FAA Restriction on FPV Flying

"Model Aircraft" drones are useful. Not just a little. They can save lives, catch bad guys, help put out fires, improve crops, climb safely to heights and places dangerous to people. 

They can also be flown by jack-asses who endanger other aircraft and people on the ground.

Our society has a mechanism to deal with this problem: licensing. You can't drive to the airport and go fly a plane without a pilots license. You can't operate a car without a drivers license. You can't pick up a ham radio and start transmitting without a ham license. You can't carry a concealed firearm (in Colorado) without a license.

All of these things are potentially dangerous and disruptive. Everyone would like to know that the people engaging in these activities are at least minimally competent and accountable. Licensing is apparently working for cars, planes, ham radios and concealed firearms. They've been licensed activities for years and society still functions pretty well.

Let's do the same thing with "drones" and "first person view" flying. The vast majority of pilots aren't looking to cause mayhem. Quite the contrary, FPV pilots are pioneering technologies that will help police safely chase down fleeing criminals, find lost people in the woods, inspect power plants, bridges, power lines, oil fields. Let the hobbyists innovate. Let them build fantastic tools to enable this bright future.

Rather than ban FPV flying, define a licensing path to ensure practitioners are informed, competent and accountable. Persons unwilling to do the work to gain a license can be subject to penalties similar to driving without a license. 

Drones are far too useful to encumber with outright bans. They are too inexpensive and easy to build to realistically suppress. Provide a legal path for responsible "model aircraft" pilots.

(I posted the above to the FAA Docket #FAA-2014-0396-0001 comments on www.regulations.gov. There were a very healthy 30,105 comments last I checked.)

Flying Slow In-close vs Fast and Far

When try tricks that take up 30ft of horizontal airspace - there's a lot of time to think about and plan your next move.

When your aircraft is 10 inches from your subject and your sliding right while panning left - your making dozens of the same plans and moves every few seconds. 

It's more difficult to be smooth and precise in a slow close in situation than executing a tight, symmetrical, repeatable figure 8 at high speed. 

Zeiss Cinemizer FPV Goggles/Glasses

I'm flying with the Zeiss Cinemizer OLED glasses. They're beautiful with bright hi-res 870x500 OLED screens. They have an HDMI port and a plain AV (composite) NTSC/PAL inputs - meaning you can attach almost anything. 

The glasses support a variety of 3D formats and I can't wait to fly stereoscopic FPV.

Two things I'd like to see improved.

First, they offer an optional set of eye-cups/sun-shades that black out your peripheral vision. The glasses are fit to your face by inserting these tiny (very lose-able) plastic pieces between the nose pad and the glasses. However, the sun-shade interferes with these pieces forcing a choice between using the shades or having the glasses line up properly with your eyes. If you have a face that doesn't require you to use any of the inserts - you're fine.

Itty Bitty Losable Nose-pad Inserts

Itty Bitty Losable Nose-pad Inserts

Second, my first impression of the glasses was tainted because they had a serious violet chromatic aberration. Very very distracting. It turned out that the severity of the violet flares was due to a misfit of glasses to my face. You need to get your pupils aligned to the optical axis of the eyepieces. Thus, the use of the nose adjustment inserts. Here's the rub: there is no inter-occular distance adjustment (imagine laying a ruler across the bridge of your nose and measuring the distance from the center of your left pupil to the center of your right).  I'm 6'3" with a fat head to match - so my eyes are a little further apart than average. So I'm unable to align both eyes - leaving me to choose which eye will see a clean image and which will see violet flares.

For a set of glasses this expensive and video/optics this nice, a couple of rack and pinion adjustments for the nose pad and inter-occular distance would be nice. It would improve the experience tremendously and get rid of those silly, guaranteed to get dropped in a wheat field, tiny plastic nose pad spacers.

T3CHDad RC Logger

Picked up a copy of T3CHDad RC Logger for iPhone to keep track of battery cycles and flight times. The interface is a little dated - could use an update for iOS 7 and when logging flights, there appears to be a bug where the "Power Source" (selecting which battery was used) isn't shown - but it works to keep track of at least flights and notes.

I am unsure this will survive the use of a ground station. The 2.4Ghz bluetooth downlink radio will be here on Monday and I can start using the DJI ground station app. This will likely provide a much more detailed and automatic flight log.

The Drones Are Here...

The DJI Vision 2+ arrived on Thursday. I am amazed the stability of the gimbal/camera system. I  copied a video onto my iPad via the SD Card and hit play. I thought the video had frozen but, no, the phantom wasn't moving yet and the picture was rock solid. It remained solid through all sorts of slow speed maneuvers. At more aggressive speeds there's the tiniest vibration - easily fixable in Premier. I hope the ZenMuse Z-15 on the S1000 is as stable (of course it is.)

PhantomVision2+.jpg

The flight time is great - 20 mins of aggressive flying with the gimbal and camera.

A processed image taken as RAW with curves applied to retrieve a little detail in shadows in highlights. A Nikon D4 it ain't - but far better than I expected. 

A processed image taken as RAW with curves applied to retrieve a little detail in shadows in highlights. A Nikon D4 it ain't - but far better than I expected. 

DJI Phantom Vision 2+ 1080p sky line pan.