Hang Gliding and Paragliding Volume 44 / Issue 2: February 2014 | Page 10

ASSOCIATION
by Andy Pag with the help of Dick Heckman

O

ur skies are about to be filled
by flying robots. The invasion
of drones is now inevitable. The
Federal Aviation Authority (FAA)
estimate that by 2030, 30,000 commercial drones could be flying around
American airspace. Compare that
with the 50,000 aircraft that cur-

legally controversial bombing raids in
Pakistan and Yemen. Drones have also
raised the ire of the ACLU with their
potential to invade our privacy. But the
UAS definition also includes benign
model planes.
Drones aren’t currently allowed to
fly in the US, but remote controlled
models are flown under a special
exemption granted to the Academy of

use drones.
Currently there’s no legal way to
make money from flying your drone in
the US. Even the military and government agencies need to have their
robo-craft and pilots certified by the
FAA as part of the process of applying
for a special waiver that allows them
to bypass the no-drone rule. The FAA
doesn’t grant this waiver easily.

Free Flying Under Attack from Drones
rently use it and you get a sense of the
scale by which our airspace is about to
change.
As the FAA alters air laws to accommodate the winged robots, the
consequences may herald changes that,
at best will have a significant impact on
our sport, but at worst could result in
the end of our free flying in the US. So,
in readiness to go head to head with the
drones, here’s a guide with all you need
to know about the skybots and what we
can do about them.

Drones and model planes
An aircraft that flies without an
onboard crew, either by remote control
or controlled by a pre-programmed
onboard computer, is an Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle or UAV for short. The
FAA calls them UAS’s for Unmanned
Aerial Systems because the FAA
includes an operator and a communication link as a mandatory part of the
system.
(If three-letter acronyms—TLAs—
make your head spin, take some
Dramamine before you read on.)
The most famous examples are the
Predator drones used for politically and

10

HANG GLIDING & PARAGLIDING MAGAZINE

Model Aeronautics (AMA) as long as
the pilots meet certain criteria: They
must be AMA members, have insurance, fly at approved sites etc., but the
most important rule is that they can’t
fly for commercial purposes.
The AMA has recently been tasked
with policing its pilots, and of chasing
down those that flout its rules, reporting them to the FAA where they face
legal action. A Minneapolis-based
aerial-cinematography company was
shut down by the FAA for operating a
commercial aerial-photography service
taking pictures for real-estate developers.

No drones yet
These little aerial butlers could be
employed to do all sorts of useful jobs,
from painting your house to surveying pipelines or searching for stolen
cattle. Some even suggest they may be a
cheaper, more efficient way of delivering
your mail.
But at the moment none of this
happens because (with the exception
of a couple of oil companies working in
remote areas) private businesses haven’t
been granted permission by the FAA to

Drone time
Under instruction from Congress to
open the airways to drones, the FAA
is searching for a way to keep the skies
safe while creating what they call the
Next Generation Air Transportation
System (NextGen) which will allow
drones to share the airspace. This is
currently in a consultation phase, but
the clock is ticking and by September
2015 the FAA is due to publish a plan
that will allow drones to take off soon
afterwards.
It promises to be the biggest upheaval of air law and the way we use airspace since Wilbur and Orville started
tinkering in their shed.

Megabucks transponders
At the moment one of the proposed key
changes to airlaw, which could really
impact on hang gliders and paragliders,
hinges around how aircraft detect each
other and avoid colliding in the sky.
In the controlled airspace of the
future, all aircraft will have to carry an
Automatic Dependent SurveillanceBroadcast (ADS-B) machine which
uses a GPS to figure out where it is and
then transmits that information on