The FAA and Drones

us here today. Now, there's gonna be some overlap with that first episode, but then it's been three years and I've bet a lot of you haven't even heard the original one. Uh, if you have and it's one of your favorites, I apologize for some of the overlap, but mostly we're gonna be looking at the law, and I'll use the first half of this episode to kind of cover the working operation of a drone. UM and by drones, I i'm talking about consumer and prosumer unmanned aerial V

vehicles or small unmanned aerial systems. So you get U a v S or U A s IS, which more frequently than not fall into the quad copter or quad rotor category. Now there are other types as well, including fixed wing aircraft and Moldy rotor drones that have more than just the four but quad coptor is the form factor that seems to be the most popular. It provides a less stability and makes the whole whole industry more

attractive to a larger audience. And um, I should also mention before I get into this too far, that the term drone is technically a misnomer. To be a true drone, at least in the you know, the traditional definition of drone, typically it needs to be at least semi autonomous, meaning it has to be able to operate on its own for a significant amount of its use. Um, they have

to have a specific purpose or mission. So a drone has to be something that is got a specific reason for existing, like spying, for example, or in the case of things like predator drones, perhaps combat. They tend to be much larger than the consumer and prosumer RC aircraft on the market that I'll be talking about, and they can often fly for many many hours, whereas your typical consumer U a V is good for maybe half an

hour of use, depends on the battery. Some of them are better than others, some of them have very limited flight times. But the term drone has been applied to these r C aircraft in general, and it's not only just stuck to them, it's grown in popularity. More and more people use the term drone to describe all of these things. So you could argue that the definition of drone has been expanded to include RC aircraft outside the

model plane and helicopter and blimp stuff. Pretty much anything that isn't one of those traditional model aircraft now ends up being called drowne and whether we like it or not, that's the term. So I know there are a lot of r C enthusiasts out there, people who have been hobbyists and model aircraft for years, who don't like the use of the word drone to describe these vehicles. Uh.

They feel that is to misleading. Honestly, at this point, I think that we could all agree that the definition of drone has changed, and that's the nature of language. Sometimes language changes to incorporate things that weren't possible to cover in previous uses of a word. It's a technology that's been developed since the word was coined, and now we just have to agree that this is one of

those susceptible terms. So I'm gonna be using the word drone, or the abbreviations of U, A V or you know, acronyms whatever of you A V and UH and U A s quite a bit in this, but they all mean the same thing. I'll also be talking about quad opters and quad rotors a lot, mainly because that represents the vast majority of the market share for for these types of devices out on the Well, I guess on the air today. So, uh, now that I've got that all the way, Um, what prompted the decision to talk

about drones again in the first place. Well, there's been a lot of news about drones over the last couple of years, and again we recorded the first episode, and particularly there's been a lot of news and debate about drones as they are being used to capture video and images and situations that raise some pretty tricky questions. For example, there's the story from two thousand fifteen of drones interfering with firefighting operations in the San Bernardino National Forest in California.

Some people were using drones to get images and video of the fires, but that meant that firefighting helicopters were grounded because the potential collision dangers. So because these drones were hovering over the sites where fire was raging, the helicopters couldn't get clearance to take off and deliver uh, you know, water or sand or whatever it was they were going to use to put out the fires at those regions, which meant the fire continue to get bigger

and bigger. And this raised a lot of questions for people saying, well, is that as should it be legal to operate a drone anywhere around there? If a drone is operating under there, what what course of action is law enforcement allowed to pursue? Could they shoot down a drone like that using whatever means they had at their disposal.

And that's kind of brought into public consciousness this idea that the drones could potentially be dangerous and also not just dangerous to property or people, but also to our privacy because more and more drones are are equipped with these cameras, some of which can capt you're pretty high quality video, So that means that even if you're far away, if you've got a high enough resolution, you could digitally zoom in a couple of levels down and still get

a closer look at something while you know, from an external point of view it may seem the drone is pretty far away. There are a lot of different questions that come up from that. Another recent story involves filmmaking. This was one that prompted me to do an episode of House Stop Works Now about this. The production crew of Star Wars Episode eight had a real issue with drones.

They were shooting in the UK. They had a location scouted out and they were shooting at that location, and they had this issue where people who were operating drones were flying them close to the location in order to get pictures and video of what was going on. So when the crew moved to Croatia to do another stage of the production for the film, they actually hired News

Security Team members to help bolster their numbers. And these new team members were drone pilots and their job was to intercept and stop any snooping drones from getting pictures of the filming, which presumably included colliding with them so that they would bring down the other drone um And that raises the question of well is that legal? Is it legal for some private company to use means to bring down someone else's drone if that person's drone and

spying on what they're doing and um. And it's a tough question. It's it's one that does not have an immediate answer necessarily, particularly since we're talking about croatia UM. So there's a lot of questions about legality, what, when, where, and how can you fly your drone? Is it ever legal to bring down someone else's drone? And once again we see that technology has outpaced the legal system. This is not a new thing. We've seen it a lot.

The Internet really drove this home in more recent past, where you see the capability of doing things far outstrips what we were able to do before. And then we see the legal system try to react to this and

and compensate for it. Sometimes it overreacts. You could argue that some of the in fact, I think you could argue successfully that several of the laws that have been passed to guard against copyright and piracy uh are overreactions to the ability to copy material much more easily in the Internet and computer age then you could in the past. Before you had computers, it was a real, you know, effort. It took a lot of effort to copy something and

distribute it. So the laws were pretty you know, they covered, they protected copyright owners, but they were pretty simple. Now that it's a lot easier to make lots of copies, those laws have become increasingly restrictive and overreaching. In some cases. The fear is the same thing could happen with U A v. S. And in fact, some would argue it already has started to happen there. And just so you know,

I need to get this out of the way. I'll be focusing primarily on the United States in this episode because that's where I live. But these issues are going on and questions are being asked and and actions are being taken all over the world. Uh, regarding drones. I mean, the UK in particular had the story of the the drone that was there was a story that a drone had collided with a British Airways flight that was taking off, I think, and that ended up bringing up a conversation

over in the UK. But these are conversations happening all over the world. I'll mostly be focusing on the US because, uh, it's one of those It's the country that is trying to figure this out, and a lot of other countries are looking to the US as a model for what to do with their own laws. So that's why I'm

going to be looking at it. But this is still tricky because there are different regions in the US that have their own local laws that may or may not come into conflict with any federal regulations once those are finally published. So we've got a lot of of ambiguity out there. Also, there are other places in the world that have much stricter privacy laws than the United States does. In the US, we're fairly fairly uh concerned about about privacy.

A lot of people don't like the idea of um of cameras on every corner, for example, Whereas in the UK that's something that happens pretty frequently in in urban areas particularly, but in other parts of Europe it's it's kind of the opposite. The privacy laws are such that, uh that it may end up we may sing stricter regulations in those areas for drone use um as opposed to the U S. So, uh that all being said, I thought it would be also a good reminder to just kind of go over the way a drone flies

to explain how it works. I mean, this this podcast is part of how stuff works. Big shock to all of you guys out there who weren't aware of that. Be Yes, How Stuff works is the is the company I work for, text Stuff being one of the mini podcasts we do, So I thought I would take this opportunity to explain how quad copters work. So this is specifically about the quad copter style of U A V S or drones um, knowing that you know there are

other other methods out there. But a quad copter has four rotors, which you would probably imagined from the name quad, and it's arranged in a cross formation. So two of the rotors spend in a clockwise direction and the other two rote eight witter shans, which is an old way of saying counter clockwise. Uh. And it's an old way that I like because I'm a Shakespeare fan. But at

any rate, you've probably heard me say it before. So to go clockwise, to go counterclockwise, the rotors are in a fixed pitch, meaning that the rotors themselves don't tilt. They are uh stuck in that position. Now, typically you would need to tilt the pitch of a rotor forward in order to get forward momentum and to do anything other than just hover in place. So with a helicopter you may have rotors that can pitch forward a little bit, and that will start to let the helicopter move forward.

The quad copter does this by changing the rotational speed of the various rotors, so they might make certain rotors turn a little slower than other rotors. That will allow the the the quad copter to telt in the proper direction and thus move in that direction. And this is a very delicate thing. You have to be very careful.

You want to generate enough lift to keep the quad copter in the air, but you also want to have a differential between the two um the two sets of rotors in order to make sure that it's tilting the right way to get your quad copter to go where you want it to go. And obviously it can also ascend or descend, so we can go higher or lower.

The motors on a quad copter copter are actually pretty simple because they only need to turn the shaft of the respective propellers in one direction, so you don't need a motor that can reverse the direction of the propeller. That's not necessary. It just has to be able to turn either you know, oriented in such way so it turns either clockwise or counterclockwise. But that's it. That's all it has to do. And in fact, mechanically speaking, your

typical quad copter is incredibly simple. It really just has two moving parts. Uh well, I guess technically eight, because quad copters have four motors and four propellers, but those are the only things that are moving on a quad copter. Everything else can be perfectly stationary. Um. So mechanically they are very simple, simple things. However, electronically they are incredibly

sophisticated and complicated. That's because it would be next to impossible to fly a multi rotor vehicle using manual controls and manually adjusting the speed of each of these rotors. Quad Copters take advantage of sophisticated sensors and electronics to maintain their flight. If the rotors spin at the wrong speed, the quad copter would either crash or it would fly

off in the wrong direction and then crash. For a quad copter to remain hovering, each of those propellers has to be spinning at the right speed so that they generate the same amount of force we're talking about, uh, the right amount of torque and thrust and compensating for the right amount of drag, which may not be equivalent across all four rotors, so you have to have sensors that can detect this sort of stuff and make tiny minute adjustments just so that you can have a quad

copter hovering in in space, because if any of those conditions changed, then the quad copter would go out of control. So you typically have a quad copter with lots of microprocessors that are paired with sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes to allow the little vehicle to make these adjustments for you, perhaps up to several thousand times per minute, just so you can cover in place. Um and early consumer quad copters were essentially limited in what they could do on purpose.

It wasn't like it was a technological limitation at the time. It was that the people the companies making the quad copters wanted to make something that anyone could use. And this is what differentiates quad copters from other types of model aircraft. Any hobbyist who has been in model aircraft for a long time will tell you it takes a lot of training and practice to get good at controlling model aircraft, whether it's a model plane or a model

helicopter or whatever. In order to get really adept at it. You have to dedicate a lot of time to learning how to operate the device and then just practice. In fact, a lot of people will say it could take up to a year of regular practice to get to get competent at something like operating a model airplane or a model helicopter. So there's a pretty high barrier to entry. It's not just the price tag of these devices, which can be pretty hefty in some cases, but also it's

the the barrier of the learning curve. It is not easy to do. It is, however, very rewarding for people who are you know, who enjoy recreational RC model aircraft flying. They find great joy a and there are a lot of really awesome organizations out there where people work together and share their knowledge and have events and reserve space where they can fly their aircraft and really enjoy their hobby.

The quad copter, however, is so easy to use that it allows a much broader array of people the opportunity to play. Also, the price tag has come down significantly over the last few years, so now it's more affordable to a larger population. The flips that you know, the downside of that just means that there are way more people with way less training getting into model aircraft, in this case the the U A V S and U A S S drone area UM, and so that's starting

to cause some problems. So the early quad copters were limited on purpose in what they could do so that it would make it very easy to operate the quad copter. UH. This meant that quad copters mostly had limits on how fast they could travel as well as how far they could tilt in any given direction. UH. And the purpose for that was to improve the stability of the quad copter. It was to create a a an experience that was

easy to control for your beginner, your novice. UH. Now today there are quad copters on the market that don't have those those limitations and restrictions in place, so that if you are a skilled pilot, someone who has really kind of mastered the use of quad copters, you can do all sorts of maneuvers. You can go at really high speeds, and you can do stuff like flips and rolls if you're going at the right speed and you

do you do the timing correctly. So those quad copters tend to be a little more difficult to control, particularly for a novice, but a lot of them also have a mode that put those old restrictions back in place and make them more user friendly, so you can go out there and look for a drone that's design so that advanced pilots can really do some cool stuff with them, but also still have this beginner mode where you can, you know, have the stabilizers put on, so essentially it's

not gonna flip over or go too quickly, and you can learn the fine motor skills needed to operate it until you're ready to take the training wheels off, so to say. Now, consumer quad cover copts became available several years ago. I remember seeing the parrot A R drone UM, one of the earliest drones I ever saw in person at CS probably two thousand seven, No, two thousand eight, I'm sorry, ces. Two thousand and eight, I believe was the first time I saw a drone UM, and that

was the parrot A R drone. And they weren't um. Uh. They're pretty much lumped in with other types of model aircraft by by government organizations like the f a A. So essentially they said, hey, you know the rules that we have for operators of model airplanes or helicopters, those rules will also go ahead and apply to U A v s and that already caused some issues, and I'll

talk more about that in a second. But another issue is that the U A v s have become more sophisticated over time, and they're not because they're not terribly expensive, and because you have more and more people buying them, and because you've got things like some semi autonomous features

that make it even easier to use. We're talking about drones that have GPS devices incorporated into them, which allows them to pilot flight paths like you can you can program a flight path for your drone and it will follow it. Um. Some of them anyway, that have GPS devices or you might be able to specify a spot and say, if you lose r C contact with the controller, returned to this location, or if battery gets down below x per cent, come back to this location and UH.

In that way, you know, you can retrieve the drone even if you somehow lose the ability to communicate with it with your remote control. Some of them also have UH the ability to follow a specific target, so you could say, hey, you know, follow this, follow whatever the controller is in like a vehicle or or identify this thing follow it. That also raises some questions. I mean, it could be really cool if you're doing something like capturing footage of yourself as you ride a bike through

a neighborhood. That could be really neat, or it could be really a problem if you're having it follow someone who did not give you consent to do that thing. A lot of them have HD or even u h D Ultra high definition cameras mounted on them, which give them the capacity need to capture video footage. Um there's one d j I one that is like it has an ultra high definition camera mounted on it, and I think it costs about eight hundred bucks. Now, not that long ago U A V s of that size cost

a couple of thousand dollars. And also not that long ago UHD cameras cost several thousand dollars, like thirty thousand dollars when they were first coming out back in the

early two thousand's. So now we're at a point where you can get both of these technologies put together in one thing for less than a thousand dollars, which is pretty amazing, and it's opened up a lot of opportunities for filmmakers to use a new tool at their disposal, replace things like crane shots and helicopter shots with a drone shot, and uh, and that's pretty uh, it's it's

pretty amazing to look at. But it's also a little worrisome because you have a potential tool for people to use to spy on one another, or to spy on other businesses or government facilities, that kind of thing. So

it's raised some pretty tough questions. Some of these drones also have obstacle avoidance capabilities, which makes them even you easier to use, which that's a good thing, especially if you're flying your drone it's a pretty far distance from where you are and you've got an obstacle between you and where the drone is. It can be difficult sometimes to judge the depth of that kind of stuff. So if you're flying a drone and it otherwise would be

bumping into, say, I don't know a radio antenna. I watched a drone nearly collide with one a few weeks ago. That's not too far from my house. Uh, And something like obstacle avoidance would allow the drone to navigate around the obstacle even if your controls were putting it on a collision course. So pretty useful stuff, but it also creates other opportunities for problems. So a few other facts I need to get to before I talk about specific

rules and regulations. Uh, typically quad copters are sized in various categories like one, eight, one thousand, that kind of stuff. So what do those numbers mean. It's the distance in millimeters from one rotor to the rotor diagonally opposite it. So you take one rotor, you you stretch a measuring tape from that rotor to the one diagonally opposite, and you look at how many millimeters that is. It's kind of similar to measuring the size of a television screen.

You do you do diagonal corner to diagonal corner, and those measurements become important in drone competitions, which are a real thing. By the way. There are races and battle competitions out there, so there are competitions where you're trying to have the fastest time through a course. There other competitions where it's kind of like a drone thunderdome or really more like a drone battle Royal, because you'll have a whole bunch of drones in sign arena at the

same time. Usually it's netted off so that no one gets hurt if the drone when the drones collide with each other, and the goal is to be the last drone flying. Um. These are real things that are out there, their entire organizations dedicated to this kind of sporting event, and they're really cool. Um. Also, drone racing is super awesome. I love drone racing. I'm not piloting it. I would be total crap at that, but I love watching them. Uh, particularly the type of races that use FPV or first

person view. Now, in those races, the pilots actually wear a headset. They're not keeping line of sight on their drones. Instead, they wear a headset that has a live video feed from a camera that's mounted on the drone coming in through little monitors in their headset. So it's kind of like flying in the cockpit of an aircraft as you zoom around its speeds of too, sometimes more than a hundred miles per hour, which is a d sixty one

kilometers an hour. If you want to hear more about that kind of stuff, you should tune into the Forward Thinking Audio podcast titled off to the drone Races that actually published on May fourth, two thousand sixteen, on Star Wars Day, So go check that out. Joe and Lauren and I talk all about drones sporting events and what

goes into them, because it's pretty cool stuff. Now, when it comes to terms of the law, at least in the United States, they aren't so much concerned with the size as much as the weight of the drone um largely because that's what you would have to take into consideration if something were to go wrong. The heavier the drone is, the more likely it would cause damage to a person or piece of property. And so the f a A that's the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States,

is specifically concerned about drones that way. Between five five and fifty five pounds, which is in metric terms, between two and fifty grams tos or soft pounds is the maximum wait for standard registration. Anything heavier than fifty five pounds requires a more comprehensive registration with the f a A. So I'm not going to cover it because very few people out there are going to end up getting a

drone that weighs more than fifty five pounds. And if you do, it will be really a challenge to make sure you can be allowed to fly it. Now, let's get to those laws. I know I've been talking about this for a while, so I just covered the first one. No drones over fifty pounds in weight for standard registration. The big concern is that potential for damage or injury should the drone fail or if the pilot excidentally steers it into a person or other type of property, that

kind of thing. If your drone weighs more than point five five pounds two grams, you have to register it with the f a A before you fly it for the first time. This is a relatively new rule as of the recording of this podcast uh and it includes getting a compliant label for your aircraft to show that it has been registered, as well as a certificate and a flight I D Card to prove you have followed the rules. These rules also apply for other RC aircraft.

It's not just U A v S. This is something that all model aircraft have to follow at this point, which has also gotten model aircraft enthusiasts a little riled up. For good reason. I don't I'm not downplaying there justification because I completely empathize with it. And I'll talk more about in just a second. So what happens if you

don't register, Well, registration is required. And if you were to get caught operating a drone without this registration, if your aircraft did not have that label, if you did not have your certificate and i D card available for for someone asking you questions, and you are caught, particularly if you're caught doing something else that's also shady. The penalties are really stiff. Civil finds can go up to twenty seven thousand, five hundred dollars and criminal finds can

go up to two fifty thousand dollars. Plus you might be liable to pay for any damages you cause, so that's a huge amount of money. So how much does registration cost? Five bucks? Five dollars to register? Um and once you register, you're good. You just have to register once.

It doesn't matter how many aircraft you own. If you own twenty drones, then you can register once and you will get a unique identification number, which then you can print on labels and you can put those labels on all the different aircra q on So that five dollars is good for everything, all the aircraft. Anything over that two gram limit or or bottom level, anything under two hundred fifty grams, you can fly without registering at all.

You that's totally fine. So that covers all the little mini quad copters that are out there that you would pick up at like a toy store. Those you can fly without having to register them at all. But anything heavier than that you need to spend. The five dollar registration fee also doesn't matter if you're a US citizen or not. If you're visiting the United States and you have a drone, you have to apply for one of these.

You have to register it, uh in order to operate that drone legally in the U S. So UM this rule came into effect on December and in fact, if you registered your aircraft within that first thirty day period after the rule that came into effect, the five dollars would be charged would be refunded. And that money, by the way, is meant to go to funding the actual registration program as well as the website maintenance, that kind of stuff. So it's really just minimum maintenance type of deal.

So why was this program implement in the first place. Well, there were a few but frequent enough instances of people using drones to fly into restricted areas like near airports, or over private property, or over restricted nature reservations. Um. There was also the issue of drones flying into areas where emergency response was trying to get in there. Um. In other words, there were enough instances of pilots being stupid or at least being thoughtless. Maybe stupid is too

strong a word. They perhaps lacked some situational awareness, they lacked maybe some common sense. Some of them might have been up to some kind of shady dealings in the first place, like trying to capture footage of stuff that really they shouldn't be. At any rate, there were enough of those to cause the f a A to say, we're gonna have to step in here, and that was a big problem. Plus there's the potential to outfit drones with other stuff that could be harmful or even deadly.

Some of the examples I saw talked about outfitting drones with guns or with explosives and uh. And since the honor system wasn't preventing mischief and worse, the f a A stepped in. And this came as a huge disappointment for hobbyists who had been flying r C aircraft for years because they have already created organizations that are dedicated to the hobby and had established guidelines for how hobbyists were meant to operate their aircraft. So these were largely

self governing, self policing organizations. They had created guidelines that set expectations and eliminated the need for or their regulation. So, in other words, the hobbyists had built up these communities that had created the guidelines everyone agreed to follow. And the reason they agreed to follow it was that as long as they followed those guidelines, organizations like the f a A will just stay out of it and they would be able to enjoy their hobby responsibly without these

restrictions coming in. But again, once that bar was lowered for entry, once you've got to a point where it was easier to operate the vehicles and they became less expensive, you had a rush of new pilots, and not all of them had that same dedication to safety and promoting the hobby as the old timers did, because they actually had to go through a lot more effort in order to be able to engage their hobby than the new folks didn't. This isn't the say that one group is

better than the other group, but rather just say that. Uh. When you open up a hobby from a narrow niche to a much broader niche, or even not a niche anymore, but just a broader audience, problems can can come up because you'll get more potential for people to misuse the technology. Even if they were misusing it unintentionally, it can happen. So the US government had to come in and start setting up some restrictions, which really was a tough pill to swallow if you had been active in the hobby

and been responsible and accountable for that whole time. Uh. In fact, a lot of the organizations have much stricter rules than things that the FAA has proposed. And it was all in an attempt to promote a hobby. It's safely so that people didn't get in trouble and you didn't have these restrictions that affect everyone, both the people who are problems and the people who are good citizens.

And it also created a negative image for people who are in the RC model aircraft community, and that was tough for people who had been part of this community for decades. Uh. You know, it was one of those things where they were largely not thought of at all. You might think, oh, well, that's kind of a nerdy hobby you have to fly on aircraft. Or you might think, oh, wow, that's really cool that you can do that. I bet

it's really tricky to learn, UM. But people didn't tend to think, oh, you could potentially hurt me or spy on me. And so this negative uh perception of operators really was a tough thing for the old timers and the the dedicated hobbyists to to deal with. UM. So when you begin getting back into registering your your U a V or your drone or whatever, when you begin the registration process, you'll be asked if you need register

as a model aircraft or a non model aircraft user. Now, that essentially boils down to whether you're using your device commercially or not, so whether you're going to be operating your U a V for profit or you're just doing it for fun. UM. Non commercial users or hobbyists register as model aircraft. Commercial users register as non model aircraft, and once you register, you're good to go, at least

for the hobbyists. Anyway. I'll get into the consumer stuff in a little bit or the commercial stuff a little bit. You don't have to register every U a V you have. Like I said, once you register the first time, you are good to go. Unless you're a commercial user. Then you have to jump through a few more hoops. So i'll cover that in a bit after I go over the basic guidelines that you're supposed to follow if you're

operating a drone. Now, the FAA has partnered with the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Academy of Model Aeronautics. Those are two organizations that have been working to establish safety guidelines for model aircraft operation for many years, and the guidelines they established aren't really law necessarily, but they're rather meant to help hobbyists enjoy their recreational flying responsibly and prevent the need for more restrictive laws to

be put in place. So again, these guidelines were kind of common sense guidelines saying, if you follow these, you'll be able to enjoy what we do without causing harm or or being liable for some damage or injury. Just follow these rules and everything will be fine. Together, the three organizations, the f a A, the the Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Academy of Model Aeronautics created a site that is called no Before You fle I that's k n O W NO, and that site outlines the

parameters for safe flying. So I'm gonna look at the recreational ones and cover some of the rules. These are rules that are both from that site and also from the f a A. Keeping in mind these rules mostly aren't law. They're essentially saying, just follow these guidelines and you'll not get into trouble. But it's not like it's a a you know, if you were to operate outside these guidelines, you would automatically be arrested. It would depend

upon your region and the local laws. So first up is you shouldn't fly your U A V higher than four feet and remain below any surrounding obstacles. Um So going over four hundred if you would be a bad idea. Now that's a pretty that's pretty significant height. And if your U A V is of moderate to small size, any higher than that you would probably lose sight of it, which would be a problem because one of the other rules is to maintain a line of sight with your

U A V at all times. So you're not supposed to fly beyond the line of sight, even if you're wearing an FPV headset, So even if you can see the point of view of the drone, the drone itself is supposed to remain within your personal line of sight if you were to remove the headset. If you're wearing a headset, typically you should have a second person there to kind of act as a spotter to make sure the drone is not flying too far away from your position so that you can continue that line of sight.

You're supposed to stay away from any areas in which manned aircraft are operating, which is a pretty understandable restriction. If you're within five miles of an airport, you're supposed to notify the air traffic control personnel of that airport that you are going to be flying a drone and ask permission from them that you conduce. Oh. Um, five miles is a long way and there are a lot of airports out there, so uh, it's important to check that.

If you live in an urban area, you may want to make certain that you are not within five miles of the closest airport to make to be sure that you don't have to request permission every time you fly your your U a V out in the yard, Otherwise you may have to drive a little distance in order to operate your U a V legally, UM, you're not supposed to fly over people and vehicles. You're supposed to keep at least twenty five ft of distance between the

U a V and people or property. Uh. That of distance doesn't include being directly over someone like you know thirty I was thirty feet up, so I'm twenty ft away from them. No, that that's not what they meant, and that X Y access not the z. UM. You aren't supposed to operate your UA be in bad weather, so any weather conditions that would impact your visibility or the stability of the the U a V. So if it's high winds or anything like that, I'm not supposed

to operate in those conditions. You are also not supposed to operate your U a V while intoxicated, while under the effects of alcohol or drugs. UM, you are supposed to take time to learn how to operate your U a V responsibly before doing anything complicated with it. So, in other words, you're supposed to actually take the time to train yourself on how to use your U a V. Before you start doing things like flying through obstacles or

trying to do tricks like flips and rolls. You're supposed to make sure your u a V is in good working order before you fly it. You are not supposed to fly over any sort of sensitive infrastructure or buildings, so don't fly over hospitals or power stations, or water treatment facilities or government buildings that kind of thing. Also, you're not supposed to fly over sporting events or big

public events UM or public safety emergencies. Those are areas that are either considered to be under a temporary or a permanent flight restriction. So permanent flight restriction could include a sports arena. Temporary flight restriction could be any area that is currently the site of a public emergency. UM. In either case, you're not supposed to fly a drone in those areas. UM You're supposed to follow all local laws before operating a u AV, so some regions could

have some pretty restrictive laws. You're supposed to make yourself familiar with them and operate within them. Don't spy. Don't use your drone to spy on people or to take unauthorized photos of persons in areas where there's an expectation of privacy. So public park is one thing, because you're out in the public um. Although again, if you're like using the drone to stalk someone, then that would probably be considered stalking. You could likely be pulled up on

charge of of that. But if you're just flying around the park and taking pictures because it's a pretty day and you want to get crowd shots and that kind of stuff, that's perfectly reasonable. But if you're flying in a different area, like private property or any other area where you could reasonably expect to have some privacy, then you're not supposed to use your cameras to spy on people at all. UM. Again, these are guidelines set up by the various organizations and the f A a UH

and likely will play into laws later on. UH. You're only supposed to operate one drone at a time, so

one operator, one drone. There there are pieces of software out there that allow you to link drones together in a fleet, but you are not supposed to do that UM, at least not outside inside a controlled area where you're experimenting with fleet software is one thing because it may be part of your research for artificial intelligence, but once you take it outside and you are out in the public where you could potentially collide with people or property,

then you can no longer do that legally or you're not supposed to do it at any rate. And the f A has a rule for all model aircraft you're supposed to only fly during daylight hours. So whatever local UH call for sunrise and sunset are, those are the hours within which you can operate a U a V. After or before that, it's not it's against the rules.

So most of the stuff is not actual law. They are rules you are strongly encouraged to adhere to because if something goes wrong and you are outside of those rules, then you can be under some pretty serious trouble. But it's not like most For most of these, it's not like if you were to go outside of it, you would immediately have cops pull up and arrestue, unless the

local laws say otherwise, in which case that could potentially happen. UH. And again, they're really there to prevent the the need for more formal restrictions and regulations so that people can enjoy their hobby without that kind of hassle. Um when the regulations become official, when when we actually get a new set of rules which the FAA is working on as I record this podcast. It is May of two

thousand and sixteen when I record this. It's possible that new rules could be published before this episode goes live, but at any rate, there are going to be some new rules coming out by the f a A that will cover unmanned aerial systems but not model aircraft. In other words, the FAA is going to distinguish between model planes and helicopters that sort of stuff and U a

v s or drones. So at that point there will be different sets of rules, and I think that will make folks who really like model aircraft and model helicopters the traditional type happy, because they will they will go back to kind of their their organization based communities. UM, those who want to pilot quad copters will have to follow the rules for the unmanned aerial systems. And some states do have those local laws regarding you A VS.

But other states, like the one I live in, Georgia, they're waiting on the f a A to establish federal rules before passing any local laws. Recently, Georgia Governor Nathan deal vetoed legislation that would regulate U A v S in the state, and he said he wanted to wait until the federal rules were in place first. So things that could have established some precedent for U A v s. H Sometimes they don't make it because the local politicians want to make sure that the federal rules are are

established before states make any um big decisions. This was not a big surprise here in Georgia that Governor Deal would veto the legislation. And I'll tell you why it's not a big surprise because Governor Deal is probably the most business oriented governor Georgia has had in a very long time. He has worked very hard to allow businesses to attract businesses to the state successfully. So this is not a criticism, by the way, this is just an observation. UM.

In many ways this has been very helpful. He has struck down legislation that was discriminatory uh and and at least part of the reason he did so was because it would have discouraged businesses from locating inside Georgia. And he's also been a big proponent for stuff like the film industry here in the States. So I imagine that he didn't want to pass laws regulating drones, but us he didn't want to um to uh to interfere with

businesses establishing themselves in the state. So that's just an observation. Again, I'm not I'm not judging anything here. Um Personally, I think uh that attracting businesses to a state is a good thing, So I don't have a problem with that necessarily, even though I also think that we need to establish what the guidelines are for drones before before an event happens.

That makes it worse. Right, you don't want to see someone use a drone in such a way that causes a public catastrophe and thus necessitates a very draconian set of laws. Okay, Uh, Now that we've got that all the way, let's talk about commercial U a v s because these are a little different. Again. This is where you're using a U a V as some sort of business use. Now, this could include capturing video or images

that you plan to sell. Um. If you're using a U a V and you're taking pictures and you're just doing it for fun, that's that's still a hobbyist use. If you are using a U a V for fun and you later sell a picture because someone was interested in buying it, that's still a hobbyist use because you were you were using your U a V for pleasure, you weren't setting out to make money. But if you plan on operating a U a V so that you

can get footage of stuff and sell it to an outlet. UH. Let's say that you are in a in Los Angeles and you're using U a V s to get footage of celebrities so you can sell it to TMZ. That is a commercial use of a U a v UM. At that point, you are no longer a hobbyist. Also, if you use a drone just to do stuff, like let's say you own a business and you've got a tall building and you're using a drone to fly up to the top of the building to check on your roof,

that's technically using it in a business sense. So that is a commercial use for U a V. If you're using it to UH check like the security of your perimeter UH in your business, that is also a commercial use of a U a V. It falls under the commercial use UH purview, So then you have to follow the rules for commercial use, not for hobbyists. The rules for hobbyists are largely loose, they aren't nearly as restrictive as the commercial uses, because once you go into commercial uses,

you're talking about commercial aviation. Even though we're talking low altitudes generally speaking with unmanned systems, it's still commercial aviation in the view of the f a A. That's where a ton of different regulations and restrictions come into play. So you are someone pursuing a career in aviation if you want to use it in a business sense, and just because you aren't sitting in a cockpit doesn't mean

your exempt from the rules of pilots. And as the recording of this podcast right now, you would have to contact the f a A if you planned on being a commercial operator of U A v s and you'd have to request a section three thirty three exemption. Now this is specifically an exception to section three thirty three

of Public Law one twelve Dash nine. Really catchy name, right, that particular laws what gives the f a A various authorizations for the fiscal years between, like I think it's two thousand eleven through two thousand fourteen, so technically those are are past, but that's the that's still the section you would request the exemption from you would also need a certificate of waiver or a certificate of authorization, and you would have to have a pilot with an f

a A Airman certificate in order to do this legally. Now this could change once the f a A A publishes the rules for small U a S operations, but as of the recording of this podcast is required. The exemption includes a basic certificate of authorization, So one of those elements you will get just by getting that exception to section three thirty three, and that certificate of authorization allows you to operate a commercial u a V below four feet altitude, and you would still have to obey the

restrictions around airports and other restricted airspace. Essentially, you have

to follow the same rules as hobbyists. Anyone who wants to operate outside of those limitations would have to apply for a more broad certificate of authorization, which means contacting the f a A explaining exactly what you want to use the U A V for, how it would be used, you know what, what context, what scenario, and then you would have to wait upon a decision by the f a A to either grant you that certificate of authorization or deny it now. Commercial operators must also have a

pilot certificate. That's because the f a A cannot by law authorize aircraft operation in the national airspace without a certificated a certificated pilot in command according to Title forty nine of the United States Code, section four four seven one one. So as a matter of law, you have to have a pilot certificate to operate this UV commercially,

to actually be the person behind the controls. All right, but what about the rules about people affected by U A v S. And we talked about the hobbyists, we talked about the commercial uses. What about everybody else? If the U I V Flies over my private property? What are my rights? And that is a super tough question here in the United States because of lots of different issues. First of all, you've got the rights to airspace, and

this is a big one. So once upon a time, property law stated that if you owned a parcel of land, you essentially owned everything below it and everything above it. So from your home all the way down or the property you own all the way down to the center of the earth, all of that's your property, and everything above your home up to the heavens that's your property too.

That has changed. That's not the case anymore, largely because we have commercial aircraft and they have to fly over places, and they obviously could not request permission over every homeowner, and so the laws have changed. It is no longer the case that you own the property above your land all the way up to space. Instead, technically you still own the land all the way down to the center of the earth. So that's good. But the airspace you own above your property, it only extends as far as

you can reasonably use in connection with the surface. That is a matter of law here in the US, so reasonably is a matter of judgment. It's not incorrect. It's not a clear cut case of below four hundred feet you own everything above your land, for example. However, that being said, ownership rights do not extend into navigable airspace, which in the United States is defined as anything above

five hundred feet in uncongested areas. So while there's not a specific cutoff for where your property ends, it definitely cannot extend to five feet. At that point as navigable airspace, it is off limits for your ownership. The question is how far below navigable airspace to your property rights extent at what point is the air above your land still

your property. Local laws are more likely to come into play for airspace ownership than federal ones, so things like zoning requirements might limit how tall a building can be in a specific area, or how tall structure is allowed to be. So let's say that you gut zoning laws that limit you and it says nothing over fifty feet. While someone might be able to argue that your property rights only extend to fifty feet above the ground and anything above that is not your property because it cannot

be reasonably used in connection with the land around it. Um. That is of a potential argument someone could make, but no one has established this. There's no law that says, at X number of feet, your rights as a property owner are no longer at play. Um. So it's a real mess. And another problem with this is that there's already been cases of people shooting down drones or otherwise

disabling them that have gone in different directions. So there's one that came out in the summer of two thousand fifteen in the United States in Kentucky, in which a man shut down a drone using a shotgun. Took three shots at it. The drone is lying over his property, and that man was William Meredith, and the pilot's owner, David Boggs, called police after Meredith essentially said if you cross that sidewalk, I'll shoot you too, uh, because Boggs came up and said, hey man, why don't you shoot

down my drone. I was just showing it off to people and showing how it works. Um. So the police arrested Meredith for wanton endangerment and criminal mischief. Alright, So, according to Boggs, he was flying the drone at around two hundred feet and there's data on the device that backs him up. Says two hundred feet was the limit of how low he flew. Uh. Meredith challenged that. He said it was closer to one feet, that it was below the tree line, and a couple of witnesses testified

to this as well. Meredith also maintained that he thought that the drone was spying on his teenage daughter who was sunbathing in the yard. So Meredith was saying, this was an invasion of my privacy and the privacy laws of Kentucky either way. At that point, the court said, and still really the courts had never decided what height a person's property rights in, so the question of whether the drone was actually trespassing is still an open question.

It may not have been trespassing because it may not have been on the property since it was above a certain height. But the judge presiding over meredith hearing dismissed the charges against him. So the judge said these charges UH don't have merit and dismissed the case. Bog said he wanted to push the case to the grand jury and try and and see if he could have any

success there. He also brought a federal lawsuit against Meredith in an attempt to establish once and for all what the rules are for you a v operation and property rights. So that's still going on right now. I haven't seen any recent development about that. Last I saw, UH, there was still a wait to see if this was actually

gonna end up going to trial. So there's some astident for bringing down drones, but the question is far from settled because there are other cases where someone brought down a drone and then got punished for it, um they were charged with acting recklessly. There's still debates on whether it's legal for law enforcement to destroy someone's property, you know, by taking down a drone or at least damaging someone's property,

let alone private individuals or companies. So movie production companies have been exploring ways to bring down drones for a while. One of my co workers tell stories about how a friend of his has been UM and talks with a production company about ways to bring down drones and ranging from beanbag guns to nets to two jammers that would interfere with the signal between the control and the drone. UM all sorts of different ways to bring a drone down and whether or not that's legal is still an

open question. It's a bit like the wild West, and it will probably continue to be that way until there are some firm f A A guidelines in place. An individual cases will likely go to court, and that's where we'll start to see precedents set by actual court cases.

Or states will end up passing local laws governing the legal use of U A v s and that will end up settling the question one way or the other, and it will rely heavily on regional laws governing property rights and privacy UM so like in in some cases courts have decided against people who have used force to down the drone, saying it constituted an unreasonable action since

property wasn't in danger. In other words, there's there was at least one case where a guy shut down a drone and he had said that he did so because he thought it was a c I A surveillance drone illegally spying on him, and so he brought it down

and was brought up on charges of property destruction. And the judge ruled in that case that the guy was in the wrong, that the guy bringing the drone down was in the wrong, that that it did the drone did not constitute a threat to anyone's property or person, and as such, the actions the guy took were too extreme. So again it depends upon the local region. Um in Kentucky, the privacy laws and property rights are pretty hefty. That might not be the case in some other places in

the United States, let alone in the world. So the reason why I wanted to kind of bring all this up was just to talk about how complicated is and and show how yet again we have a piece of technology that has uh developed and evolved far faster than the legal system can compensate for. And we're likely to see this happen over and over again with robots and autonomous cars and all sorts of stuff in the future.

This is a great way of kind of taking like a test case and saying, here's an example, yet another example of how technology can get to a point where it hits the market. It's available for us to buy, but the laws aren't there yet too, say when, where, and how can we use this stuff in a way that is legal, where we're not infringing on anyone else's

rights or putting anyone else in danger. It's a complicated thing, and it's also kind of cool, and I'll probably do another update to this once the f a A publishes their rules if there are any rules that are particularly interesting, troublesome,

you know, worthy of conversation. If they are essentially codifying the rules that have already been set, I probably won't do another episode about this, but if they end up coming up with other rules or or or other restrictions that are particularly interesting, then I'll look into it again. In the meantime, if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, please let me know. Write me an email. The address is tech Stuff, How Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on social media.

On Facebook and Twitter, I use the handle text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you guys again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com