Yesterday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) overruled a federal judge, deciding that remote-controlled aircraft (whether or not they’re autonomous enough to be called “drones”) fall under the purview of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). News on that, plus an update on Parrot’s Bebop drone and some new firefighting skills from Lockheed Martin and KMAX, after the jump.
Here’s the meat of the NTSB’s ruling, which is in response to a 2011 challenge by Raphael “Trappy” Pirker, a hobbyist who felt that the FAA’s juristiction applied only to manned aircraft:
An aircraft is “any” “device” that is “used for flight.” We acknowledge the definitions are as broad as they are clear, but they are clear nonetheless.
The NTSB goes on to say that “at this stage of the proceeding...we decline to address issues beyond the threshold question that produced the decisional order.” And with that, the NTSB has made the FAA entirely responsible for aircraft, unmanned aircraft, remote controlled aircraft, and any and all combinations or permutations thereof.
While hobbyists would likely have preferred that the FAA (and everyone else) just kept out of their business, someone needs to be regulating the use of unmanned aircraft, because of abstract privacy concerns as well as the much less abstract risk of someone getting run over by one. The FAA is in the process of developing an official set of rules and regulations, but until they’re done, things remain cloudy.
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