Drones Could Be Coming to American Skies Sooner Than You Think
By JASON KOEBLER
On message boards and Facebook groups, he’s known as Trappy. Fellow drone hobbyists call him an “aerial anarchist” and marvel at the videos he’s taken with his five-pound foam aircraft of the Statue of Liberty, the French Alps and the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship that ran aground in the Mediterranean in 2012.
“Ask anyone who the most daring pilot is,” says Trappy himself, never one for false modesty. “The answer is probably going to be unanimous.”
But ask officials at the Federal Aviation Administration, and they’ll tell you Trappy is a 29-year-old Swiss thorn in their side named Raphael Pirker, someone who flies recklessly, flaunts the agency’s rules and might even threaten its slow, careful plans for the safe integration of commercial drones into American skies.
In 2011, the FAA slapped Pirker with a $10,000 fine after he flew his Styrofoam drone around the University of Virginia while filming an ad for the university’s medical school. With that, the most famous pilot in the underground drone world became a test case for the FAA’s authority to prohibit people from making money off their hobby.
Pirker has asked a judge with the National Transportation Safety Board to throw out the fine, and a decision is expected any day now. In the meantime, the case exposes what would seem to be a rather large loophole in the law: The FAA has been saying since 2007 that commercial drone use is not allowed, but the agency never went through the official rule-making channels to make it illegal. I asked an FAA spokesman at least five times whether flying a drone for profit is illegal and, after several attempts to follow up, was told that the agency was not prepared to answer that question.
As a result, the case against Pirker hinges not on whether he was operating a drone for commercial purposes but instead on whether the FAA can prove that he was flying in a “reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.” In other words, the FAA needs to show that Pirker could have killed someone or seriously damaged a building with what is essentially a flying toy. If the agency fails and his fine is thrown out, the ruling could be taken as a sign to would-be commercial drone operators that the FAA lacks the authority to stop them—at least until it can issue an official rule, a process that typically takes more than a year. All of which could mean that the agency’s multi-year effort to plan for the gradual introduction of commercial drones—with safety controls and privacy protections to reassure those who worry about allowing small, flying cameras to operate with impunity—would fall by the wayside as the skies immediately open to a buzzing, whirring horde.
Whether the FAA is ready or not, the drone age could suddenly be upon us.
