Would this disable/prevent use of already purchased drones as well? I’ve considered picking one of these up for the longest time, but now with this potential ban, I’d really want to pick one up, but not if they would be unusable if this passes.
I’ve wanted to pick one up for ages, but when I look into it there’s so many restrictions on where you can fly that I can’t see myself being able to get much use of out.
Unless you live next to an airport or next to a federal building, it’s really not all that restrictive. Only places I haven’t been able to fly were near camp David and a local airport.
For starters you cannot fly a drone over a person except the operator (yourself). The weight of the drone or inclusion of prop guards does not change this.
So goodbye to flying around any busy area or city.
Ita because they could fall on people and cause harm.
You can in theory fly a drone over people if it meets a few criteria such as enclosed blades, under 250 grams, purely for recreation (no helping people or taking photos of your roofs gutters, purely recreation), displaying your registered FAA number on the drone chassis, etc etc.
Basically no drone you can buy is actually rated to fly over people, and that’s before passing the test and registering your drone with the FAA.
Such a blunder, imho. Since drones are the future at least for warfare, encouraging their use with certified and safe models may be a no-brainer to support the growth of that technology and educating civil operators en masse.