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Comment by tomswartz07 | Hacker News Reader

The article does not link to the FAA's website.

Here's the link to the actual FAA page: https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/

It appears that registration opens on 21 Dec, 2015. Further, if registration is done before January 20, 2016 the $5 registration fee will be refunded.

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So now, model airplane hobbyists who've been doing the same thing for decades can be penalized with "fines of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years," if they don't realize they have to register their balsa wood RC airplanes.

Not just register, but register every single one of them.

I've got 4 or 5 rc gliders in my garage and half a dozen or more kits or collections of parts to build more, as well as 5 quad copters that'd all fall under these rules.

At the height of my slope combat phase, I was probably averaging building 2 or 3 new slope soaring gliders every weekend. And I had friends who were _way_ more prolific than I was.

I wonder just how scalable their new "drone registry" is? It's easy enough to keep track of 747s and A380s, but whatever system they use for that was unlikely to be designed/specced for "webscale" type growth (and given their "$5 is the same price as we charge airliners!" comment, I wouldn't bet against this being exactly the same system/database)

It's worth noting that you register once and then mark each aircraft with your registration number[0]. You don't need to register each aircraft.

0: https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/faqs/#use

Rules change. That's why you have organizations like the AMA, who can educate their members. (And you need to be an AMA member to use many of the model aircraft fields, anyway.)

And even ignoring that, this topic has been on the national news quite a bit recently.

Knowing model airplane enthusiasts, I bet getting a real registration number that they can put on their models will only add to the fun of making the model as realistic as possible.

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