DETROIT – What’s up with drones and drone law now that the Federal Aviation Administration is granting special exemptions for commercial drone flights for such purposes as power line and oil pipeline inspections, agricultural surveys and much more. Drones were the focus on the Internet Advisor show on WJR 760 AM in Detroit last month. Harry Arnold of Detroit Drone Company debated Enrico Schaeffer of Traverse Legal about what is, and isn’t, legal when flying drones. You’re going to want to read this since experts predict 1 million drones will be sold this Christmas.
Here’s the transcript of that radio show. Internet Advisor co-hosts quoted include Foster Braun, Gary Baker and Cal Carson.
Foster Braun: Welcome back to the Internet Advisor. We have a whole crew here along with Harry Arnold who is the founder of the Detroit Drone Company. And, we’re welcoming to the conversation right now, somebody else who describes himself as a drone attorney. That does not mean he is inhuman? He is an attorney who focuses on and specializes in drones, Enrico Schaefer. Am I right on that?
Enrico: You are right. I do disguise as a cloudcopter during the Halloween season, but that’s about it.
Laughter
Enrico: No human on board
Foster: Can you just see him in here with his arms flailing? Enrico, seriously thank you very much for being with us. I love an article that I read that Mike Brennan, who works with us of MI Tech News shared with us, it was entitled: Has the FAA Gone Crazy? Inside the FAA’s Attempt to Require Registration of all Recreational Drones and we’re going to step into something. We’ve been talking about some of the practical things that and incredible things that drones can do with Harry Arnold, who is the founder of the Detroit Drone Company here in studio, but what you’re tackling there is the attempt to try to get some kind of regulatory handle on drones and on piloting them and flying them and from the title of your article, looks like you’re saying the efforts that are going on right now are just plain crazy
Enrico: Yeah, it is Foster. It’s a really strange environment right now as I know that Harry probably sees every day as he looks at what’s going on on the web. The FAA has been trying to regulate SUAS into the airspace here for many years and they’ve broken drones down into two categories essentially; commercial drones and recreational drones. Commercial drones you have to get permission from the FAA to fly as part of that you have to register your aircraft so that they know if there’s a problem with the drone, they can trace it back to you. But you’ve got hundreds or thousands of times or tens of thousands of times, soon to be millions of recreational drones in the air, and now they’re trying to get everyone who buys a recreational drone to have to register that drone with the FAA and they just started this process last week and they say that they want a proposal from the task force by November 20 and they want to have the new regulation in place by mid-December and if anyone who knows anything about the government, it does not act fast.
Foster: It moves at glacial pace at the very best. Harry, I’m just curious about this, you would, I imagine as a drone operator, you’re not against regulation or registration necessarily.
Harry: I’m 100 percent for registration, certification. That’s the only way the drones are going to take their place in the future. If you look back, at our history, every new technology has gone through a phase where it was unregulated and then as it became more pervasive, the government regulated it. I go back all the way, you guys are probably too young to remember but the sinking of the Titanic at that time, ham radio had just come out and it was not regulated in any way, but there were spoof calls that were sent out during the disaster and it raised such a public ire, that the CC was formed shortly after that accident that put the ham regulations in place and you can look at planes, automobiles, radio, television. It’s all followed the same pattern.
Foster: Yeah, we don’t want to have a disaster that we’re following in order to have good regulation
Cal Carson: And the regulation right now was registering right? We’re not talking about..
Harry: Yeah, first step.
Cal: I mean, we’re not talking about changing innovation. Anybody can come up with a new and improved drone, they just have to register it.
Harry: Completely fair in my humble opinion and reasonable. The people that are upset, including the gentleman on the phone are the AMA, the hobbyists flying planes the park with their sons for 50 years and now they’re going to have to take their RC models, which have heretofore been exempt from any kind of government oversight to register them and that’s the problem with a large part of modeling community, they’re literally up in arms over it.
Enrico: And the thing that’s driving this is that there were over the count is debatable, but over a thousand near misses or sightings or sightings between aircraft and UAVs. Typically near airports and airliners trying to land and take off right? SO there’s a tremendous anxiety by the FAA about whether or not there’s going to be a collision between a drone and an aircraft and what that may mean. Whether there would really be a safety impact there, these types of things.
Where Harry’s wrong is that the problem is that not so much that they want recreational users to register to try and come up with a set of regulations, which by the way, the FAA probably has no authority or ability to try to regulate recreational drones because congress passed a law saying that they couldn’t.
Harry: That’s why they have the DOT do it.
Enrico: Yeah, so the challenge here is where’s going to be there authority. How in the world are they going to be in less than two months, going to come up with the framework that will identify what kind of drone needs to be registered. Drones under a pound, drones under three pounds, drones that can fly 50 feet away, 100 feet away.
Where it really needs to go to on a technology basis is some sort of transponder that goes in a certain class of drones that will actually not only identify, that will identify the person that owns that drone and you’ll be able to read that transponder from some other receiver and say it belongs to so and so because if a drone is in the air and it’s registered to someone, you still don’t know who owns that drone and unless it crashes into something. So if it’s too close to an airport, once that drone lands and the person drives away, you literally have no ability to figure out who that person is. The effort here is really to try to get people to be more safe when their using registration as kind of a fear tactic along that line. It’s just not a very good solution to what is a significant problem.
Foster: We’re with Enrico Schaefer and we’re talking with him from Traverse City and you have a firm up there. Your firm does drone law, correct?
Enrico: Correct.
Foster: Cal you had something you wanted to ask.
Cal: Enrico, this is a question that always gets on my mind, I gotta ask this one. Can you tell me what is the, in a short way, because I’m sure everything legal is always long. Airspace, what control of airspace over my own private property do I have over drones?
Enrico: Well, it’s a great question. There’s very little litigation on that issue. From the FAA’s point of view, they can regulate at least commercial aircraft including drones on the national airspace, which they believe be basically from the tops of the blades of grass upwards, but there really hasn’t been any reason to explore that legally until UAVs started to launch and so we really don’t know the answer to. You certainly have a right to privacy and many states have anti-surveillance laws which would apply. If you’re flying a drone commercially, as Harry knows, you can’t fly it over any property that you don’t own or don’t have permission to fly over, so the FAA is trying to deal with that issue by simply barring people from flying over property that they don’t have permission to be over. But, of course, we know a lot of people are out there flying drones and they’re flying over other people’s property.
Cal: Enrico, what’s the rules on taking down drones over my own airspace.
Enrico: Well, again, it’s complicated but because the FAA is considering a drone as an aircraft, if you were to shoot at a zone, it would be no different than technically shooting at an aircraft which, of course, would be a 10 or 20 year felony.
Cal: I just want to throw in with your fine answer to the previous question. There was a Supreme Court v. Cosby case where the airspace above your property was determined under common law it extends from the depths to the heavens, but the Supreme Court held that you have ownership of the airspace is structurally being used by what you have developed on your property. So in other words, my home I might lose rights per se at 100 and 200 feet, but over the Renaissance Center, which is 600-700 feet tall, their property rights would naturally extend quite a bit higher says Supreme Court v. Cosby.
Enrico: Yeah, let me just throw in there that that is not an accurate statement of the law, but there is a lot of debate on this issue and a lot of unknown
Foster: I’m curious Harry, have you run into litigation?
Harry: As far as
Foster: The use of your drones or have you been able to avoid that obstacle.
Harry: Oh no, we only do what is legally allowed under the law.
Foster: No, I meant have you run into litigation in the sense to have to deal with it. Having to hire a lawyer to protect yourself.
Harry: No, we don’t do anything that illegal. We only fly over property with owner’s permission, and work with police, fire departments, nobody’s mad at me.
Foster. Okay good. Enrico, I want you to hang on because I want to talk a little bit more about the whole issue of getting, kind of mandating pilot training as also part of dealing with drones as well. Enrico Schaefer with us from Traverse City Law. We’ll be back in just a moment with our crew in studio here talking about unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs or drones.
Foster: Welcome back to kind of a Back to the Future type of conversation. We’re talking about drones, and about their application and some the control necessary to deal with them responsibly and a future with them. We have with us on our phone lines who is a drone lawyer with Traverse Law. Am I right about that Enrico?
Enrico: Traverse Legal, yes.
Foster: Traverse Legal, pardon me, out of Traverse City. He is a drone lawyer. With us in studio, we have Harry Arnold, who is the founder of the Detroit Drone Company, a commercial drone operation here and our crew.
Gary Baker: And may we mention, Enrico, are you in Traverse City because of Northwestern Michigan College having such a great drone training program.
Enrico: No, it was just purely coincidental that they were here and I happened to be here. So it’s one of the very few times where being in Traverse City actually worked for business. We practice all over the country in intellectual property another technology company representations, and we just actually get to come to Traverse City, but there’s not much of that going on here.
Foster: And you brought up, Gary, Northwestern Michigan College, actually has a training program for drone pilots. Am I right?
Enrico: Yes, they were one of the early college programs out there to put a UAV program in place and they’ve been doing it for 5 or 6 years now, and they are training drone pilots for both military and commercial applications.
Foster: Oh my, military and commercial applications. That is interesting. Gentlemen, I’d like to ask both of you, you Enrico and you Harry, you know I had conversations off the air in the studio and we’ve got to record those and on air here, I think, Harry, you want to have some kind of full regulations of drones and their pilots for public safety so their industry can continue at a reasonable pace of development. Am I right on that?
Harry: Yes, yes. The ability of drones, multicopters and the radio controlled aircraft has risen so quickly and there so publically available, that if they are not regulated, you’re going to have someone going to Best Buy and flying one over the World Series and you know with the uncomfortable motion that you can fly any kind of payload that you want, that’s leaving too much in the hands of chance for most citizens.
Gary: And just if you’re flying it over the World Series let’s say or over any stadium, and as your flying that, it’s going to lose connectivity at some point, right, you’re going to lose control over it potentially and if it comes down, even if there’s no payload problem, right, it’s going to come down on somebody.
Foster: Bean somebody on the way down. Enrico, what do you see the path forward if in some ways this crazy rush to regulation is going on between the FAA and now the Department of Transportation is getting involved in it, what do you see as a clear path through this?
Enrico: That is the million dollar question and the problem is there is no real clear path. The FAA’s been trying to get the regulations together on the commercial side for many years and they just finished their proposed rule-making. There’s now a proposed rule for commercial operators. There is a section 333 process that companies like Detroit Drone can go through to get legal and fly commercially, but the real problem is when Congress enacted the law in 2012, which directed the FAA to come up with regulations, it also precluded the FAA from regulating recreation or hobbyist drones.
Foster: Ahhh.
Enrico: That has created a big challenge for the FAA. Because that’s where most of the drones are going in the air and that’s where a lot of the stupidity is happening.
Gary: Isn’t this similar to what has happened with personal watercraft? Um, where they weren’t regulated when they first came out, people did stupid things with them, then they became regulated where under a certain age you had to have a license and now we’re finding out that most of the problems were somebody crashes into another personal watercraft or a person or a dock or something, they’re really happening with adults who happen to be drinking.
Foster: Yeah.
Gary: Are we going to see kind of drones maybe take a similar path where everybody has to be licensed?
Enrico: Well, I think it’s going to have to happen because you’ve got about a million drones that are about to go into the air as result of Christmas and so you know, the problem is how do you get people educated? Regulation is one way to educate people. News programs are doing a great job of bringing information to the public. Manufacturers are trying incredibly hard to get information to the purchasers to let them know how to fly safely. But it’s big challenge because as Harry noted, anyone can buy a drone at $500 or $1,000, unpack it and have it in the air in less than five or 10 minutes so that’s a really big challenge.
Gary: I have to ask you this question, how did you end up in drone law and if a young person wanted to get into law, how would they go in that direction?
Enrico: We have done new and emerging technology since 1992 and so we’re a technology company representation law firm and so I also do RC aircraft and sailing and all sorts of wind sports for many years and so as drones started to come on the scene and we started to see the FAA start moving towards regulations, we jumped in with both feet and then having an NMC here as a resource, just proved to be an added benefit and now, of course, it’s all coming of age right now. It’s a little bit of dumb luck and a little bit of good planning.
Foster: Enrico, thank you so much for being with us on the Internet Advisor here today.
Enrico: Okay, you guys have a great weekend.
Foster: Okay, the very best to you. That’s just another example where someone took their own personal interests and made it part of their daily lives.
Gary: My father always said if you do something you love or you can incorporate something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
Foster: Harry, you certainly, I’m sure, model that with your experience with drones doing something you love.
Harry: Yeah, I would definitely have to say that it’s been a very fun ride. We were one of the first companies around doing it when people were still saying what’s that and they didn’t even know what a drone or an unmanned aircraft was. Yeah, dumb luck, I was into photography and RC and there was a technological
Foster: RC being remote control.
Harry: Radio controlled aircraft, aircraft cars and about six or seven years ago there were advances in risk processing and the ST-32 chip and some other innovations came up that made drones really stable and really reliable to the point where you could fly a couple hundred dollar camera without fear of it crashing every other time you flew it and that kind of reliability opened the door and that’s where I jumped in.
Cal: I have a couple of quick questions, but you know when you think about what Enrico was saying which is maybe a transponder is the way to go so you can identify each individual drone like you can an aircraft. A transponder in airspace, you have to turn it to a certain number. I can see that being a way to actually identify each one of these and you know, it used to be expensive and today with the technology we’re putting into our smart phones, right, where’s my phone app, and where’s my drone, right. I mean it’s pretty cheap today to get the domain. Where’s my drone?
Harry: I’m personally a fan of the other side, personal certification. I think it should be you get a learner’s permit, operator’s license and then get insurance and you have a commercial license instead of the hardware which is going to be really expensive.
Foster: Harry, where can we find you on-line?
Harry: detroitdrone.com
Foster: There it is, detroitdrone.com. Harry, thank you so much. It’s always fun having you in here. Can we have you back because I’m kind of thinking, not 30 years into the future, but may a little while, a few months beyond, I know this is going to continue to go just in a crazy wild fashion, but thanks for being with us.
Harry: Thank you for having me.
The Internet Advisor on WJR 760 AM in Detroit airs Saturdays from 4 to 6 pm. It also is heard on the Michigan Talk Network in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing and Muskegon.
