There is absolutely no chance that this bill will pass.
Crazy bills championed by people that either don't understand them, or are just posturing are semi-common. Just because it has been proposed, doesn't mean anything.
Alas, enough of them pass with serious enough consequences that we do have to watch for and actively oppose them. Prime example is NY's recent passage of the "SAFE Act".
The provision making hundreds of thousands of cooperative upstanding law-abiding citizens into enemies of the state for owning common devices less dangerous than stairs.
Many times, ideas start out as super crazy simply so they can be reeled back in to the degree they really want. For example - they could back-up from "complete ban" to "must have a license/permit" and wrap some bureaucratic process around any non-governmental drone programs.
This could be a ruse to get some iterations done - they start with a drastic one to measure the reactionary sentiment to see what they can get away with.
I can order a very wide variety of quadcopters online, or build my own - including a camera gimbals with zero interference from any governmental agency.
As long as you maintain line of sight to them, then yes, but calling these "drones" betrays the word "drone".
If you want a true "done", that is: something that flys autonomously, that you don't have to watch, you need to apply for a Certificate of Authorization (COA) from the FAA.
The people who are allowed to apply for these are major universities, and government contractors.
Awesome - thanks for the info and the clarification.
I guess you're correct that we should be careful about the lexicon we use to describe these things. Personally, I don't even like the term Drone.
I see it as an attempt to obfuscate the human element, especially when talking about military operations: i.e. they have a pilot who pulls the trigger - he is just not physically in the weapons delivery platform.
This is a very important, yet very delicate, area that needs to be extremely well deliberated over in the next short while.
I am not confident that politicians have the foresight and testicular fortitude to really make appropriate choices in this matter - especially given the vultures poised on the sidelines with watering mouths over the potential to sell such systems for domestic spying, control and TIA.
>I see it as an attempt to obfuscate the human element, especially when talking about military operations: i.e. they have a pilot who pulls the trigger - he is just not physically in the weapons delivery platform.
Completely agree. I don't know if there are any weaponized UAVs that are capable of fully-autonomous flight, (or if fully[1] autonomous strikes would even be allowed), but I do know that there are fully-autonomous surveillance "drones". Being pilot-less, to me, fulfills the term "drone".
[1]:Practically fully autonomous in the way that a guided missile is. Tell it where to go, and it figures out how to get there.
The same physical quadcopters available online are perfectly capable of flying autonomously beyond line of sight (for example, following preset GPS-waypoints) - some may need extra software for that, some can do it out of the box.
De facto, many people are already flying "true drones" without any authorization, as it's practically available not to "major universities and government contractors" but as a hobby for a teenager.
What is their crime and the currently prescribed punishment for doing this without government authorization?
There is absolutely no chance that this bill will pass.
There've been too many cases where it seemed this way, then the bill passed (or was only narrowly defeated), for us to ignore anything that appears to have no chance of passing.
A bill like this would royally screw over the mapping, GIS, agricultural, real estate, and film industries, and those are only the ones I can think of off hand.
They'll lobby for and obtain exemption, maybe a permitting process. They're not interested in making this available to the general public (on the contrary, they could benefit from inhibiting their competition).
Crazy bills championed by people that either don't understand them, or are just posturing are semi-common. Just because it has been proposed, doesn't mean anything.