Here is the difference in our thinking, and why I believe you will not understand the rationale of the DOD, SS, and hence the FAA if you fixate on the FPV aspect as being the discriminator for regulation:
1. The video aspect made flying cool again to youth who grew up with video, camera phones and utube. They are not inherently aviation minded--that is just the vehicle to an new and evolving aspect of digital video. But don't confuse this feature that attracts nearly all of the participants as being the enabler.
2. The ability to fly an inherently unstable vehicle without autopilot/stabilization automatically limits you to line of sight operations. Think R/C helicopter with just rate gyros. You are not going to fly it beyond line of sight.
3. What makes the platform a serious issue for abuse and therefore regulation is the ability to preprogram flight paths and to park it exactly on lat/long/alt numbers. And to do it with very little pilot knowledge or skill as compared to actually flying an airplane or certainly a helicopter. Once you have this autonomous capability, now you can missionize it. Put on a camera. Cameras. Put on anything within the weight lifting capability. Now imagine that you have no camera at all, and it is not FPV. You can still "park" one in a critical piece of airspace and it becomes a threat--with no camera onboard. So FPV alone is not a sufficient criteria for discriminating a threat vehicle. Unless you comprehend this, you will not understand the discussion within DOD, SS, and the FAA.
This is not something that "just showed up." I worked for a company that was heavily involved in UAV development and avionics. I started on my first UAV project in 1995. We were actually a named co-winner of the Collier Trophy for the first fully autonomous UAV for the DOD. The same principles apply to the quads current being purchased as consumer items. These would be considered a tactical capability, rather than a strategic one, but potentially highly effective for a lot of missions. Range and duration is their biggest limitation.
The video attached, while I agree with much of the sentiment, has numerous logical flaws that are based on what he thinks the testimony in the hearing is about--but was not what I derived from the discussion. This isn't just about the types of problems we have already experienced. It is also about the threat of what is now possible. Today, and with other developments in the near future. (Part of the EMI discussion.) And in the name of fun and new challenges, the Quad Community keeps raising the bar on the level of concern. For example, I just read about how excited they were to perform a record attempt to see how many they could put up all at once. In the DOD, they call this a swarming threat.... The regulators may discover that the only prevention here would be to disallow, via the FCC, the 2.4GHz frequency hopping capability, as an example. Not a place the hobby wants to go, but we are clearly not helping ourselves with our own actions.
I believe that some in the government get the benign nature of control line flying. I had the serious/comical situation where a control line racing contest was going to be cancelled because the Parks department was shutting down the field due to a last minute TFR for VIP movement around LAX. I made some phone calls, including one to the FAA and one to the AMA. I explained that the planes were tethered, and could not go higher than 70 feet. That there was no radio control, it was all manual connections, hooked to your arm. Ultimately, the Secret Service called the Parks and Rec department and told them to go ahead and hold the contest. I got a frantic call from the lady from Parks and Rec who was obviously flustered by the call from the Secret Service: she told me that we had to hold the races--the CIA had called her and told her we had to.
Topic: FAA registration (Read 3772 times)