Mavic after that incident.

georgeburdell 7y ago

Why bother pushing this onto hardware makers? Just authorize authorities to shoot the things down.

14 7y ago
Well I think with ample threats and a few examples made we could seriously help deter some of these events. Would anyone be crazy enough to fly a drone over area 51? I don't think so because they would know as soon as they were caught they would be going to some hole in the earth of a prison. We don't just tend to let fires burn on their own so any active fire should by default be considered actively fought by firefighters therefore keep your drones away. I would just make it illegal to be within "x" distance from any active fire with threat of 5 years in prison, loss of vehicle, ect... or whatever the punishment should be.
cma 7y ago
Shooting drones could cause additional fires.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  > Shooting drones could cause additional fires. But would clear the pass to helicopters that could just send a shoot of water in the same area to grant that this would not occur and then keep doing their job. The result would be still less hectares burnt than if keeping the helicopters parked.
  - cma 7y ago
    Send a shoot of water on a lithium fire?
    - pvaldes 7y ago
      Ok, maybe more than one shoot. So you can identify quickly the point of drone landing. Honest question. What would be worst, a lithium fire surrounded by soaked soil, or a match fire surrounded by dry combustible? Of course if the landing happens in an area burnt yet, would not have anything more to burn except this battery and some plastics.

swiley 7y ago

That sounds more difficult to implement and I doubt it would work as well. This is a country that expects people to be responsible enough that we don’t require pilot licenses to fly homebrew aircraft, I think we should encourage more personal responsibility rather than hacking around stupid people with firmware updates.

hirundo 7y ago

We have the tech to create no-fly zones around the paths of individual aircraft, including other drones. It could become cheap enough for cheap drones. That could let the skies be densely filled with flying machines while being safer than now. Imagine a swarm of personal and news drones hovering around a fire, but in harmony with assorted emergency response craft, dodging away with a generous safety envelope. Hopefully the current chaos is transitional and we can have our own eyes in the sky without getting in the way of the solution.

jacques_chester 7y ago
I direct your attention now to the existence of software bugs, in particular to their frequency of occurrence and the infrequency of patching in firmware devices. You know what works better than everyone's software being correct, up to date, not affected by a log file filling the flash stick unexpectedly or the heat or a battery getting a bit hot or a null pointer error or being overloaded by needing to track too many other drones or sheer murphyesque buggery? Empty air. It's a well-proved safety technology, empty air. Doesn't require much in the way of upgrades to make it work, reverse and forward compatibility is assured, it's simple to implement and has an excellent record against catastrophic failure modes of the not-enough-space variety.
- hirundo 7y ago
  The amount of empty air required for safety decreases as the technology improves. And there is life saving value in being able to launch your own drone or tune in to a news drone, to decide on the right response. How many die because they don't know when to evacuate or which way to go? Too large of a safety envelope can reduce safety by slowing the diffusion of info about the fire.