DRONEon 1...
There are few public parks with model aircraft flying sites provided by Palm Beach County - Parks & Recreation where people go to visit and fly airplanes, helicopters and drones.One problem is many are within 50 miles of president Trump's Mar-a-Lago retreat and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) has banned all model aircraft on days when he's in town.
I believe the normal restrictions are 400 feet maximum altitude and no flying within 5 miles of a commercial airport.
So any Palm Beach modellers who only fly weekends and holidays get shut down when the president is at Mar-a-Lago on those days.
Happy flying... !
Comments (8)
Model aircraft are only good for line-if-sight and cannot fly a distance of a mile from the pilot. If they lose transmitter signal, they go into 'fail safe' and power down.
Sophisticated drones with GPS can be programmed for a few miles, but return home when the signal to the transmitter is lost.
Thanks. With the advent of armed drones, I was wondering about that.
Have you looked at shotgun prices lately? Very, very reasonable. And you may check Beeman to see if air-powered shotguns are still made. They don't make noise.
All the legitimate places I've seen model aircraft flown require you to keep them in sight.
It appears the laws have changed over the years, now they are requiring each drone to have individual registration and failure could be subject to civil and/or criminal penalties including fines up to $250,000 and prison.
My opinion says this is crazy serious.
I'll address the hobby part mostly and leave out the commercial registration. Not long ago it was stated that more than 770,000 hobby drone pilots had been registered with the FAA. That number is greater than the number of licensed pilots of full-scale aircraft.
I scanned the FAA website and they have definitions of Unmanned Aircraft of purchased (ready to fly) versus ones put together from various manufacturers parts. All that legislation is an attempt to restrict the number of pilots. Some of my friends have switched to micro-drones small enough to race indoors. No registration is required.
(cough) you call that fun??
There are a few (very expensive) models that can be programmed to fly a defined course of GPS weigh-points without the need to communicate with the transmitter. This would be like the models Amazon is experimenting with. Type in some coordinates and it carries out the instructions autonomously.
I'm sure there are stories of high flying drones crossing the Mexican border dropping off packages of cash in exchange for drugs. I haven't checked payloads of drones but I've seen some large models that carry high resolution video equipment used in the filming of commercials... a few pounds at the most.
All of these drones require Li-Po batteries that provide lots of power with much less weight than older styles of batteries. The problem is flight time. Less than 15 minutes of flight is pretty standard. There is a trade off with bigger batteries for more flight time, but the added weight means less flight time. At some point you negate the benefit of a bigger battery.