FAA's Rule for Small Unmanned Aircraft Released

[Derek]

Perhaps I'm just tired because I worked last night and then watched this video....but I don't understand what's being said. I heard "the new rule" mentioned quite a bit but I guess I didn't hear anything about "what" the "new rule" states. Can someone clarify this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaONsheXj1g

[pvolcko]

I haven't watched the video yet, but based on their press release earlier in the week the new stuff is focused on commercial uses of sUAS. From small time occasional for hire shots of some properties, to contractors and home inspectors using them day to day, to farmers doing crop inspections or planning, to professional level advertisement and movie making. They simplified the process to get a remote pilot certificate. You no longer need to have an actual full scale pilot license or go through ridiculous amounts of ground school. FAA will be putting a certification test in place. It isn't made up yet, no word on how available testing facilities and times will be or cost, but the expectation is that this will be available throughout the US at FAA centers and certified facilities/providers, will be low time and money investment, etc. Same flight rules as before: no flying over people, maintain visual line of sight (can use a 2nd pilot with flight control override to maintain line of sight if primary is using FPV), etc. Another big change: no longer need to maintain rigorous flight logs and maintenance records. Pre-flight safety checks are all that are required now. If there is a property damage incident in excess of $500 or a personal injury of a "serious" nature, then the incident must be reported to the FAA.

Again, this is all for commercial uses of sUAS from .5-55lbs. Anything over that weight requires FAA waivers. If you want to violate the basic safety protocols as part of a flight, you must and will likely be approved an FAA waiver assuming safety of people is well accounted for.

On the hobby side of things: Not a whole lot new, except that apparenly they intend to codify the Special Rule for Model Aircraft from the 2012 FAA reauthorization bill into FAA regulation part something or other. What that means isn't entirely clear to me yet. Given that they jumped through legal interpretive hoops to get the sUAS hobbyist registration database put into place, claiming it was entirely allowed under that special rule from 2012's bill, despite that law saying the FAA could not promulgate new regulations on hobby model flying... I suspect it means nothing for us in a practical sense. However, if may well lead to a court case we can win since up until this point the FAA hadn't actually written any new regs, they were just doing this stuff willy nilly based on intepretation of existing law and prior regulations already on the books. Now that they're writing regs it could well lead to a finding of a clear violation of the 2012 law and get the FAA slapped down in court. Wishful thinking, but a libertarian minded rc heli and plane pilot can dream...

[murankar]

For the hobby all we "HAVE to do" is register with the AMA and the FAA web site. Then obey those community based organization rules about flying our models. Unfortunatly we still have to register with the FAA in those cases where the aircraft is at weight. Outside of that not much else has changed on our side of things.

RCHN June 20th episode covers this in overview type detail.