It is now legal for US firms to start using drones in a limited manner | Hacker News Reader

It is now legal for US firms to start using drones in a limited manner

washingtonpost.com

72 pointsLukeHack29 comments

Now companies can start legally innovating in a way they should have been able to do for the last few years.

There's risk to drones - and companies can buy insurance to cover themselves. If they make a mistake, don't have insurance, and cause harm, they can be sued.

I wonder how long before the black market of remote drone operations companies shows up. Then the FAA will demand more regulation.

> they can be sued

This only works in a world when you assume that the person in question has

1) Assets sufficient to cover the cost of their negligence.

2) Will not die to avoid liability.

Given that the liability for aerospace accidents can be quite high and that many people can choose to die without loss of human life, these assumptions aren't very sturdy.

This is not a reason to restrict drones. This is yet another reason to reform the concept of companies as legal persons that human persons can use to absolve themselves from responsibility.

If someone made a bad choice, hurt someone, and was sued and had all of their assets taken from them, that would be a great motivation for everyone else to get insurance.

Insurance companies, being eager to not pay out, would adjust their premiums based on the riskiness of the drone driver.

Carrying heavy payloads above people? If you mess up, the insurance company could pay out many millions. Your costs go up accordingly.

Carrying a camera above fields for crop imagery? Almost no insurance risk, tiny premiums.

There's no way for _regulation_ to cover the massive potential drone market without relying entirely upon a Procrustian Bed [0] form of "responding to the market".

[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/procrustean-bed

Oh, and re: #2, the person killing themselves to avoid liability - I doubt they'd be that swayed by regulation in the first place. They've got other problems than a lack of insurance.

I think the "people" killing themselves are meant to be corporations.

Now we all understand understand point 2 (companies are legal persons which can be dissolved easily absolving smart company owners of responsibility) how much of the rest of this post should be reconsidered/retracted?

Regarding line of sight. I wonder if companies could just erect a pilot tower (in a relatively flat region). I know where I live 40 feet of height would give a pilot visibility to millions of homes because it's pretty flat. Maybe they need binoculars to see the drone when it was a certain distance away, but maybe that's within regs?

The FAA has said no binoculars: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...

  > (for example, no binoculars)

That's not to say it will never happen: Companies can apply for special testing waivers from the FAA that allow them to go farther than what the rules permit. And those are generally approved on a case-by-case basis. The FAA is also running an experimental program called Pathfinder that's looking at how companies like CNN and others can fly drones over people (for example, for newsgathering purposes) and in beyond-line-of-sight operations.

The FAA has granted 76 of these waivers. Of those, 72 had to do with flying at night, which is still prohibited under the official regulations.

my friend works at a startup that will likely be one of the first flying drones commercially outside of line of sight :)

http://media.precisionhawk.com/topic/faa-grants-precisionhaw...

To be fair, people have been operating drones commercially outside of line of sight for years now (many of them even legally) using FAA exemptions. There's a number of YouTube videos which show this occurring (look for a FAA exemption ID to be included in the video or description).

Stay up to date!

https://www.faasafety.gov/search/default.aspx?keywords=drone...

https://www.faasafety.gov/search/Default.aspx?keywords=suas

Should the title be amended to indicate that this is referring to the USA? I appreciate that the article is in the Washington Post, but it would be nice to be able to get a more accurate summary straight-up.

OK, we've updated the title.

Why was the title changed to include "for firms"? Do we have some British editors here? Strange since the FAA ruling only applies to the US, where we'd call them "businesses"

From the article:

> On Monday, an important set of federal drone rules finally took effect across the country — making it possible for firms to start using drones in a limited manner.

Clickbait title.

> The drones can be flown only during the day and can't be flown over people who aren't somehow related to the flight. They can fly only up to an altitude of 400 feet, a speed of up to 100 miles per hour and they have to stay within visual contact of the operator.

In other words, it's not legal to do any kind of comercially interesting drone flights

I was about to comment that: how exactly is this useful? In New York, there's not a lot of places you could fly that aren't over a person unrelated to flight?

I've read a lot of articles about farmers using drones to remotely view their fields, with stuff like thermal cameras so they know what needs to be watered. Can't immediately think of any other common uses, but people are creative. And as the article says, the rules should loosen a little by the end of the year.

Search and Rescue, cinematography (which includes things like filming flybys of houses for realtors, in addition to making films), remote mapping (including mapping out fires), agriculture (frequently using IR and other camera technologies), delivering small payloads to remote locations (such as tools or materials to smokejumpers or mountain climbers), remote inspection...

Think of anything we use a helicopter for now, and drones will probably help cheaply supplant those uses wherever possible.

I wonder if "they are gonna be in the movie that this drone is taking" is enough for "somehow related to the flight" ;)

With exemptions being offered by the FAA to those who need to operate outside any of those restrictions.

Just like it always has been. You could get an exemption and fly a drone commercially before this was signed into law as well. All you had to do is write to the FAA and ask for an exemption, with an explanation of why you needed it and how you'd do it safely.

If that's the case and the FAA can overrule laws prohibiting it, then why bother changing the law at all? In fact, doing a ctrl+f for "law" right now in that article, it's not in there, it only mentions "rules". I'm becoming more confused the more I read.

Because now you don't need an exemption to monetize your videos of flying a drone up on YouTube. Or to film the outside of a home on contract with a realtor trying to sell that home. Or make a commercial movie/TV show.

Exemptions take time to get, and frequently can cost you fees to get a properly written request (I was quoted $1500). For a company wanting to do more, it's well worth it, but this lets anybody get started.

Oh right, I hadn't considered that there might be a cost for getting the exemption.

It's the worst kind of work. Time consuming, dull and repetitive, but requiring skilled site-specific research every time so you can't just mail in the same package every time. Awful. It's very important that companies are super careful about safety, so it's not pointless. But it is a non-trivial cost of doing business that currently rules out lots of low-cost applications.

It's a real challenge to get the balance right between safety, privacy and freedom to make new applications. Very interesting to watch it develop.

The FAA is making changes to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). They do not have the power to change the United States Code (USC), which is the collection of what we commonly call "laws". However, the CFR has the force of law without actually being the law, because the actual law gives the FAA the authority to write regulations pertaining to aviation, as well as providing for consequences for people who violate those regulations.

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks.

really, any kind?

A lot of things are still commercially interesting, even if you can't do them everywhere. (Aerial photography or movie productions, inspection work (agriculture, powerlines), ...)

While they say "not over", the article doesn't mention any distance requirements.

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