Drone Regulation In The Wings

Will there be a drone hanging from your Christmas stocking, or perhaps vice versa? As many as a million drones (unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs) are expected to be sold for the holiday season, part of a trend that the FAA finds alarming, and which has given one New Yorker fiction writer inspiration for a creepy story about a not-to-distant future in which the threat of drones as an instrument of terrorism dominate our daily life. For better or worse, there’s no Second Amendment right to fly a drone, but the commercial, practical and popular interest in the technology is powerful, so a battle is no doubt shaping up. A Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee recently submitted recommendations for how small an aircraft should have to be before it and/or its owner would be exempt from a registration requirement, and per these recommendations a UAV would have to be quite tiny indeed to slip out from under what will no doubt be attacked as “the heavy hand of regulation.” A Denton’s client advisory takes a look at what’s being proposed.