Action Alert
The FAA Proposed New Drone Rules – You’ll want to read this one. Our federal agency addiction to taxpayer money has found a new outlet in the FAA. In the interest of “safety” and “protection” of the general public, the geniuses at the FAA are proposing an annual tax on every RC airplane you own. This is the typical eat an elephant a bite at a time approach:
- Implement a registration requirement. It’s easy, cheap, one registration, all planes. Keep the sheep quiet.
- Expand the registration requirement to include fees for each plane instead of just the pilot.
- Satisfy the corporate lobbyists by using that windfall of cash to build a “monitoring system” so some federally funded jackhat can sit in a federally funded facility and send a ticket to your house when your kid flys his race quad around the backyard.
What This Will Mean
Think it’s not going to happen? Watch….
There are commercial entities (anyone in the transponder and wireless business) will benefit through subscriptions to the drone id service. So watch Verizon and AT&T get in on the action quick with their insatiable demand to add connections. Notice the mandate requires drone ID assets to have access to the Internet? Where do you suppose that will come from?
I’d like for someone, anyone to explain what actual problems these FAA Proposed Drone Rules will solve. All I can say is I feel like the government is stomping the heart and soul of RC Modeling because they can’t delineate the differences among troublesome actors, commercial needs, lobbyists, and hobbyists.
Of course, as with most things government related, money has to be at the heart of it. So if you have a hangar full of airplanes, you’ll be sending (mark my words) an annually increasing payment to the feds so they can continue to run another boondoggle they refer to as “drone id” through the proposed drone rules.
What You Can Do
Here is the information you’ll want to start with:
FAA Press Release
After you familiarize yourself with what the FAA is trying to do [get your money], you’ll want to respond to the request for comments before March 2, 2020. I suggest you maintain a civil tone in any correspondence you send, but do not be afraid to clearly state any objections you might have as a hobbyist being lumped in with commercial operators so as one of the many sheeple, you can be fleeced to pay for the infrastructure to follow if this ridiculous set of rules is imposed on the hobbyist community.
It’s also time to start asking the AMA to figure out how to curb this disaster. AMA members make annual contributions to fund a very large organization. It’s time they start helping protect the interests of hobbyists.