Can you summarize what this means?
Sure… caveat here that I’m not a lawyer…
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The FAA had issued rules in 2015 saying any UAV (drone, unmanned airplane, whatever) weighing more than 0.55 lbs and less than 55 lbs needed to be registered with the FAA through a simplified process. Less than 0.55 lbs did not need to be registered, and more than 55 lbs needed to have a full airworthiness certificate.
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This applied to all small UAVs, model aircraft being flown for recreation as well as commercial purposes. (Part 107 refers to the regulations that govern the latter). Both types of operation required the same registration. (Government UAVs have yet another set of regulations)
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A vocal proportion of the model aircraft community and recreational drone community find the registration requirement onerous. Amongst other things, the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 has language stating that the FAA “may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft." (Personal opinion - I’m sympathetic, but don’t think harm is done by the registry).
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A smaller (my opinion) proportion of the model aircraft community and recreational drone community think they should not be subject to any type of flight restrictions. (Personal opinion - I’m not sympathetic at all to this).
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A person in the second group sued the FAA to void AC91-57A (Model Aircraft Operating Standards, which amongst other things requires model aircraft operators to comply with FAA issued Temporary Flight Restrictions) and the registration requirement. He succeeded in having the registration requirement suspended, but not the AC.
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Also opinion - in the short term no one who’s operating for fun needs to register. But the registration system was pretty painless, and in the long term I think there’s going to be something more draconian coming down the pipe. I’m also worried (as someone managing a part 107 fleet) that the existing website and registry may go down before a 107 only, or 107/gov registry is built.
Edit: None of this applies directly to non-US pilots, but companies like DJI are trying to incorporate FAA guidance directly into their controllers.
Cool, thanks.
DJI now also in the mini drone business…
Yeah, it’s pretty amazingly capable for the price. $499 for the drone, but you’ll want the remote or the range kind of limits it to being a selfie drone. The $699 combo pack with the extra battery, charger, remote, etc. is what you really want. With the remote, its range is more than a mile. It really packs a lot of what my Mavic does at half the price. Biggest caveat is video is limited to 1080p 30 fps, vs. 4k on the Mavic, but for many people that won’t matter.
Here’s a fun review of it from a trustworthy and entertaining YouTube reviewer. Love his demo of the handfly mode in his office.
Gotta say that is slick as hell. I loved the auto-follow mode.
Living the dream.
A coworker picked up the DJI Phantom 3 Standard for a fantastic price recently and can’t stop showing me stuff on it.
Need to spend money … rising.
We bought this $50 model (as it was the recommended entry level model a bunch of places in 2017) and it is a super fun toy to mess around with so far. Incredible what you get for the price: 720p video, 4gb sd card, two batteries and a dual USB charger, plus of course the drone itself gets solid reviews as well! About 8 minute runtime per battery, very easy to slap a new one in.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0108UXWK6/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Shit that’s awesome. In your line of work, these things are a fucking no-brainer. And a tax write off to boot! just be careful depreciating them too quickly - too many ‘Smaug ate my drone’ year one write-offs and the ATO might cotton-on…
You’re the exact right person to ask: will a drone survive a direct hit from the Nemesis?
No idea but I suspect it would be fine. Sounds like you need to science the shit out of this, my man… make it happen!
A few things I learned as a 100% n00b drone pilot, for that UDI U818A model we have
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Start indoors, I think, in any room with about 4-5 feet of clear area. We had some (cough) bad luck learning the absolute basics while starting outdoors, and there’s the wind factor too. Those rotor protectors work!
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Remember the white rotors are the “front” of the drone when operating. There’s also a bright white LED in the front, and the LED lights underneath are blue (front) / red (rear) to hint about orientation as well.
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Another thing we kinda learned the hard way: follow the manual instructions on order of power-up. To launch: power up remote, then the drone. To shut down: power down drone, then the remote. Opposite order.
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Mode 1 (beginner mode) limits how hard you can tilt the drone in any direction and is the default. We were wondering why we could barely move forward outside in a breeze and then I realized why. Switched to mode 2 (regular mode) and bam, now we’re cooking.
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Grit and sand is hell on the gears that drive the props. I didn’t even realize this until we were testing on a baseball field and the props started acting a bit weird. I removed the tiny bits of grit in the gears with a knife and it’s OK so far. It does come with replacement gears, but only the tiny ones (there are two, one large, one tiny, per rotor). It also includes 4 replacement props!
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There is an obvious beeping low battery alert on the controller, so you’ll know when to swap batteries (the kit comes with one extra). Extra batteries were super cheap, for $18 I got a 4 port charger and 5 more batteries. Very easy to swap out as well. We got about the promised 8 minutes of runtime per battery.
We have yet to use the video feature, I slapped the included 4gb SD card in there (they also include a USB reader) and we’ll give that a shot later.
Anyway this UDI U818A is great fun for me and my 8 year old son… at $47 I think it’s a fantastic deal and I heartily recommend it for any other drone n00bs like myself!
With Mavics and Phantoms we generally recover to the hands of someone other than the pilot flying. It looks dangerous at first, but my crews have been comfortable with it. For boat recovery I can’t imagine another way… I had some carrier landings before we started doing that :) (State-level natural resource agency/university setting)
Do you turn off the downward sensors when hand-recovering the Mavics? I remember the first time I tried to hand-recover (after doing it all the time with the Phantom) and the Mavic went to full-throttle to try to get away from my hand. :)
Glad you’re enjoying the Mavic, Krayzkrok. That’s footage is awesome – can’t wait to see more.
I have a co-worker that ran his mavic into the side of a house. Don’t do that. His repair cost from DJI was half the purchase price.
Speaking of, how are you guys handling repairs you’ve needed to make?
I bought DJI Care Refresh and used it on the one stupid crash I’ve had. So surprisingly, it was worth buying. Of course, I’ve had my Mavic for a year now, and I don’t think you can renew it…
lol, you guys need to get some more sport oriented drones - crashing is a way of life. Makes you appreciated the automated systems on board the DJI et als.
Well for what it’s worth, they did give him great feedback and a breakdown of what was broken and the repair time. He was also back up and flying with it fairly quickly.
Back in my RC car days, though, you could source a lot of spare parts. I’m really surprised with chinese manufacturing of nearly anything and 3D printing that someone hasn’t picked up the slack here with a 3rd party solution similar to phone repair places.
So this is weird:
We made our first videos using the inexpensive UDI U818A I referenced earlier. They came out OK, 1280x720, fixed camera position of course, written to the 4GB SD card that was bundled. Unfortunately when I upload them to YouTube they corrupt for some odd reason. The default Windows 10 media player absoutely hates these video files, too, but MPHC and other alternative video players open them fine.
video file format details
General
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 84.1 MiB
Duration : 30s 767ms
Overall bit rate : 22.9 Mbps
Video
ID : 0
Format : JPEG
Codec ID : MJPG
Duration : 30s 767ms
Bit rate : 22.4 Mbps
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:2
Bit depth : 8 bits
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.810
Stream size : 82.2 MiB (98%)
Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings, Endianness : Little
Format settings, Sign : Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 30s 0ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 512 Kbps
Channel(s) : 1 channel
Sampling rate : 32.0 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 1.83 MiB (2%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 1026 ms (30.77 video frames)
Why the heck do they even have an audio track on these video files, all you can hear is the super loud whine of the rotors anyway?
I did notice that having a SD card active reduces battery life, especially when recording video! I suppose that is expected.
I also tested how far you can fly with the low battery warning on the controller and it’s quite forgiving – maybe last 10-15% even? Eventually you’ll notice you have to give it more and more throttle than usual, and that’s when you absolutely want to start reeling it in. But you don’t need to land the minute the beeping starts.
We’ve had a few minor spills and the drone is plenty survivable, so I continue to recommend this model if you want to dip your feet in the water. Price seems to have gone up to around $55-$60 versus the $47 I paid, so I dunno!