Many in the UK who unwrapped a new drone this Christmas may face a rude awakening next week, when they will have to take a theory test before being allowed to fly outdoors. From 1 January, those intending to fly drones or model aircraft weighing 100g or more outside must complete a Civil Aviation Authority (CCA) online theory test to get a Flyer ID - something previously only needed for heavier drones. The regulator believes up to half a million people in the UK may be impacted by its new requirements. CAA spokesperson Jonathan Nicholson said with drones becoming a common Christmas present it was important people knew how to comply with the law. With the new drone rules coming into force this week, all drone users must register, get a Flyer ID and follow the regulations, he said.

We present a novel application of Goal-Directed Answer Set Programming that digitizes the model aircraft operator's compliance verification against the Academy of Model Aircrafts (AMA) safety code. The AMA safety code regulates how AMA flyers operate Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for limited recreational purposes. Flying drones and their operators are subject to various rules before and after the operation of the aircraft to ensure safe flights. In this paper, we leverage Answer Set Programming to encode the AMA safety code and automate compliance checks. To check compliance, we use the s(CASP) which is a goal-directed ASP engine. By using s(CASP) the operators can easily check for violations and obtain a justification tree explaining the cause of the violations in human-readable natural language. Further, we implement an algorithm to help the operators obtain the minimal set of conditions that need to be satisfied in order to pass the compliance check. We develop a front-end questionnaire interface that accepts various conditions and use the backend s(CASP) engine to evaluate whether the conditions adhere to the regulations. We also leverage s(CASP) implemented in SWI-Prolog, where SWI-Prolog exposes the reasoning capabilities of s(CASP) as a REST service. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of ASP in the AMA and Avionics Compliance and Certification space.

Last week saw the 2018 FAA Reauthorization Act become law, and the new legislation has quite a few implications for people who fly small drones or model aircraft as a hobby. Before diving into the latest changes, it's worth reviewing how the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has regulated such things in the past. Way back in 1981, the FAA issued an "Advisory Circular" that provided guidance for people flying model aircraft. Most modelers considered those guidelines reasonable enough, but if you didn't conform to them, it was no big deal--they weren't rules, just recommendations. So, for example, if you flew a model sailplane and caught a thermal that took it more than 400 feet off the ground, the FAA really couldn't object that you were in violation of its advice to keep lower.

I'm preparing to return to a pastime that I gave up a few years ago: flying radio-controlled model airplanes by first-person view, or FPV. Telemetry to Go: My ground station for receiving video was a battery-powered Raspberry Pi connected to two Wi-Fi dongles [top]. On board the plane, I mounted a camera module attached to a Pi Zero [bottom]. The final nail in the coffin was that I discovered that the Raspberry Pi Zero's camera connector wasn't making a very solid connection to its ribbon cable.

The laws governing the use of drones in the United States are changing so fast it can be hard to keep up. But I'd like to explore here some proposed drone rules that never went into effect because the legislation that described them, Senate bill 2658 (the Federal Aviation Administration Reauthorization Act of 2016), was never passed. Why care about rules that didn't become law? It's my theory that although the legislation died in Congress last year, the people championing various parts of it are still around and may yet influence future laws. So an examination of the ill-fated legislation could provide a window on what the future holds for drone operators.

Drone law is, like the wobbly uncrewed aircraft themselves, hardly settled law. On Friday, the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals overturned an existing rule from the FAA that mandated drone users register in a federal database in an attempt to enforce accountability. According to the decision, the rule did not have the legal standing to apply to anyone flying for hobby or recreational purposes, which is likely most of the over 800,000 people who registered. In the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, Congress specified special rules for model airplanes, flown for hobby or recreational purposes, and charged the FAA with creating rules to govern the growing field of small unmanned aerial vehicles, specifically ones that fell outside this hobbyist/model airplane exception. In December 2015, the FAA announced that all owners of unmanned vehicles weighing more than 250 grams (or roughly as much as two sticks of butter) had to register as a drone operator, in a national database of drone users.

Is it just a new version of the model aircraft that decades of schoolchildren have flown in their backyards and parks with little harm to people or property? Or is it a far more dangerous, often much more substantial, piece of machinery that can fly thousands of feet in the air, requires little or no training to get off the ground and can cause serious damage? And that's a problem because, as a federal appeals court noted last week, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't have the authority to regulate model aircraft. This means the FAA must drop its 18-month-old requirement that owners of large recreational drones (defined as between 0.55 pound and 55 pounds) register with a federal database before they take to the air and possibly blunder into the path of a commercial jet. Congress must fix this, and quickly.

Since December of 2015, Americans have been required to register any drone that weighs more than two sticks of butter with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It's a minor hassle and costs a little bit of money and seems like a reasonable idea considering how many people are flying sizeable drones nowadays. However, there was one particular group that really didn't appreciate the new ruling: model aircraft enthusiasts. One of them sued the FAA in February of 2016, and a federal court in Washington, D.C. ruled in favor of hobbyists, meaning that the FAA can no longer require you (or anyone else) to register their personal drones. Here's the important bit of the ruling (you can read the whole thing here): In short, the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act provides that the FAA "may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft," yet the FAA's 2015 Registration Rule is a "rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft."

An appeals court on Friday struck down a Federal Aviation Administration rule that required owners of drones used for recreation to register their craft. The ruling was a victory for hobbyists and a setback for the FAA, which cited safety concerns as it tried to tighten regulation of the fast-growing army of drone operators. Some pilots of commercial airliners have reported close calls with drones flying near airports. About 760,000 hobbyists have registered more than 1.6 million drones since 2015, and sales have skyrocketed. The FAA estimates that hobbyists will buy 2.3 million drones this year and 13 million by the end of 2020.

The Federal Aviation Administration has said that online shopping powerhouse Amazon may not employ drones to deliver packages, at least not anytime soon. The revelation was buried in a FAA document (PDF) unveiled Monday seeking public comment on its policy on drones, or what the agency calls "model aircraft." The FAA has maintained since at least 2007 that the commercial operation of drones is illegal. A federal judge ruled in March, however, that the FAA enacted the regulations illegally because it did not take public input before adopting the rules, which is a violation of federal law. Flight regulators have appealed the decision, maintaining that commercial applications are still barred.