Page 15 - Volume 20 No. 6

Should you could be a good little citizen and do what the FAA says you should do, or not?
Gee, this is a tough one.
Are there solutions?
Some manufacturers are building a GPS receiver into their craft which will not allow flight around air carrier airports.
Flaw: That’s a good step towards protecting airliners, but it does nothing to protect helicopter operators anywhere, or aircraft operating near the much larger number of small airports used by general aviation.
In addition to GPS lateral control to avoid some airports, how about limiting altitude to, say, 100 feet above the ground, using GPS and a barometric sensor integrated into the controller?
Flaw: Expensive to do and what about the millions of drones already being operated?
How about requiring registration by forcing the new owner to input the FAA registration number into non- volatile memory in the drone’s controller and receiver, prior to each flight? Legally, that would force acceptance of responsibility for every flight.
Flaw: not practical without a way to verify the number was actually assigned and valid before the drone will fly. And, even then, what would prevent an operator from simply “appropriating” someone else’s registration number?
How about a version of the data recorder so treasured by crash investigators? Something that has the registration number encoded on a chip that could survive an encounter with a real aircraft in most scenarios?
Flaw: Possible, but expensive and what about the millions of drones already being operated?
In my humble opinion, unless a compliance law exists with teeth – such as a mandatory one-year prison term for anyone caught flying an unregistered drone or other unmanned aerial vehicle weighing more than one pound – the majority of people are not going to participate in a registration program.
Pretty stiff penalty you say? You’re right, but, without a way to find out who the operator was, should a mishap occur, drone hobby law enforcement will become akin to the Citizen’s Band debacle. This time, though, physical property dama•ge and death are the potential consequences of operation of an unlicensed transmitter by an unknown person. T&T
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Mike Simmons is President of Plane Data, Inc. and may be reached at 800-895-1382 or 828-737-1599 (Direct & International), or by visiting www.planedata.com
JUNE 2016
TWIN & TURBINE • 13