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Feds’ drone rules
ignore public comment period; invite lawsuits
By Eric Boehm / December 17, 2015 / News
The rules were announced Monday. The
FAA wants all drone users to register devices by February 2016 through a
new web-based tracking system, which is still being completed.
Registration will cost $5, according to the FAA.
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 “Make no mistake: Unmanned aircraft enthusiasts are aviators, and with that
title comes a great deal of responsibility,” Anthony Foxx, secretary of the U.S.
Department of Transportation, says in a statement announcing the new rules.
SEE ALSO: FAA wants to be the DMV for flying toys
Perhaps so, but the federal government has a responsibility to listen to the
public before issuing new regulations, too.
Marc Scribner, a research fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a
Washington, D.C., think tank, says the FAA moved too quickly with the new
regulations and tried to substitute a task force “of 25 to 30 diverse
representatives from the (drone) and manned aviation industries” for an actual
public comment period.
The FAA, as part of the process of releasing the new rules, said the large
projected increase in the number of privately owned drones creates an immediate
safety risk to the nation’s air traffic control system. The agency can’t spend
the necessary time to collect and sift through public comments.
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 “This is entirely predictable,” said Scribner. “It is also a weak
defense of a naked regulatory power grab.”
Scribner says the FAA is inviting litigation because it ignored
the public comment period and failed to explain how a simple
registration process will do anything to prevent the supposed
aviation risk created by drones.
The rules are about what you’d expect of anything produced by
Washington bureaucrats and lawyers. The document is 210-pages long —
single-spaced, with small text — but the first 180 pages are
dedicated to introducing and explaining the rules. The actual rule
changes are about 10 pages. According to one analysis, the actual
rule comprises less than 5 percent of the total verbiage.
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