Ethical question: are DJI the good guys here working within the rules set out of the FAA, or are they running afoul of the spirit but staying within the letter?
This is true even in things as routine daily chit-chat and conversation. Think about how often tacitly express your opinion through the way you frame a discussion and how often those environmental cues bias other parties to respond in particular ways. Then, consider how often marketers, salespeople, and other manipulators intentionally frame interactions to provoke a specific biased response.
The light touch and the small nudge are grossly undervalued.
This is (part of) the reason people spend hours debating seemingly mundane aspects of rules & regs, legislation, corporate bylaws, etc. Eventually someone will have a [dis]incentive and try to get around something.
Or the intensity of enforcement varies in the first place.
And chances are you’re doing something else illegal anyway.
Or can be followed until you do.
And if you don’t, there’s always the routine traffic stop.
someone has to decide which cases to bring, unless you fund the police and prosecutors so they can bring every plausible case, which sounds like a strictly worse universe to live in. Is this discretion abused? Yes, all the time. But bringing every case seems more like a police state than a free society.
Testing the boundaries of murder and rape laws is, of course, a different matter.
The part 107 commercial UAS exam that already exists requires a lot of studying and costs $150 to take, and this falls on the easy end of your typical FAA exam.
DJI is hedging that the recreational flyer test is going to be a massive barrier for recreational pilots, which is why they're pushing a <250g UAS into the market.
If you use the heavy battery you go over 249g I’m also not sure if their flight stats were measured with the heavy one or the light one I’ll bet that they are with the 100g battery.
This means that under most conditions you’ll likely have 8-10min of flight time with the light battery since the advertised max flight time is often 30-50% over real world scenarios with these drones.
But for toy drones, the 50g battery is fine. Especially since that pack lets you carry 3 of them. Plus I'm sure the next generation will be lighter still with still greater flight time. And the generation after that. Etc.
Future seems pretty bright for these "family pictures" type drones. But they aren't competitive with the big boys for certain use cases right now.
Battery technology is maxed out currently, plastics and composites aren’t going to change much...
Not much weight shedding to be done here my bet is that they’ll add more collision sensors as they become cheaper but not much else they can do.
They shouldn’t add any weight and you’ll offset their weight with the removal of the material from the chassis.
As for the flight characteristics I’m pretty sure they did everything with the heavier battery you go from 18W to 8W in exchange for losing 50g which is only 16% reduction in weight form 299 to 249.
If anything the loophole battery would perform considerably worse given the power output of the cell compared to the full one.
It also looks like the S mode isn’t available for the smaller battery I have a feeling that once reviews will start popping out the FAA approved config will be called gimp mode.
I'm really not sure; and I could see arguments either way.
I see 249g/199g (JP) for takeoff weight in the specs, which suggests to me that with the 100g battery it's 249g grams, and with the 50g battery it's 199g (presumably in Japan, which seems to be a 200g limit where others are 250g).
Go on the M4 though and 10 over is too slow for many!
So no, I don't think DJI are being "bad guys" by kissing up to the limit because the rules were made by people who do think things through very thoroughly.
Edit: This wasn't posted as a judgement, it's just an observation of a trend.