FEMA Grounds Private Drones That Were Helping To Map Boulder Floods 356
First time accepted submitter MrMagooAZ writes "An interesting article about a questionable reaction by FEMA in response to the flooding in Colorado. It seems a small firm was working free of charge with County officials to use drones to map the area and provide near-real-time maps of the flood damage. When FEMA took control of operations one of their first acts appears to have been to not only ground the drones, but threaten the operators. 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help you?'"
The drone model in question has permits from the FAA to be flown around even. The drones were replaced with manned craft that, due to the terrain, where unable to fly low enough to make useful maps.
Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's because we have a big US Defense Drones (Score:5, Informative)
I cheated and read the article. They WERE US Defense Contractor drones that FEMA shut down.
Re:Could this be due to the helicopter operations? (Score:5, Informative)
Bah, hate replying to my own comment, there is a NOTAM: http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4481.html
"No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM (except as described)."
Reason for NOTAM : TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR LARIMER COUNTY FLOODING SAR
So the drone operators are in violation of FAA rules.
Re:Could this be due to the helicopter operations? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Could this be due to the helicopter operations? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you didn't even read the NOTAM.
"Altitude: From the surface up to and including 13000 feet MSL"
I actually got the wrong NOTAM, which is why the date is wrong. The right one is http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_3_4333.html and was issued back on September 14th. It says "Altitude: From the surface up to and including 11500 feet MSL"
Re:What Do You Expect? It's FEMA. (Score:4, Informative)
Hurricane Sandy. Even Governor Christie (GOP) complemented [thehill.com] the Obama administration on its response. Which incurred a political cost. So I don't think he made his comments lightly.
Yes, I am a "drone" pilot (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, I fly them, and work with the engineers who design them. These things, and more specifically, the people who advocate for them, are a menace. They have no semblance of airworthiness, are not designed to be safe in the airspace, and are generally (the small ones) flown by people who have neither the training nor the operating procedures to safely fly them. There's a reason the global hawk costs $200M and the reaper $60M. That because more than a million engineering hours has been put into each to make them airworthy. The small remote control toys have no redundancy of design in structure, programming, hardware architecture, propulsion or datalinks, and generally flown by people who have no concept of how many people they can hurt by launching them up at people who are properly using the airspace.
When the weather's bad, aviation doesn't stop, you just don't see it. Pilots fly in the clouds every day, throughout the world. No UAV has a safety system that will allow it to safely fly near other aircraft, much less ones that the operator can't see. Do you just casually assume that nobody was flying that day with SWIR or SAR imagers Both of those will punch through the clouds and can be safely flown. Would be a damn shame to kill them. Geography of that area, in particular, limits IFR flight of helicopters, but in many large area disasters, helicopters are flying in and out of the clouds on IFR flight plans. Would be really bad to take out a life flight helicopter because your little quadcopter doesn't have robust communications links.