General > General Technical Chat
For the Love of Radio Controlled Aircraft in the US, New Rules Possible.
GreyWoolfe:
--- Quote from: chickadee on March 03, 2020, 07:31:49 pm ---A work colleague told us of a trip to america in a previous job where they went to a shooting range and where pleased to find out that they could hire anything they wanted to play with. However one person soon had everyone throwing themselves to the floor when he started waving around his gun oblivious to the fact that he could accidentally shoot a colleague
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Most states have banned this practice for that very reason! You now need to demonstrate some competency and even a single mistake gets you banned! I almost got banned simply for not putting my safety glasses on *as* I was walking through the door into the range instead of before!!! They pulled me out and read me the riot act!
[/quote]
Back in the dim and distant past, I was at a shooting range that was run by a group of local police officers. I was shooting one night, and the numpty next to me stepped out of the shooting port with his revolver in hand and the cylinder closed. Next thing I knew, the Range Offer was in front of him with his own weapon drawn and pointed, asked him to open and empty cylinder and tossed him out with a lifetime ban. Stupid is as stupid does. Thankfully my only gaff over many years of gun ownership was missing charging a case when I was reloading. Bullet was a squib and got stuck in the barrel. The gentleman running the desk laughed at me while he gave me a cleaning rod to tap the bullet head out. Always triple checked the tray before seating the bullet heads after that.
LaserSteve:
I'm not a Kalifornian, atthough I like the northeren part of the state.
I live in the conservative , somewhat hilly, "Bible Belt" portion of the Midwest. I can stand Southern Kali for about one week at a time and Northern Kali for about two weeks. I've been there a few times for work, and never got to visit any of the surplus electronics places. When I'm there I don't have time for the beach or anything fun. Because the traffic population is so dense in the South, its difficult to do repairs or research work without pre-packing in all possible tools and parts. Thus every minute in the lab is critical when I'm there.
Only fun I've ever managed to have in Cali was one short emergency trip for parts to pre-Armageddon Fry's Electronics , a few priceless minutes of a backstage tour at Laserium's repair facility, and a short trip to inside the perimeter of Moffett field with a Nasa Burger at Mega Bites. I'll admit you can get good Mex-American food around there, though.
Steve
beanflying:
--- Quote from: LaserSteve on March 05, 2020, 01:20:52 pm ---This gets real interesting, real fast. DJI published an analysis of who was on the 75 member invited "Industry Advisory Committee". Mostly telecom providers in the form of big cellular companies and law enforcement. Users and manufacturers were woefully under-represented.
So the published pipe dream is that some service provider would 1. Charge public users only 5 USD per month, 2. Feed all this flight data down a pipeline (or two) to FAA and probably other agencies for free, 3. Retain the
data for six months, and yet have the level of customer service to make the drone delivery companies happy.
So either some one is planning to spend in the government's black budget for what I'm going to call "Total Drone Awareness" or this was a pipedream of totally privatized art traffic control via the existing cell service, or I'm believing some one's preplanned spin on the project.
And yet all nine or so "invited" service providers would also have to co-operate and share the data, while hopefully providing a "freemium" service to some minor users, which means there would have to be advertising or something to users, or selling the data which was supposed to be open source.
Turns out, according to DJI, there is no budget for FAA to spend on establishing this system. FAA excluded ADS-B from the drone side of things which means either they don't want to overload ADS-B (Which is contractor operated) or clutter it with non safety of life traffic. But as I think of it, even at low level, it IS safety of life traffic.
I've never known a Telecoms company to NOT turn a profit, even the government owned monopolies, so think what you may.
Ouch... Again, Allegedly …. When I get time I'll publish the links to the docs I'm basing this post on.
Which really raises the question, of "Where is the real time collision avoidance and flight guidance Hardware" going to set? Is the reason why government and apparently part of the industry wants totally open source everything data so that the flight planning is done at each operator's headquarters? A version of what the airline industry wants to go to with no airways routes, so all flights are direct for shortest distance? Who/ What/ When/ Where negotiates what UAS has the right of way?
An even bigger question is how does a General Aviation aircraft or crop duster, or Ultralight or Medical Helo pilot "pop up" into the drone traffic from an uncontrolled airport? Right now in most uncontrolled airspace they just call blind on CTAF, a open traffic advisory frequency.
I can't help but to have a little fun with this:
"Press one for Espanol, Press two for English, Press three if your drone can't get permission to take off, Press four if a unwanted delivery drone is setting in your yard, Press five if your at the scene of a mid air collision or drone crash, Press Six to pay your Airspace Bill, your estimated wait time is Thirty Two Minutes" ATC support from an overseas call center is going to be a hoot, too...
Steve
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This model with talking to 'big' industry with commercial interests would be fine if they weren't setting rules for the casual R/C'er or Drone flier. In some ways calling for submissions is PR as the basic idea if not the bulk of the direction for the legislation would already be written. The fairly recent UK process was largely here it is now suck it up and by the way if you can be bothered drop us a note here so it can be filed that we listened ....
If the FAA puts it out to Private to run and administer then good luck with affordability and any shred of privacy with your data/flight logs. Some things the government should remain in charge of :palm:
Any explanation or ideas what they plan to do with the more general R/C community yet or do they get lumped in still?
LaserSteve:
In the plan as mentioned, general RC using home made gear is as difficult paperwork wise as building a real experimental aircraft and have to be flown at a designated flying field sanctioned by a community organization and approved by FAA. This field, called a FRIA, will be designated air space, temporary, and only active for a year or two until all UAS are replaced by type approved commercial models with the data transmission pre-installed . NO new FRIAs will be allowed after the first year and FRIAs can't move, but the administration may end them all permanently at ANY time. Grandpa's 0.60 Gas Powered RC biplane he willed you becomes a museum piece. Model kits with 50% commercial content can be built but must have approved electronics. No flying in your back yard without the license, registration, type approved craft and the full permissive action link, no engine start without electronic approval from the system. Estimated FAA approval process for a home built is 50 pages and two hundred fifty hours of work, using the estimate prepared for the Office of Management and Budget by the FAA. (All civilian facing government paperwork and forms must be approved by OMB, which is the executive branch's internal watchdog)
Getting approval for a mom and pop business to make UAS/Models will be nearly impossible without a LOT of Money.
NOTHING CAN START ENGINES WITHOUT ELECTRONIC APPROVAL EXCEPT FOR THE 255 gram toy class. If you can't get continual cellular internet access your screwed. Which makes large portions of the US unflyable.
FAA assumes no model lasts longer then three years, and they cant be rebuilt, so everyone will be have to happy with commercial, type approved drones flown in a highly restricted manner with NO FPV, No Foamies built in a day and flown that evening. FAA seems to think nobody builds or repairs anything themselves.
You can buy something under 255 grams as a toy at big box mart.
Canada made it easy for now, the Minister for Transport granted a long term, temporary Exemption to Members of the Model Aeronautics Association of Canada under some tight, but acceptable, rules. Only for "TMA", traditional model aircraft flying, line of sight, manual, traditional RC with no camera, no Internal guidance or stabilization, not capable of flying autonomously to waypoints, or IMU.
The advisory board for the US strongly suggested a carve out for small TMA under 400 foot altitude flying Line of Sight no more then 400 feet from the operator with no camera and no gyro, IMU or GPS waypoint capability, but the FAA bluntly nixed it in the NPRM, creating the FRIA instead.
400 Foot horizontal limit comes from Law Enforcement, it is their best guess estimate how far they can associate an operator with a craft visually.
There are two levels of Drone, one that will be damn hard to get and a lesser performing common model.
Steve
Steve
beanflying:
So the 2nd R/C Diesel (Playboy Cabin old timer) powered aircraft I built about 30 years ago :rant: Seriously they have NFI about the average Aeromodeler. Most of my 30+ fleet of aircraft and helis are well over 5 years old and all have R/C gear in them with only the light weight indoor or DLG's running 2.4Gig the rest is on the Aussie 36Meg band. Where was the AMA in this discussion and why did they not have a seat at the table?
As someone who flies Gliders a lot and in particular ridge soaring I don't fly at registered airfields so clearly that is ignored completely in the proposed regs?
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