Ben Sclair, a well known General Aviation advocate has written an article about the Registration Task Force. As usual, Ben amazes me with his grasp of the situation.
What's most amazing is that this is from Ben Sclair. Ben comes from a family that lives and breathes General Aviation. His father, Dave Sclair, started General Aviation News 20 years ago. Dave retired to an airpark in Oregon and handed the publishing to Ben.
Ben could easily have taken GAN in a different direction. Like the AOPA - head in the sand about Drones, or like the EAA - "look people interested in aviation; let's invite them", but Ben's common-sense view from a General Aviation advocate is quite refreshing.
Well, they do if you can wrap your head around the timeframe that government operates in. When the current Aircraft Registration process was introduced, it was appropriate and logical for the time. The forms were three-part carbon-paper forms that were manually processed. Later, NCR paper replaced the carbon sheets. Oklahoma City receives about ten to twenty registrations a month, so there was no pressure to change anything. They are still manually processed, but I hear that Oklahoma City FAA was looking at computerizing recently. They will need it to register two million model aircraft by the end of the year.
The thing that I'm afraid of is that the Government is going to rush to get these so-called "requirements" out the door, and not much though will go into it... which in the end is going to hurt us all.
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For the record. I'm not against regulation, I'm just against bad regulation. I am not in the least opposed to making owners of these small aircraft operate them safely. But the proposed registry won't even move the needle on the frequency of reported drone sightings, let alone do anything to curtail irresponsible flights.
An emergency rule in less than six weeks to register 2-million model aircraft? Really? What could possibly go wrong?
Just because an rogue drone might cause an accident smacks of "Minority Report". The FAA is going to make an emergency rule for something that has not happened yet?
