Judge: FAA Can’t Fine Drone Pilot for “Reckless” Flying

Even as Amazon announces its intentions to
launch delivery drones, beer companies try to
send brews aloft, and aerial photographers plunk down credit
cards to buy their very own quadcopter from Chris Anderson,
the bottom of every article about the brave new drone-tastic world
just over the horizon had a sentence like this:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said that it will
issue regulations for the use of commercial drones in
2015. 

Last month, the FAA announced that it might consider some early
approvals on a case-by-case basis and there were other signs the
agency’s
control of drones was slipping. But a new administrative court
ruling
casts doubt on whether such rule and permissions from the body
that regulates all things airborne would even be binding:

Raphael Pirker, who had been docked $10,000 by the Federal
Aviation Administration for using a drone to shoot a promotional
video, won an appeal yesterday of the fine for reckless flying. The
judge in the dispute dismissed the first-ever such fine, saying the
FAA has no authority over small unmanned aircraft….

Patrick Geraghty, the administrative law judge for the National
Transportation Safety Board who decided on the appeal, said that at
the time of Pirker’s flight to shoot a promotional video over the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville on Oct. 17, 2011, “there
was no enforceable FAA rule” on the type of model aircraft he
used.

If he accepted the FAA’s argument, it would mean that “a flight
in the air of a paper aircraft, or a toy balsa wood glider, could
subject the operator to” FAA’s penalties, Geraghty wrote in his
decision.

The FAA can (and likely will) appeal the ruling, but this leaves
big commercial players and mom-and-pop drone shops alike in an even
greater state of legal limbo in the meantime.