WASHINGTON — A regulatory battle in Washington has compelled professors to ground their research drones, the tiny aircraft academics consider vital for archaeological surveys, river mapping, and countless other discoveries.
The Federal Aviation Administration recently clarified that only hobbyists can fly unmanned aircraft without a special permit. The restrictions aim to improve safety and curb the myriad schemes entrepreneurs have envisioned, from Amazon package drops to pizza deliveries.
But now scholars warn the FAA’s action jeopardizes their work and undermines basic education. The issue lands them in the center of a fight over government’s role in airspace and the appropriate use of drones.
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The FAA plans to propose new rules for unmanned aircraft under about 55 pounds in November. It still struggles with a September 2015 deadline set by Congress to open the skies to drones.
Businesses don’t want to wait.
Amazon this year hired a Washington firm to lobby for package deliveries by drone. Google recently bought a producer of solar-powered drones with aims to improve Internet access in remote areas. Even wedding photographers are starting to use unmanned aircraft for that perfect family shot.
Cheaper aircraft options draw interest from realtors, police, journalists, filmmakers, builders, surveyors, and even brewers. The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International estimates the industry will generate $82 billion in economic activity over the next decade.
“The FAA is having problems in basically controlling the introduction of [unmanned aerial vehicles] into air space,” said Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm based in Virginia. “The academic community has sort of gotten caught in the middle.”
They $hould be u$ed to it.
Privacy groups also fret about flying objects that see into living rooms or monitor movements....
Conspiracy kooks.
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"Lawsuits challenge FAA drone, model aircraft rules | Associated Press August 23, 2014
WASHINGTON — Model aircraft hobbyists, research universities, and commercial drone interests filed lawsuits Friday challenging a government directive that they say imposes tough new limits on the use of model aircraft and broadens the agency’s ban on commercial drone flights.
The three lawsuits asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to review the validity of the directive, which the Federal Aviation Administration issued in June.
The FAA has been working on regulations that would permit commercial drone flights in US skies for more than 10 years, but the agency is still at least months and possibly years away from issuing final rules to permit flights by small drones. Regulations for flights by larger drones are even further away.
Part of the agency’s challenge is to distinguish between planes flown by hobbyists and those used for commercial applications, a distinction that has become harder to draw as technology for model planes has grown more sophisticated.
Meaning a PRIVATE CITIZEN will NOT BE ALLOWED to operate drones. Government and bu$ine$$ will. What a completely fa$ci$t nation.
The lawsuits were filed by the Academy of Model Aeronautics, which represents more than 170,000 model aircraft hobbyists; the Council on Governmental Relations, an association of 188 research universities; and commercial drone and model aircraft interests.
A law passed by Congress in 2012 directed the FAA to issue rules permitting commercial drone flights by the fall of 2015 but prohibited the agency from imposing new regulations on model aircraft.
The FAA directive is a backdoor imposition of new regulations on model aircraft hobbyists without going through required federal procedures for creating new regulations, said Brendan Schulman, an attorney for groups in the lawsuits.
Looks illegal and unconstitutional to me.
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Look, up in the sky....
"Drone almost blocks California firefighting planes" Associated Press July 29, 2014
PLYMOUTH, Calif. — A private drone trying to record footage of a Northern California wildfire nearly hindered efforts to attack the flames from the air, but firefighters made enough progress to allow some of the 1,200 people under evacuation orders to return home Monday.
An unmanned aircraft that aimed to get video of the blaze burning near vineyards in the Sierra Nevada foothills east of Sacramento was sighted Sunday, two days after the fire broke out, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff said.
Authorities told the man controlling the drone to stop it from flying because of the potential danger to firefighting planes. The man, whom Tolmachoff did not identify, was not cited....
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You would think the FAA has enough to deal with what with the lightning and lasers than drones filming fires in national parks.
Of course, commercial use (made by Boeing) is approved and promoted even if there are some rocks to avoid in the amazing industry they are feeding you, even if they are dragging their feet with some others (film at 11):
"A Westbrook woman faces assault charges after confronting a teenager who was using a drone to film above Hammonasset Beach. Andrea Mears, 24, was charged with third-degree assault and breach of peace after an investigation into the May 12 encounter. A video posted on the website Photography is Not a Crime shows the woman calling 17-year-old Austin Haughwout a pervert, striking him and ripping his shirt. Haughwout, of Clinton, told reporters he had been using the remote-controlled drone to get footage of the landscape from about 50 feet above the beach when he was confronted by Mears (AP)."
Must have been sent in error.
So what cracks and cleavages was he charting?
"The Federal Aviation Administration will authorize test sites for drone aircraft -- proponents prefer to call them “unmanned aerial systems” -- in upstate New York, New Jersey, and seven other states, the agency said Monday. Flights are supposed to begin within six months. The FAA did not give the exact locations where the tests would be carried out. The basic concept is that everything in the sky, manned or not, will use the Global Positioning System to determine its location in three dimensions and will radio that information to the ground, where a computer will develop an integrated picture and send that to pilots."
That photo looks like something that may have crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and about those pilots, yeah:
"UMass patch would spot stressed-out soldiers" by Naila Moreira | Globe Correspondent August 04, 2014
James Watkins, a polymer scientist who is leading the UMass effort, and his colleagues are developing a Band-Aid sensor patch in collaboration with General Electric Co. and the Air Force that would gauge stress and fatigue among armed services personnel. The five-year, $450,000 project was announced in June and represents the first grant awarded by the Nano-Bio Manufacturing Consortium, an industry organization backed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory to turn nascent nanotechnologies into electronics that monitor human activities.
It's a total war economy.
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More than 30 percent of drone pilots experience symptoms related to high chronic stress, including difficulty sleeping, according to a survey of 1,084 pilots that Chappelle and colleagues wrote about in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders in May; nearly 15 percent of those pilots also had difficulty concentrating or had outbursts of irritability.
What?
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The patch would behave much like a tiny computer. After collecting sweat and extracting a chemical via microscopic gated channels, its electronics would measure and report the data. But unlike a computer chip, the patch won’t be made of silicon, which is expensive and time-consuming to work with. Instead, it will be constructed with minuscule plastic elements, using a technique called roll-to-roll printing. The technology, which is still under development, “prints” structures at a nanoscale or molecular level, and at a much lower cost.
“We want to be able to print these things for under a dollar,” Watkins said. In collaboration with the small company Carpe Diem in Franklin....
John Berg, chief executive.
Four separate efforts funded by the nano-bio consortium will come together to create the monitor. The UMass effort will focus on physically processing sweat at extremely small scales. Three other grants, which have yet to be announced, will fund separate efforts to create the device’s packaging, remotely relay the patch’s data, and link the measurements to physical conditions such as stress or fatigue.
The Air Force and GE collaborative will be spurred by a larger push at UMass to build new nanotechnology infrastructure.
Last year, Watkins and his collaborators received $46 million from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, a state-run initiative, to build a laboratory dedicated to the creation of personalized health monitors.
Related: Patrick Pre$cribes a Pill
UMass has also received a 10-year, $36 million grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing, a nanomanufacturing research center directed by Watkins.
Meanwhile, food stamps were cut and unemployment benefits allowed to lapse.
The center will be a testing ground for new equipment, including solar cells, energy-efficient batteries, and “smart paint” that helps control room lighting. Industry partners will be able to use the facility for development and demonstrations.
And the wearable health patch is not likely to be used solely by the military.
“The military market is just one small piece of the market that exists,” said Scott Miller, manager of the Nanostructures and Surfaces Laboratory at General Electric. “There’s the civilian market. It’s an extension of wearable electronics and fitness monitors.”
That way the NSA can call the ambulance for you.
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UMass researcher Jeffrey Morse, managing director of the new UMass center, said, “The idea is to keep people out of the hospital and reduce medical costs.”
So there will be more money for us!
With the current crop of monitors, such as Fitbit, “we’re mostly talking about the personal athlete or the weekend warrior,” Morse said. “But I think the health side of this is going to be where the big impact comes in.”
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The startup program is for police only, but soon you will be blinded by the light once you face-up to who is flying those drones.
Those who can't fly:
The startup program is for police only, but soon you will be blinded by the light once you face-up to who is flying those drones.
Those who can't fly:
"Illicit drone crashes outside S.C. prison" Associated Press July 31, 2014
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A drone carrying cellphones, marijuana, and other contraband into a South Carolina maximum-security prison never made it inside the 12-foot-high razor wire fence, and authorities said Wednesday they are looking for one of two people accused in connection with trying to sneak it in.
The search has been ongoing since April 21, when officials found a small, crashed drone in bushes outside the walls of Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, according to Corrections Department spokeswoman Stephanie Givens. At the site, Givens said, officers found materials inmates are not supposed to have, including the phones, tobacco products, marijuana, and synthetic marijuana. One person has been arrested.
Why am I just reading about it three f***ing months later?
Givens said officials are not sure exactly where the drone would have gone if it had made it over the wall. He said it was the first time officials know of that a drone was used to smuggle banned items into a South Carolina prison. Last fall, four people in Georgia were accused of using a remote-controlled drone to fly tobacco and cellphones into a state prison there.
It's all bu$ine$$!
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Can't anyone down the drones (other than the Iranians)?
"Amherst, Leverett ponder resolutions for drone restrictions
Town meetings in Amherst and Leverett will consider resolutions calling on the federal government to end the use of drones for assassinations and regulate the unmanned aircraft locally. The Daily Hampshire Gazette reported that Amherst Select Board member James Wald said he isn’t comfortable with the town having a foreign policy when the federal government doesn’t have one. Frank Gatti, a Town Meeting member and lead petitioner in Amherst, said the drone resolution would express concern about the US government killing people in Pakistan and Yemen. It would ask US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey and Representative James McGovern to propose legislation to stop funding drone killings. A second restriction would keep drones at least 500 feet above private property unless otherwise authorized by town officials."
That legislation is going nowhere.
Related:
The Drone Wars: Pakistan
The Drone Wars: Yemen
That was the last I've seen about Yemen.
"2 N.H. lawmakers seek to limit use of drones" by Norma Love | Associated Press January 19, 2014
CONCORD, N.H. — Two New Hampshire lawmakers have resurrected an effort to limit the use of drones to protect residents’ privacy, despite the failure of efforts last year.
New Hampshire was among 43 states last year to introduce bills and resolutions concerning the unmanned aircraft. But the legislation that would have prohibited drones from snapping pictures of people’s houses could not make it through the state House.
This year, Republican state Representatives Neal Kurk and Joe Duarte have sponsored separate bills to require police to get a warrant if they want to use evidence obtained by using drones as surveillance. Because of questions last year about possible conflicts with federal law, Kurk this time included a provision that his bill would only take effect if it is allowed under federal law.
The military and some law enforcement agencies already use the devices, but the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t allow commercial use of drones. By last month, 545 drones had FAA authorization to fly in domestic airspace, but Kurk didn’t think any in New Hampshire had been licensed.
They don't?
Kensington Police Chief Mike Sielicki, president of the New Hampshire police chiefs association, opposes the bills because uses for the technology are still evolving. He envisions using a drone when intervening in a domestic dispute or apprehending a bank robber.
‘‘This could save lives,’’ he said. ‘‘It could save civilians. It could save officers.’’
And who could ever question such intentions?
Kirk Broders, an assistant professor of plant pathology at the University of New Hampshire, has been using a small hexicopter — a small drone that hovers — to photograph apple orchards to pinpoint problems. Under Kurk’s bill, Broders would have to get permission from property owners and anyone whose picture his research drone captured — a hurdle that could stifle his research.
Then I AGREE with the BILL, and the answer is NO!!
Mario Mairena of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an international trade group that promotes drones, said unmanned aircraft should fall under the same warrant requirements as manned aircraft, such as helicopters and airplanes.
‘‘If we’re going to have an honest debate about surveillance, it should be technically neutral ,’’ he said.
When you find an honest debate in AmeriKa let me know.
Congress has given the FAA until September 2015 to integrate the private and commercial use of drones into US airspace.
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Look at it this way: You will never even hear or see then up there, so what is there to worry about?
Next you thing you know they will be talking about drone ships and drone cars or fleets of drones making drops.
Related:
The Drone Wars: 21st-Century Red Barron
The Drone Wars: Pakistan
The Drone Wars: Iraq
The Drone Wars: Yemen
The Drone Wars: Libya
"Source of airstrikes on troops unknown
That means we are not being told!
TRIPOLI — Two unidentified airstrikes targeting Islamist militia positions in Libya’s capital killed 15 fighters and wounded 30 on Saturday. A senior militia leader accused Egypt and the United Arab Emirates of being behind the attacks on their posts. The mysterious airstrikes Saturday were the second this week to target Islamist militia posts in the capital. They have fueled speculation that foreign powers are covertly intervening because Libya’s air force does not possess the guided ordnance apparently used (AP)."
So not only has Obummer had to go back into Iraq, he has been forced to do the same in Libya.
That's what is behind the "mystery." This is REALLY, REALLY BAD for the DEMOCRATS this POLITICAL SEASON!
Also see: Egypt, Tunisia cancel flights to Libya amid militia fighting
Related: ISIS is in Tunisia
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"Libya’s Islamist militias claim control of capital" | Associated Press August 25, 2014
CAIRO — Libya’s Islamist militias said Sunday they have consolidated their hold on Tripoli and its international airport, driving out rival militias to the outskirts of the capital following a weekslong battle for control of the strategic hub.
Meaning the U.S-backed general has, in fact,m been decisively defeated.
The umbrella group for Islamist militias calling itself Dawn of Libya said it has also taken hold of other locations in the capital controlled by the rival militias.
Taking the capital draws to a close one chapter in a prolonged confrontation between the Islamist-allied militia, largely from the city of Misrata, and the powerful militia from the western mountains of Zintan.
The fight has largely destroyed the airport and scarred the capital, prompting diplomats, foreign nationals, and thousands of Libyans to flee.
The violence in Libya is rooted in the empowerment of militias after successive transitional governments since the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Khadafy depended on them to maintain order in the absence of a strong police force or a unified military.
It also comes as part of a backlash by Islamist factions after losing their power in Parliament following June elections and in the face of a campaign by a renegade military general against extremist Islamic militias in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.
His name is Hifter!
But this has been the worst bout of violence in the battle over turf and influence since 2011.
Mysterious airstrikes have struck the positions of Islamist militias, sparking accusations by the groups that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, who oppose Islamists in the region, were behind it.
I was also told maybe Italy, but we all know who it really is.
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