Submitted by Roger O'Neill, Overhead Intelligence.
In early 2025, the FAA is anticipated to release a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for Part 108, aimed at regulating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone operations. This landmark step could revolutionize drone operations in the U.S., offering greater airspace access to commercial drone operators while maintaining safety for current airspace users. Below are proposed rule changes to address challenges in Remote ID requirements, right-of-way laws, and operational risk management, ensuring a balanced integration of drones into the National Airspace System (NAS).
Many of the arguments are equally valid if a drone ban is the goal. Since the aircraft and operator cannot be identified one should not expect compliance with rules by many parties. Arguing that corporations should have priority over “hobbyist” will certainly reduce the number of users and supporters of drones.
Objection, Your Honor! This proposal hands drones a free pass while grounding legacy aircraft with extra red tape. It clears the skies for drones and dumps the compliance load squarely on the shoulders of manned aircraft operators, especially the legacy crowd.
Regs are for safety of flight, not commercial expediency. Implied in that safety of flight is a human onboard, if no onboard human life at risk then priority is not there. An exception would be if a TFR is established for a specific mission/time where a UAS has a lifesaving mission.
“Nobody is in charge” is not an excuse or confidence building statement. Some living breathing PIC must be accountable and responsive…regardless of command/control logistics or corporate liability shielding.
Winning the trust war vs battle…right or wrong, things like trolling social security number indexed databases and using ADS-B out to charge for services are individual battles won, but remain as factors in how much trust is left to draw upon.
“The part needed to fix a CL-415 water bomber damaged in a drone strike in Los Angeles on Thursday was on its way to L.A. on Friday.” from AV Web today says it all. If you want unpiloted commercial operations in the National Airspace, be prepared to pay for the safety of others. Factor it into your business plan. The only regulation I need to see is one that requires an inaccessible/non-removeable kill switch on all drones that activates automatically if within a quarter mile of any aircraft with humans onboard.
There are several valid and perfectly legal reasons for operating “hobbyist” and commercial aircraft off-airport below 500ft including seaplane ops, sightseeing off an island or volcano, dirt of grass strips, gravel bars in the case of back-country ops, snow and ice ski plane ops. And there are perfectly valid reasons for “fear of being tracked” including history of using ADSB for revenue generation and enforcement of questionable “power-grabs” such as this one. To the contrary, you are proposing that faceless, nameless non-operators have ROW to operate these “commercial” drones anywhere with complete immunity. Why not restrict BLOS drone operations to certain “drone airways” and let them do their thing in the middle of the night so they dont encroach on our freedom to fly without fear of being whacked by a drone. Another thing it may not be possible for a manned aircraft to see and avoid a drone as the drones are usually smaller and more maneuverable.
Part 107 drones must always give way to manned aircraft because they are so difficult to see. Manned aircraft that are more maneuverable already have to give way to less maneuverable aircraft, and drones are always going to be more maneuverable than any manned aircraft (that’s just physics due to their lower mass), so they should follow the same precedent.
I could not possibly be more opposed to this for several reasons.
There are a lot more legal ways to fly below 500 feet AGL than you seem to realize, maybe you live in the middle of a city and just don’t see all the space that some of us have to fly in.
You are dumping an expensive requirement on the least well financed of all our operators to allow them to not get killed by robots.
You are giving unmanned aircraft right-of-way over manned aircraft. This should NEVER EVER happen unless it is inside a TFR and that needs to be rare, something like a rocket launch or forest fire.
For YEARS I have been reading about how much better drones and automated aircraft will be at see-and-avoid than a manned aircraft and now all of a sudden that isn’t doable, too bad, out of our way.
You are not realizing the extent of the problem. $1,000 more or less will get you a drone that might get 5-10 miles or more from the operator and a few have 5G modules that will get them as far as the batteries last. These are flying right now BVLOS all over the place and this is only going to get worse.Many of the “pilots” of these things have no idea at all about anything to do with rules and FARs of any kind and the rest don’t care, it is all for the clicks and subscriptions to their social media.
Slightly tongue-in-cheek: One could be cynical, but not necessarily incorrect, and state that Part 103 and all the other flavors of GA are a giant, money-sucking PITA to politicians, authorities, and air-gods with a lot of liquidity and a lot of friends. The promise of smaller-government in the future brings with it the potential for simplified, easy-to-enforce rules. Simplified and enforceable rules are often heavy-handed and arbitrary, and favor those wealthy enough to write them. Good luck to anyone selfish enough to aviate soley for self-actualization, and not for the benefit of corporations and billionaires.
Speaking as a helicopter owner/pilot, this could be a very complex issue. But it really all boils down to accountability, which is quite simple: the Right to Life. Unless and until all drone operations in the NAS are conducted by a human with some “skin in the game”, they should be severely illegal, as in Class A felony.
Any aerial vehicle carrying “ugly bags of mostly saltwater” has a fundamental right-of-life (and thus -way) over all other aerial devices. Otherwise how, exactly, does a drone differ from a very large remote-controlled bullet?
I’d be willing to accept exceptions as long as every drone controller could detect that it had lost contact with its drone, and would instantly trigger a bolus of C4 in the controller.
In the case of autonomous drone swarms, some human must be designated to wear a vest containing a bolus for each drone aloft.
It’s all about having “skin in the game”. Until drone operators ante-up, they should be banned above 100’ agl.
The rapid growth of drone delivery services, like Wing and Walmart assumed to be serving 60,000 households in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is adding more pressure to an already overloaded air traffic control (ATC) system. Walmart’s drone program isn’t going so well right now, and ATC is still struggling with outdated equipment and too few staff, making it hard to handle the current air traffic. Adding more drones to the mix will only make things worse, increasing the risks of mid-air collisions, disrupting flights for manned aircraft, and delaying emergency services due to crowded airspace.
Pro-drone groups pushing to quickly integrate drones into shared airspace without fixing these issues could end with reckless, irresponsible, costly, and dangerous programs. A better plan would be to require drones to have advanced anticollision systems and tracking technology, making them pay their share and reducing the burden on ATC. Without these precautions, rushing drone integration while encroaching airspace could lead to serious safety risks and hurt the long-term development of drone technology.
A quick preview of the future will be provided by the Presidential Inauguration TFR for the DC SFRA/FRZ in a week. The number and type of flight ops will be severely restricted, as is appropriate, and to which we have become accustomed.
Buried at the bottom of the NOTAM is the following laundry list:
Prohibited Operations ANYWHERE within the SFRA/FRZ:
Model Aircraft, Unmanned Aircraft (UAS), Aerobatic Maneuvers, Glider Operations, Parachute Operations, Ultralights, Lighter than Air/Balloon/Moored Balloon, Agricultural/Crop Dusting/Spraying, Animal Population Control, Banner Towing, Utility/Pipeline Patrols, Aircraft/Helicopters operating from a ship or private/corporate yacht, Model Rockets, or Maintenance Flights. Flight Training/Practice Approaches are prohibited."
Now, with the unlikely exception of “Flight Training/Practice Approaches” what type of operation do you suppose is the most frequent inside the SFAR?
Follow up question: What percentage of UAS operators get and read, much less abide by, NOTAMs?
Last question: How long will it take for drone footage of the Inauguration to show up on the net?
Good point. The reliance on blanket restrictions during events like the Presidential Inauguration is a clear sign that current ATC safeguards are not adequate to address the growing complexity of modern airspace. This highlights the urgency of modernizing ATC systems, developing robust UTM frameworks, and addressing staffing shortages to ensure safe and efficient airspace management in the future.
Populating the airspace with drones at this time, without addressing these fundamental shortcomings, is like putting the cart before the horse. Drones must be required to have effective—not superficial or inadequate—ID and anti-collision systems. Anything less compromises safety, increases the risk of airspace conflicts, and undermines public trust in both drone technology and aviation as a whole.
Ah, one more thing. The proposal broadly paints GA operators below 500 feet AGL as largely noncompliant, using this as a rationale to prioritize compliant drones. By emphasizing noncompliance, particularly among “hobbyists,” it undermines the significant and legitimate use cases for low-altitude GA operations, such as training flights, sightseeing, crop-dusters, and humanitarian missions.
It boils down to effecting “action at a distance”, RO. There is a reason that shooting a guy with a gun is punished more severely than punching him in the head. Both could result in death or serious injury, but only one of them is the result of an “action at a distance”, severely tilting the balance of power and thus the onus.
If you, even unintentionally, flew your RC aircraft into a crowd causing a fatal injury, you should be held liable. Worse case, it’s negligent homicide, but you are responsible. If that is the case at 5’ agl, why should it be less so if it happens at 500 feet?
If your RC aircraft (which is invisible to me when closing at 50kts) hits me aloft, it is entirely possible that my helicopter will be uncontrollable, and my widow will be suing you big time. We both have the “see and avoid” onus, except that you are invisible and operating at a distance. You have absolutely no skin in the game. So yes, that does sound pretty reasonable to me.
And surely you know that the penalty for a felony has a wide range of punishments, from Life to a slap on the wrist. I know of a guy who was convicted of 34 of them, and it won’t affect him at all …
While I don’t agree with aviatrexx’s overall premise, I read that to mean that the operator of the drone is operating at a distance. The drone may get hit by a human-occupied aircraft and both may receive “fatal” damage, but only the humans in the aircraft will suffer the consequences.
I do agree that drone operators who cause damage to “persons or property” should be held liable for their actions or inactions in the same way that the pilot of a manned aircraft would.