News Corp's Drone use in U.S.

denverpilot

denverpilot

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DenverPilot
Leave it to Rupert Murdoch to bring the completely neglected drone aircraft regulation "head in the sand" policy at FAA to a head here in the U.S. ...

http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill...ions-about-who-gets-to-fly-drones-in-the-u-s/

AOPA was getting hot on this prior to Phil Boyer's departure and then suddenly went silent. I was on a mailing list of concerned pilots that Phil was gathering information about Public Safety and Private drone use from...

Under Fuller's watch, not a word. Not even an editorial, a web-only article, or a letter to the editor.
 
woodstock said:
How can you see and avoid a drone? Ar they so small that hitting one wouldn't do much?
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I wouldn't want to hit one, and I don't think you would ever see it before you could do something.

The multi-rotor drones that was pictured have almost no surface area to see, unlike a R/C plane or even helicopter with a canopy. With payload, they can weigh quite a bit and they are structurally strong.
 
That quad copter weights probably around 1.7 lbs with the typical Go Pro HD camera. A goose weights from 3 - 13 lbs. And the goose doesn't have spotters to see your plane coming. Mini drones don't operate at great AGL altitudes usually. I doubt they are breaking 500 ft above nearby obstacles. I can see some problems with allowing a 1/2 ton predator to fly low, its far closer to a conventional airplane in terms of weight and size. Hobby sized drones are basically the size and weight of birds.

So what would make pilots ok with drones and FPV(NLOS) flying? I'd really like to see something like ads-b mandated on both sides. It would greatly simplify awareness for both parties.

People are going to pick apart the communication link, which is the major difference. Plenty of ways to make that reliable either through cell backup, operating on multiple bands and having an autopilot that returns home on loss of signal.

I'm working on a FPV/Drone system myself currently. Right now its a matter of perfecting the radio which I've designed as a Software defined radio that spans at least two channels in the 5.8 ghz band. This will allow me to have my radio act essentially as a repeater for other fpv craft nearby. Just in case one loses contact with the base station. It can't pickup/transmit cell traffic yet, but that will be for another version that is a bit more flexible with how many different bands it can tune at once.

FPV and drones are not some sort of boogy man. We want to share the air with you fairly. But if we get shut out we will just operate more covertly.
 
The details are not well formed in my head, but basically this... a license to fly them and all the usual training and certification stuff that goes along with that.

Thus, a way to deny flying them to the folks who do stupid, dangerous, or other dumb things with them.

There's probably a whole rulebook that needs to be written to go along with that...

Doesn't matter if it's 1.5 lbs or 13 lbs, you don't want it coming through the windshield.

I've seen bejillions of YouTube videos where no one was "spotting" for an FPV drone pilot. In fact, there's a number of night videos of them where you probably can't spot the drone from the launch site if you tried.

Plenty of folks work well with the FAA... high-altitude balloon folks and high-power rocket folks both carefully notify FAA and get NOTAMs issued for their areas of operation.

Drones don't seem to want to play by those rules, mostly 'cause FAA hasn't exactly been open to finding real safety-conscious solutions and just has their collective heads in the sand... waiting for something like this drone flown by someone with "something to lose" to test the system, apparently.

Have lots of friends in this group -- they do a great job of notifying ZDV when they're launching, where their balloons are at, and when they've recovered...

http://www.eoss.org - Edge of Space Sciences
 
Palmpilot said:
So you want to impose significant extra costs on existing airspace users. Thanks a lot.
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Except that these significant costs are already mandated on the operators of GA aircraft. ADS-B is coming. The question is only if we can burden the operators of UAV with their fair share of the significan costs.
 
Palmpilot said:
So you want to impose significant extra costs on existing airspace users. Thanks a lot.
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Technology changes over the years to make things safer. ADS-B I will admit isn't very good. But it seems to be all that the FAA is willing to offer. Also its not our fault the AC market and regulations are amazingly expensive and overbearing. The alternative from my perspective is coming up with a small radio direction finder that will pick the secondary radar sweep of a transponder and guestimate if you are in the neighborhood and similar altitude(lite TCAS). Not nearly as effective as ads-b which will give me an actual position and let me report one as well. I think its unlikely that any sort of private standards will be effective. Or at a minimum the FAA should just give us a procedure to alert them of our activity and file a NOTAM. Or change regulations so we can alert AC on CTAF in uncontrolled space.

GA seems to want this to be risk free. It will never be. People on the ground and in the air are at risk from GA/commercial operations and GA will be at risk from drone operations. The key is keeping the risks reasonable.

I can see licensing happening at some point. I'd like to see rather light regulation on "normal" sized model aircraft/drones. At their size and weight they don't have too much punch. Not to say I would want to get hit with one. But compared to a large nearly full sized AC drone they are fairly low energy. Full sized drones should have more significant training requirements aligned with more traditional flight schools.

I hate to have more regulation since I prefer a stance of automatically having a right/privilege until proven a moron. But licensing and byzantine regulation is all the gov knows.

Also keep in mind that most of this is from the perspective of small drones. Big drones are going to be a whole different issue.
 
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Big drones over "newsworthy" events will become commonplace before ADS-B adequately covers altitudes below 1800' AGL.
 
denverpilot said:
Big drones over "newsworthy" events will become commonplace before ADS-B adequately covers altitudes below 1800' AGL.
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This figure only refers to reliable reporting to FAA facilities. The conflicting traffic will be informed from day one with no regard to altitude -- as far as I know, of course. Therefore, mandating drones to carry ADS-B with transmission in both modes would be useful us as users of GA aircrafts.
 
Not if one is using the Mode-S extended squitter and the other is using 900 MHz.

(The awful design choice of building two separate but simultaneous systems here in the U.S. is breathtakingly stupid really. It kills the ability for one whole fleet of aircraft to hear the others directly without relaying data through FAA facilities.)

:(
 
zaitcev said:
Except that these significant costs are already mandated on the operators of GA aircraft. ADS-B is coming. The question is only if we can burden the operators of UAV with their fair share of the significan costs.
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Actually, the only mandate is for ADS-B OUT, and only for operations in some defined airspace. To "see" the UAV, a plane would have to be equipped with ADS-B IN and a equipment to display it on. And, what about UAV operations in airspace where ADS-B isn not required?
 
karmicthreat said:
But compared to a large nearly full sized AC drone they are fairly low energy. Full sized drones should have more significant training requirements aligned with more traditional flight schools.
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You can go as slow as you want, but I'm still moving at a good clip (comparatively) to stay airborne. It's that closing velocity that is going to put your toy through my windscreen. You're small and I can't see you. Now, if you want to buy me a targeting radar and air-to-air missiles for my C-172 so I can clear you out of my path... :D

And this is for the newsies? Wonderful. More stuff for them to mis-report. I'm thrilled. I'm still looking for that part of the airport they keep calling the tarmac. Idiots.
 
Ghery said:
I'm still looking for that part of the airport they keep calling the tarmac. Idiots.
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From Merriam-Webster

Definition of TARMAC

: a tarmacadam road, apron, or runway

Origin of TARMAC
from Tarmac, a trademark First Known Use: 1919

Just because some pilots don't like it when someone calls an apron a tarmac doesn't make it wrong.

It's not the "fast lane" or the "slow lane" on the interstate highway either...but...
 
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Commercial or LE drones should be flown by an appropriately certified pilot, mode s transponder, and full radio comms. This allows the rest of us half a chance to avoid hitting them. On the other hand, if they're the size of global hawk, most of us near blind could see them.
Any drone in the area, please advise!
 
RC airplanes have been flying around for quite a few years...

I saw one flying under me just last night as I was climbing out of ONZ - someone was flying off the soccer fields on the north end of the airport property.

There is (or at least used to be) RC activity just east of Y47. I don't recall it ever making the news.
 
karmicthreat said:
Technology changes over the years to make things safer. ADS-B I will admit isn't very good. But it seems to be all that the FAA is willing to offer. Also its not our fault the AC market and regulations are amazingly expensive and overbearing. The alternative from my perspective is coming up with a small radio direction finder that will pick the secondary radar sweep of a transponder and guestimate if you are in the neighborhood and similar altitude(lite TCAS). Not nearly as effective as ads-b which will give me an actual position and let me report one as well. I think its unlikely that any sort of private standards will be effective. Or at a minimum the FAA should just give us a procedure to alert them of our activity and file a NOTAM. Or change regulations so we can alert AC on CTAF in uncontrolled space.

GA seems to want this to be risk free. It will never be. People on the ground and in the air are at risk from GA/commercial operations and GA will be at risk from drone operations. The key is keeping the risks reasonable.

I can see licensing happening at some point. I'd like to see rather light regulation on "normal" sized model aircraft/drones. At their size and weight they don't have too much punch. Not to say I would want to get hit with one. But compared to a large nearly full sized AC drone they are fairly low energy. Full sized drones should have more significant training requirements aligned with more traditional flight schools.

I hate to have more regulation since I prefer a stance of automatically having a right/privilege until proven a moron. But licensing and byzantine regulation is all the gov knows.

Also keep in mind that most of this is from the perspective of small drones. Big drones are going to be a whole different issue.
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As others have mentioned, big or small (assuming small is bigger than a large insect) will cause damage to an airplane if a collision occurs. Also your notion that the fact that flying airplanes isn't perfectly safe gives you license to increase those risks is ludicrous IMO and I suspect that the first time a drone causes an accident with injury occurs there will be lots of fallout not the least of which will be a successful lawsuit against the builder and operator of the drone. ADS-B will not be a solution in the foreseeable future because the FAA has only mandated ADS-B out (meaning that a significant number of airplanes won't have ADS-B in to warn them of drones).

That said, I'd think that as long as the drones were limited to operations no more than a couple hundred feet above the nearest tall structure or ground and excluded from an appropriately sized area surrounding an airport the chances for a collision would be acceptably miniscule.

And FWIW, I've personally had a scary close encounter with a "small" (4-6' wingspan) drone at my exact altitude above a few thousand AGL and the only reason I didn't hit it is the fact that out flight paths didn't exactly converge (the actual separation was less than 100 ft horizontally).
 
timwinters said:
From Merriam-Webster

Definition of TARMAC

: a tarmacadam road, apron, or runway

Origin of TARMAC
from Tarmac, a trademark First Known Use: 1919

Just because some pilots don't like it when someone calls an apron a tarmac doesn't make it wrong.

It's not the "fast lane" or the "slow lane" on the interstate highway either...but...
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Yup. The whole definition requires that it be paved in tarmacadam. All too often the newsies use the term when anyone who can see will note that the pavement is concrete. Therefore, not tarmac. It isn't a place, it is a pavement material.
 
Rupert Murdoch Worried He May Have Damaged Heretofore Perfect Reputation

LONDON—Embroiled in a vast phone-hacking scandal involving the company he founded, respected entrepreneur and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch expressed concern Monday that he might have caused significant damage to his heretofore pristine reputation.

Murdoch, who established his widely admired career on the foundations of basic morality and sound business ethics, has, until now, been revered as a pillar of honesty and accountability in the media world. However, the Australian-American billionaire said the events of the past few months could make it very difficult for him to restore honor to his otherwise spotless legacy.
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:rofl:
 
I am more worried about catching leprosy than hitting one of these things. I think I have a better chance of winning the lottery than hitting one of these things. Have any of you EVER worried about hitting an RC plane ???? Quite simply I'm not operating in the same airspace as these things. Are you telling me that you guys spend extensive time at and below 500 AGL ?????? These type of drones are a non-issue. Please find a REAL issue to whine about.
 
steingar said:
Heaven forbid News corp hire and airplane and pilot to get their footage.
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This was done under a TFR, the drone is flown by some highschool kid that doesn't have a ticket to punch if he gets caught.
 
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