Give a bureaucrat an inch and he’ll make a regulation that will prevent you from giving it to him without forms in triplicate.

According to my best reading of a notice the FAA announced on Monday, things like the US $154 Husban X4 quadcopter are no longer toys—they are true drone aircraft in the FAA’s eyes and cannot be flown without a certificate of authorization or special airworthiness certificate.

Up to now, the FAA has been distinguishing model aircraft from small drones (or small unmanned aerial systems, to use the FAA’s preferred terminology) according to whether they are flown for recreation or for commercial purposes. If you want to fly a 20-kilogram, turbine-powered radio-controlled model airplane, go right ahead, so long as you only do it as a hobby. Fly a 2-kilogram electric foamy for compensation, and you’re breaking the rules against commercial drone use, though. That was the basic argument the FAA had made against Raphael Pirker, who was issued with a $10,000 fine for flying a model airplane for hire in 2011.

On the other hand, maybe they want to prevent people from having “drones” that can intercept government drones spying on us. Or that can spy on them.



  1. BubbaMustafa says:

    Won’t stop me. Got the hubsan and a DJI Phantom. Looking for a full autonomous build.

  2. RE@DER says:

    Rant and rave. Tear up papers, bury the office copier. Be a pain in the neck….tompeters.com/writing/books/
    by Tom Peters – In Thriving on Chaos, Tom declares that everything known “for sure” about management 15 years earlier is being challenged, and he forecasts (correctly) that …Cuba is going to allow people to operate small toy repair shops. It’s that or make toys and they’ll never permit that. Cap pistols will be regulated! Take abandoned places like Detroit and create drone zones to go along with free speech zones. The whole country used to be a free speech zone. It was a free travel zone too.

  3. RE@DER says:

    “If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.”
    ― Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution
    It’s a robot revolution and they are flying. If the drone only flies a foot off the ground it is technically not in airspace. Fly low and slow like a C-130. We could use the closed Interstate in Delaware with drones.

  4. RE@DER says:

    by Betts, Forest Richard / Neel, Johnny.

    Get the ringtone
    Play Video
    Share
    Correct
    Print

    Ain’t that low down, low down, dirty, mean
    The way you’ve been treatin’ me, beats all I’ve ever seen

    I loaned you my brand new car, said you was goin’ for a Sunday drive
    Yeah, here it is now, four days later, I don’t know if you’re dead or alive
    I got on the telephone this mornin’, put the word out on the street
    And I heard you was down in Memphis, with a big man in the driver’s seat

    Ain’t that low down, low down, dirty, mean
    Ain’t that low down, low down, dirty, mean
    Oh, the way you’ve been treatin’ me, beats all I’ve ever seen

  5. RE@DER says:

    We were welders and magic knitters http://plaidstallions.com/cp/cp4.html I have the bar vanity case. Holds two fifths and stainless steel cups. Drink on the run. Don’t drink and drive. Drink and fly.

  6. bobbo, the pragmatic existential evangelical anti-theist and junior culture critic says:

    I think the regulation is “misguided.” Does make me wonder what they are trying to control. If I can do “EVERYTHING” as a hobby, they aren’t controlling any given liability/secret/situation. If they regulate being paid for the activity then they are simply restricting capitalism.

    Its a bit of a puzzle.

    Until now, aircraft have been controlled by number of engines, weight and so forth: characteristics of the craft. NOT of the operator……hmmm….. “commercial aviation”…. controlled by the business entity too.

    Heh, heh…. can a corporation have a hobby?

    • RE@DER says:

      “It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”
      ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

      “The book states that the “First World Nations” and in particular the United States have entered in a Post-capitalism system of production where the capital is no longer present because it doesn’t belongs to one person or family but to a series of organizations such as insurance companies, banks, etc. Because of this, normal citizens become virtually owners of the great American enterprises, being owners of the capital, therefore, not destroying but overcoming the capitalism. The book foresees that the post-capitalist society will become a society of organizations where every organization will be highly specialized in its particular field.”

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Capitalist_Society

      Gravity can be overcome, but the paperwork is… plus theres now less of it. Certification will require more of the thinking that’s bankrupted corporations. All the people who redirected your funding to Russia now want paid for making your aero fun legal. Bureaucrats! They closed down the space shuttles, the Interstates and other forms of safe transportation. Welcome aboard the USG Crazy Train. Get Hobo Licenses. We bankrupted the kids. Send more paperwork because the trackwork is falling apart. All the funds went to Iraq for democracy. How many hospitals will close down with the new healthcare system? If we turn the empty airport into a hospital what will the empty hospital be used for? More government offices. Maybe we can bank by aircraft. Charge people to fly money somewhere safe. They reserve the right to go through your safe and sock drawer and take what they find. That can be used to help fund the bankrupt airports. We can fund another month in Iraq with extra taxes on shopping malls and then sell them for sheriffs funds. Gas is going up and less traffic at the malls. Empty malls can be car lots. What will the empty car lots be? Free clinics. Filling stations where they collect your dental work cause you can’t afford dental work.

      • Tim says:

        “”If we turn the empty airport into a hospital what will the empty hospital be used for?

        A heliport, I’m guessing.

  7. dusanmal says:

    “Give a bureaucrat an inch and he’ll make a regulation that will prevent you…” – yet the same people who complain elect bureaucrats who promise to regulate anything and everything to death… Schizo-Progressives. No bureaucrats will stop only at your pet issues. Eventually they’ll come for you and than you’ll see that it is too late.

    • RE@DER says:

      I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect.
      “Modern Man”
      Drones will make you Post-Modern.

      • gelatinous turnkey says:

        I’m a modem man, a man for the modalennium, dock and border and road-free; it’s the only transportation for me. A compartmentalized malfunctional postmenstral decomposeructionist … bla bla bla

        Planes trains and automobiles, your buttcheeks still feel like two analtomically correct pillows behind any wheel {excluding boats}…

  8. AdmFubar says:

    has nuttin’ to do with gubberment… gubberment are just “tools” used by industry..
    check here…
    http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/06/27/3454235/drones-factory-farms/

    • RE@DER says:

      All the F-15’s are heading for partners in Egypt and Iraq because we have superior new F-35’s. We can partner with Iran and give them more advanced jets to help secure the region. If we give Syria our submarines they won’t need chemical weapons. If we give all our space machines to Russia they’ll send us a Christmas card. China can operate all our aircraft carriers and cut the budget. Mexico can have all our choppers and protect our southern border. Cuba can run the prisons and help expand them!

  9. Go Fly a Kite! says:

    I’m not so sure SOME regulation might not be in order here. Just consider how hard it would be to strap a small bomb like a hand grenade to one of these things and then go “hovering” around somewhere like an airport or a joint session of Congress. Want to talk about “buffer zones”?!

    Frankly, given the knee jerk reactions that American society is prone to, I’m surprised that there’s not an outright ban on these things.

  10. RE@DER says:

    “Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.”
    ― Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War
    What they didn’t cast away has been frittered away in an effort to create monumental debt. We dont even have money to maintain the old war memorials and cant afford new ones. Drones increase manueverability which decreases slaughter and more slaughter requires more bureaucracy. With another trillion in losses we can expand operations. Underwater drones are going to expand faster than airborne drones. The oceans are richer than the skies. Hunt for shipwrecks and gold. Who made the filling for the pie in the sky?

  11. RE@DER says:

    I don’t think there is anything the administration can do. If the administration tries to prevent the old industries from restructuring themselves around knowledge, then the work will just be shifted offshore. It’s that simple. We have gone quite a ways along the restructuring road. In 1980, US Steel employed 120,000 people in steel making. Now it turns out the same tonnage with 20,000 workers.

    This shift will be a particular problem in this country because in the last forty years the one way a black could rapidly rise to a middle- class or upper-class income was by working on the assembly line. So it aggravates racism, already our worst problem.
    http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker.html?pg=2&topic=

    The 20,000 workers are being eliminated by robotics. We are being erased. So is racism, so that’s one less problem. Our worst problem is solved. With nothing better to do we are staying busy invading other places. The upper class is busy converting the middle class into the lower class. All that’s growing is the computer steal industry. Debt’s going up and people are going down.

  12. RE@DER says:

    “Organizations as a Source of Instability”

    S: In your book, _The Post Industrial Society_, you state: “Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work – on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself – it must be organized for constant change. It must be organized for innovation.”

    Hardly a day goes by that we do not read of thousands of jobs being cut somewhere in the industrialized world. Factories, offices, department stores, military bases are closing all over the world. Abandoning people and products is the necessary hand-maiden of organizational survival.
    http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker.html?pg=3&topic=

    Empty Main Street is easy to repurpose. Empty cubicle farms with distribution centers? You might as well have an empty military base. Now we have an empty treasury and debt. Certified organic is growing because nobody wants GMO and more GM recalls. With more cubicles and fewer farms food is going to be a problem. That’s a worse problem than racism? Now we have mass starvation, no hate though. All the produce can come from Mexico. What will the US grow? More managers to manage decline. You have a future as a bureaucrat.

  13. RE@DER says:

    I have worked with musician Peter Gabriel on several projects. At a workshop we were holding for AT&T he was asked, “How do you deal with piracy of your albums?” Gabriel said, “Oh, I treat it as free advertising. I follow it with a rock concert. When they steal my albums in Indonesia, I go there and I perform.”
    http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker.html?pg=5&topic=
    If this free advertising model takes off…lots of the big data operations that charge for ads are going to fold. All you can do is keep performing. Pioneering don’t pay. Pirating does what marketing used to do without research.

    I didn’t rob you…it was the robot! Skynet is self-aware and all our music is now in the airspace.

  14. RE@DER says:

    D: For the first time the Japanese are not willing to pay for new technology. They are not buying the new Sony MiniDisc CD players. It’s wonderful technology but it’s no different from my old player. When you see that happening, when people begin to ask for product differentiation, the boom period is over. From then on you have to work to earn your living. And that’s hard.
    http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/drucker.html?pg=5&topic=

    Life’s hard. Robots make life easier.

    Oscar: You must have the wrong office, you want the purchasing office, Mr. Le Duc.
    Le Duc: We have energy to sell, Mr. Goldman.
    Oscar: I see, but you don’t eh –
    Le Duc: Cheap, non-polluting, inexhaustible supply. Energy that is capable of powering a… portable laser projector, Mr. Goldman. (Le Duc now has Oscar’s undivided attention)
    Expensive, polluting and exhaustible didn’t pan out now.

  15. RE@DER says:

    Steve: Here you are, my lady, the pumpkin ride is over.
    Audrey: Oh, gee and I didn’t even get to keep my glass slippers. Oh well, thanks for the ride.
    Steve: I just wanted to make sure you didn’t run away for a wicked life on the stage. Make sure you got back on the groove.
    Audrey: Yeah, back in the groove…
    http://bionic.wikia.com/wiki/Hocus-Pocus
    Groovy..if they aren’t regulating the pumpkin catapults why regulate these things? http://instructables.com/id/Portable-pumpkin-catapult/

  16. RE@DER says:

    Steve: All right, then you know how much I earn. You can tell the OSI I’m sick of working for a government that doesn’t appreciate their scientists. I’m tired of being paid less than some teenager who sings out of tune. Most of all tell them I’m sorry that you’re a spy.

    The teenager wasn’t pirated. Sorry you had to pay for ads. I’m sorry that you’re a pirate. 1900 Paris Olympics featured pool, checkers and fishing. Chess should be an Olympic competition.

  17. GGnarl says:

    Did anyone read the linked info? This article is Linkbait. All they say is that drones are RC aircraft, which cant be flown for commercial purposes (like making videos).

    All this energy and no one actually read the FAA article. Adam would be sad.


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