- Click here for the article.
In an attempt to bring order to increasingly chaotic skies, the Federal Aviation Administration on Sunday proposed long-awaited rules on the commercial use of small drones, requiring operators to be certified, fly only during daylight and keep their aircraft in sight.
The rules, though less restrictive than the current ones, appear to prohibit for now the kind of drone delivery services being explored by Amazon, Google and other companies, since the operator or assigned observers must be able to see the drone at all times without binoculars. But company officials believe the line-of-sight requirement could be relaxed in the future to accommodate delivery services.
The proposed regulations would cover only nonrecreational unmanned aircraft weighing up to 55 pounds, and would not apply to the recreational use of drones, which have become hugely popular with hobbyists and are covered by other rules. However, the F.A.A. said it was considering additional rules to cover some uses of the smallest drones, so-called microdrones, weighing less than 4.4 pounds.
Some drone evangelists believe that in the next few decades, robotic aircraft will prove as useful and transformative to government, commerce and home life as the personal computer. But the exploding number of domestic drones has been accompanied by increasing safety problems, including reports of near misses involving passenger airliners and the crash of a small drone on the White House grounds last month.
- Click here for the rulemaking page on the FAA's website.
- Wikipedia: Federal Aviation Administration.
- FAA website.
