Initial Thoughts on New FAA Drone Rules

by on February 16, 2015 · 0 comments

Yesterday afternoon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally released its much-delayed rules for private drone operations. As The Wall Street Journal points out, the rules “are about four years behind schedule,” but now the agency is asking for expedited public comments over the next 60 days on the whopping 200-page order. (You have to love the irony in that!) I’m still going through all the details in the FAA’s new order — and here’s a summary of what the major provisions — but here are some high-level thoughts about what the agency has proposed.

Opening the Skies…

  • The good news is that, after a long delay, the FAA is finally taking some baby steps toward freeing up the market for private drone operations.
  • Innovators will no longer have to operate entirely outside the law in a sort of drone black market. There’s now a path to legal operation. Specifically, small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) operators (for drones under 55 lbs.) will be able to go through a formal certification process and, after passing a test, get to operate their systems.

… but Not Without Some Serious Constraints

  • The problem is that the rules only open the skies incrementally for drone innovation.
  • You can’t read through these 200 pages of regulations without getting sense that the FAA still wishes that private drones would just go away.
  • For example, the FAA still wants to keep a bit of a leash around drones by (1) limiting their use to being daylight-only flights (2) that are in the visual line-of-sight of the operators at all times. And (3) the agency also says that drones cannot be flown over people.
  • Those three limitations will hinder some obvious innovations, such as same-day drone delivery for small packages, which Amazon has suggested they are interested in pursuing. (Amazon isn’t happy about these restrictions.)

Impact on Small Innovators?

  • But what I worry about more are all the small ‘Mom-and-Pop’ drone entrepreneur, who want to use airspace as a platform for open, creative innovation. These folks are out there but they don’t have the name or the resources to weather these restrictions the way that Amazon can. After all, if Amazon has to abandon same-day drone delivery because of the FAA rules, the company will still have a thriving commercial operation to fall back on. But all those small, nameless drone innovators currently experimenting with new, unforeseeable innovations may not be so lucky.
  • As a result, there’s a real threat here of drone entrepreneurs bolting the U.S. and offering their services in more hospitable environments if the FAA doesn’t take a more flexible approach.
  • [For more discussion of this problem, see my recent essay on “global innovation arbitrage.”]

Impact on News-Gathering?

  • It’s also worth asking how these rules might limit legitimate news-gathering operations by both journalistic enterprises and average citizens. If we can never fly a drone over a crowd of people, as the rules stipulate, that places some rather serious constraints on our ability to capture real-time images and video from events of societal importance (such as political protests or even just major events like sporting events or concerts).
  • [For more discussion about this, see this September 2014 Mercatus Center working paper, “News from Above: First Amendment Implications of the Federal Aviation Administration Ban on Commercial Drones.”]

Still Time to Reconsider More Flexible Rules

  • Of course, these aren’t final rules and the agency still has time to relax some of these restrictions to free the skies for less fettered private drone operation.
  • I suspect that drone innovators will protest the three specific limitations I identified above and ask for a more flexible approach to enforcing those rules.
  • But it’s good that the FAA has finally taken the first step toward decriminalizing private drone operations in the United States.

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Additional Reading

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Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer / Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.

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