The FAA is helping protect people like you: people who went to the trouble to get your license and have now been relegated by auto-pilot tech.

If technology is a threat to a bureaucracy, the bureaucracy will ban the tech whenever and where-ever it can.

No, the FAA already ruined it for everyone by redefining the rules against congressional legislation. They've also ruined it for business by not having any sort of a plan to allow them to be used commercially.

IMO people like you who think good behavior will let you have nice things when your government is suppose to work for you are the problem.

I'm positing the farmer owns his own airspace: and if he wants to contract someone to fly his field with 20-pound drone or a paper airplane I believe he has the right to do so without anyone's permission.

And if the drone flies off course and crashes into the neighbors house/barn/cattle: the contractor is as liable as anyone trespassing and destroying property with a vehicle.

You may want to up that privacy fence. FAA rule 103 allows ultra-lights (unlicensed light-frame aircraft/no pilots license needed) to fly up to 1200 feet (and lower) right over your property and look right in your window no questions asked, no permission needed.

But contracted semi-autonomous/para-drones can't take pictures of a land owners own property with the land owners permission -- without first having an FAA permit, according to the FAA's spiel. And you can't get one! Permits are only granted to law enforcement and big foreign oil concerns flying the backside of Alaska.

Actually, constructing a building is constructing "an obstacle" (as long as said constructions whole intent is not to impair air traffic aka "spite towers"). Air traffic must now avoid the new obstacle by 500 ft.

I believe there is a concept called "enjoyment of the land". The FAA has to pay land-owners for navigation right-of-way if flights (usually near airports) routinely go below 500 feet. Obviously not a legal coat hook, but sure seems like an indication the land owner owns that space.

Heck, now that I think about it I want the FAA to compensate me for limiting the use of my own airspace by threatening to fine me!

Which is why most companies won't sign-off on it (and I'm not inspecting pipelines with mine). Though farmers (even incorporated ones) probably have a better chance of this playing out in court in their favor than any other venture.

Still haven't heard if the FAA's appeal was ever in court.

FAA Fine Dismissed

Yes, I noticed that. Maybe as a reminder that the rest of the world is moving on with this whilst the US government manages to (at least verbally) stifle innovation.

And as one of the thousands of people who own a UAS in "the land of the free" who can't use it for anything but recreation, I never miss an opportunity to disparage FAA policy and pseudo-policy regarding drone use.

Agree. Either by design or ineptitude the FAA couldn't put together a workable process for commercial UAS

For farmers (private land owners) below the navigational airspace (500 feet above obstacles) IMO this the land-owner's property and non of the FAA's domain.

i.e. the FAA is blowing smoke to threaten people out of working their own land until they can contort it into a regulatory money pump.

I only highlighted this because of sabri's reply:

He doesn't know if you are able to work for him, but he does have the power to permit you to work for him.

My Uncle used to get me and my cousins with this nuance all the time. So it was kind of reflex to highlight it here.

Obviously, that's what you're hearing, because that's what you think. But there's a huge difference between this and the interstate highway system: the interstate highway does not tell you what to do (well, unless you're on it, or you happen to be one of the properties condemned in order to build it...)

Using the freeway is optional. Food, clothing, shelter to the degree required isn't as much. The moment you abstract basic human needs/wants away from the source the more chance there is for misery: since the person most in tune with what they need is the person himself. Someone else in a far away city through malice or negligence sooner or later is going to get it wrong.

IMO, government control should have an exponential scale. Tyranny begins at home, and should taper off from there precipitously.

1. As an individual I should have exclusive rule over my thoughts, my speech, my body, and my property. (kids you don't get that until your old enough to have some common sense!)
2. My neighborhood and town has lots to say over how things should be conducted. That's fine: though it should do as little as possible about my property. And next to nothing about my person.
3. Even less control at the county level.
4. My state should have even less control.
5. Finally the national/federal government should have the very least amount of control over my person.

All levels should defend me, the individual. So two major caveats for the federal level: they get to repel foreign invaders, and they may see to it that no level of rule may be enacted at other level that deprives me of my ability to move freely or to defend my own body. (Civil war kind of decided that one: except hello Obama Care! Oh the irony of history...)

Okay, we're a stone's throw from the east side of Jupiter on all of this right now in the United States. But that's the way I think it was suppose to run.

Central planning that has direct control of the individual is courting equal misery for the common man: the author of TFA is promoting a way to achieve it.

i.e.

We the central planners will determine what you need, because anything you think you need, is just a want -- at least that's what we think -- and since we're in charge, we decide. This is just not something you little citizens think about enough!