Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

September 8, 2019 10:34 am

'It Shouldn't Be This Hard To Responsibly Fly a Drone'

The B4UFLY app from America's Federal Aviation Administration tells you where you can and can't fly your drone. But a senior writer for IEEE Spectrum reports that in fact the app "ignores both local and national regulations," and concludes after some field-testing in Oregon that it's "in many situations, worse than useless."Buried in a PDF FAQ (now offline) about the app is this: "Additionally, there may be local laws or ordinances about flying unmanned aircraft affecting your intended flight that are not reflected in this app. It is the responsibility of the operator to know the rules and fly safely at all times." And oh boy is that a huge responsibility that the app itself doesn't even mention, and that enormous loophole means that the B4UFLY app's "good to go" indicator is not just meaningless but in fact giving you the wrong idea entirely.... You could argue that this is worse than no app at all, because the app is actively giving you bad information. You are not, in fact, good to go, and if you're already going, you should stop immediately... When the FAA itself presents the B4UFLY app as a tool that can be used so that "recreational flyers know whether it is safe to fly their drone," that's exactly what it should do. Instead, the app provides only one very limited kind of information about recreational drone safety, without telling the user that it's on them to somehow dig up all the rest of the information that may or may not affect their flight... At the absolute minimum, the B4UFLY app should not tell users that they're "good to go" unless they are flying from an area where drone use is explicitly permitted, like national forests. Anywhere else, users should be instructed to verify that their local laws allow drone use. Is that going to be a huge annoyance that drives users away from the app? Of course. But it's the truth, and if the FAA doesn't like that, they should work with local governments to put the necessary information into the app instead. This article inspired a suggestion from long-time Slashdot reader gurps_npc. "What should be done is that every park that is not too close to an airport or other forbidden zone should set aside a location and a time where they allow and encourage people to use drones."

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot