Which is worse?

Is it circumventing the law?

I was having a discussion with someone who is a law school graduate and he took the bar but didn’t like it and chose administration. I was discussing the ruling by the first judge in the Texas Equusearch vs The FAA with the judge finding in favor of Texas Equusearch that their SAR operations are not a commercial operation because they are a non-for profit and the Spectra is not a drone but a remote controlled hobby plane. So when I asked him for his opinion on FFA, 4-H and Boy Scouts flying these small remote control aircraft for surveying and agriculture projects he told me “You are circumventing the law”. So the law puts commercial use of these unmanned aircraft in the same legal category as prostitution and using the weight of the law to give an unfair advantage to the established military technology providers and forcing research and development outside of the United States of America. What is going to take for someone to sue over that?

I was sent a text of an article out of the “Up and Soaring-UAS” Magazine and the first article is the University of Alaska getting a waiver to operate within five miles of the Fairbanks International Airport. The second article is the National Technical Systems Inc. getting a $1.4 million contract to build to payload pods designed to support 25lbs payload per wing. I would like to see them do that and keep the take-off weight below the 55lbs limit for small UAS.

The next article announces the introduction of the Lockheed Martin Vector Hawk. I would like to compare it head to head against the Spectra. It has VTOL capability but I wonder how long it can float of a thermal with the power shut off. It didn’t mention the price, I wonder if it’s less than $10,000?

Then there was a nice article about how much more safely the ScanEagle UAV can observe wildfires than a manned aircraft for fighting wildfires. It didn’t mention how well it can float on a thermal either.

Then there was an article about Northrup Grumman and Yamaha Motor collaboration on an unmanned Helicopter. Yamaha started making remote control mini Helicopters about 12 years ago. They even carry pesticides to spray for agriculture. There is no mention of the cost. I wonder why they didn’t collaborate with SCION UAS an American company that has been manufacturing autonomous Helicopters for 13 years.

The next article talks about how Sikorsky is going to develop an autonomous Black Hawk. Did I just mention SCION UAS? Enough on that. The next article mentions how The Center de Geomatique du Quebec is using a robotic aircraft to collect aerial imagery. Did I mention that commercial UAS operations are legal in Canada?

Then the last article on the page is about Freewave developing a wireless roadmap for UAS to operate in Class A airspace. That means flying in the same airspace as commercial airliners. I don’t remember reading anything in the FAA proposed guidelines allowing for that. Oh, they haven’t been published yet. There was no mention of the situational awareness capability developed by IPS/NexGen right now!

If is amazing how concerned some people are about circumventing the law by trying to stay within a judge’s ruling allowing for non-for profits to operate using a remote control plane when rules are circumvented for convenience and overpriced technologies that weren’t thought through for the applications they are intended are shoved down the industry’s collective throats.

This is circumventing common sense.