Welcome to this edition of Drone Law Pro Radio. Your source of information for everything UAV. We are drone attorneys and we speak drone.
Welcome to Drone Law Pro Radio. We are broadcasting today from Miami, actually South Beach, Florida, where it’s sunny and beautiful unlike my home state of Michigan. I am happy to be here and I am happy you are here too.
Today, we are going to be talking about the importance of safety and the importance of compliance to the growth of the UAV market. We hear it all the time in our Facebook post and our Twitter post and the forums we participate; there are a lot of pilots out there that simply do not like the FAA. They don’t want to become Part 107 pilots. They don’t want to get their remote pilot certificate. They think Part 107 regulations finalized by the FAA this year are inappropriate, are overreaching or beyond the jurisdiction of the FAA. Just fill in the blank. There are pilots out there that simply to not like the UAV regulation. Hey, I get it, a lot of people get it, a lot of people understand that point of view but let me tell you what the better approaches and why. If you are a drone pilot, or a drone company looking to build a drone business, you’ve got one fundamental choice. You can buck the FAA’s rules and Part 107 regulations, you can treat them with disgust and simply ignore them, when it’s convenient for you to do so, or you can embrace the Part 107 regulations the FAA’s approach and the regulatory framework.
So, which one should you do? Here is what I propose, you need to do what most of the people in the industry are doing and believe me, many of these people, these insiders, these folks who’ve been part of the Part 107 experience since 2012 when the FAA really buckled down and started to develop regulations, they like it either. But the better course of action is to embrace the regulations, fly within the regulations, educate other pilots on the importance of flying within the rules of Part 107, and go through the process installed by the FAA. If there is an incident involving a manned aircraft and a drone, or someone is seriously injured because of a drone, or a drone crashes into a crowd, that is going to be front page headlines. So, the more tolerance we have for the fly by night pilots or the pilots who simply want to do whenever they want, irrespective of what the FAA or Part 107 have to say about flying over crowds for instance, well the more problems that we’re going to have, because guess what? Just as Kevin Morris’ from Minneapolis FAASTeam said in his recent webinar, the only thing that is going to get reported on in this new and emerging technology are the problems, are the injuries, are the accidents and a lot of that reporting will be wrong. It will be way off base, but guess what, the press is not willing to report the correct story once it’s revealed that, oh by the way there wasn’t a close call between a drone and a manned aircraft, or the reason why a particular drone crashed into a structure is because of pilot error. The press is never going to report on that. All of the population, the populist, the legislators, the state legislators, Federal legislators, municipalities, the only thing they are ever going to see is the bad headline; they are never going to see the good headline. And guess what, the FAA and Congress can shut down or increase the regulations for drones anytime.
So you tell me, what’s better, embrace the regulations and encourage safety, make sure that other pilots abide by the rules, create conversation that embraces and supports the regulatory framework or simply thumb your nose at the regulations and hope to the best? Those of us who are involved in these every days, who are trying to build the UAV market, knows that there is only one right answer here. Drone pilots and drone companies need to step it up here and embrace the regulatory framework like most are doing. To argue back to those who simply want to do what they want or go on rants against the FAA, saying I’m a great pilot and I don’t need to comply, none of that is helpful. We’ve been doing new and emerging technology regulate technology company representation since 2003 and we have seen this many times before. The new regulatory framework can help grow and create the market because customers needing trusts UAV services and need to trust drones and the FAA’s Part 107 regulation provides a foundation for that trust as long as people are complying, supporting, and participating in the regulatory framework. So yes, you can have your opinion and voice your opinion to the FAA. But when you see that Facebook post which essentially amounts to screw the FAA, screw the regulations, you need to comment back, you need to continue to articulate the importance of the regulations and importance of compliance. My name is drone attorney Enrico Schaffer from sunny Miami and we’ll see you next time.
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