Drone Journalism Lab

The boot camp will be held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, home of the Drone Journalism Lab. While you're here in Lincoln, we'll mix instruction with practice tests, hands-on flight practice and discussions about how journalism ethics factors in when you want to fly a drone for a story. You'll leave with your own copies of the FAA's main resource books (the FAR AIM and the Pilot Handbook of Aviation Knowledge), the study materials presented and the Drone Journalism Lab's manual. The days will be full -- we'll provide breakfast and lunch so we can keep at it -- and we'll end the day flying drones and putting what you've learned into practice.

The fee for the camp is $195 and it's just a month away. We chose that weekend so you have time to learn here and then study on your own for the test, which becomes available on August 29.

We're working on getting all the details in place. If you're interested and want more information, fill out this form and you'll be the first to know when the registration site goes up and more information becomes available about hotel room blocks and course schedules.

Who:

Under Part 107, you’ll have to be 16 years old, understand English and, most importantly, you have to have a Part 107 operators certificate. What does it take to get one? You have to take a knowledge test “that includes knowledge of airspace, airspace operating requirements, and the use of aeronautical charts” among other things. Generally, the FAA’s tests are 40 questions, multiple choice and you have to get a 70 percent to pass. Because I’m a college professor I have to say this: The test is not hard IF YOU STUDY. Really study. Learn what you need to learn. I missed one question on my knowledge test and I was angry that I missed it. Anyone committed to learning the material can pass the test. And you can take it again. But: The manned aircraft test costs $150 to take. I couldn’t find a cost anywhere, but I would assume it will be the same. Retaking gets expensive fast.

What:

The What rules are pretty much what we have been expecting since last February when the FAA started the process. There are a few tweaks here and there.

No flight above 400 feet. Initially, it was 500 feet, but 400 aligns more with current restrictions and theoretically provides a 100-foot buffer between the lowest flying aircraft and the highest flying drone.

No night flying. Initially, this was day flight only, but like everything in aviation, there are specific rules about what Day and Night are and Day does not include sunrise or sunset -- the Golden Hour so beloved by photographers. It is now possible to fly in that golden hour.

No flight over people. This remains unspecified, which means there’s no specified buffer around people. It means what it means -- no flying over people. BUT, that also means it’s open to interpretation, because ...

No reckless or careless operation. No flight over people plus no reckless or careless flight without specifics about what either of those means gives the FAA wide latitude to go after pilots they feel are operating poorly. So for journalists wanting to use drones to cover big protest marches, it means you’re going to have to rope off a space set back from the main group, keep people out of it, and do not leave that spot. And make sure you document what you’ve done to keep you drone from flying over people and keep them safe for when the FAA inspector comes calling.

Flight in restricted airspace requires Air Traffic Control (ATC) permission. If you are within 5 miles of an airport with a tower, you will have to get permission from that tower to fly. That means large chunks of cities are going to require ATC permission first, and then you have to worry about the above flight over people restriction. How do you get ATC permission? That’s not clear yet, and it is being worked out. However, one nice change is that if you are near a small airport without a tower (Class G airspace) you do NOT need permission mostly because most Class G airports don’t have a tower.

You are not required to have a visual observer, but if you’re going to use First Person View cameras, then you need one.

The drone has to be within the pilot’s line of sight at all times.

Under these rules, just about any story that isn’t breaking news can use drones without a ton of effort (provided you already have a licensed operator). Breaking news coverage in cities with drones will require some work. It will require newsrooms to meet with and discuss what they want with the local air traffic control facility in advance. In some places, operators have been able to get agreements from ATC where so long as the operator stays below an even lower altitude and operates under a set of heavier restrictions, then ATC gives them blanket permission to operate. Letters of agreement, as they’re called, are possible. Requiring pilots to have radios and be in contact with ATC is possible, but not likely because air traffic radio is busy already with manned aircraft. Or, this might just end up as a web form at the airport’s website, as is the case in Tampa and Phoenix. The fact is, we just don’t know how permission in controlled airspace will happen, and it will require local effort to work through it.

Where:

I’ve touched on this, but it bears repeating. Flight in Class B, C, D and E airspace will require permission from ATC. What does that mean? We’ll, those airspace designations will be on the test, but the simplest thing to do if you are in the United States is to go here. Do you see all those circles? Those are airports with restricted airspace around them. If the circle is a fuzzy purple, then you don’t need permission, you just have to be smart and avoid the airport. Or, take a look at the airspace around Lincoln, Neb. A large chunk of the city is in Class C airspace, which is common around the US. Only the largest airports are Class B airspace (think: Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Newark, etc). Inside of five miles from the airport in Lincoln, which includes my office, I’ll need to get permission. Anywhere around here, outside of those five miles, I’m free to operate without ATC clearance.

The headline you’ll see is that the FAA now considers certain educational uses to fall under hobbyist rules. That means students can fly drones for classes that teach about drones under those hobbyist rules and the FAA says that’s fine.

Sounds great, right?

It is regarding one thing. For everything else, it’s not.

Yes, under this interpretation, students can fly. Students can do journalism with a drone for your class. However, faculty can not fly, unless it’s intervening in an emergency. Faculty control of the device has to be minimal. The student is the pilot in command. That means I can’t fly with my students. I can’t even conduct a demonstration flight. I can just hand them the controller and wish them luck.

So there’s the good: I can now take students out to a park more than five miles from an airport (to duck the notification requirements) and they can fly and I can stop fearing another FAA cease and desist order. Because of that fear, I have few students with actual flight experience around. I have been absolutely adamant that I won’t risk more FAA intervention in my program, so the practical outcome is that my students have only ever flown inside. We can now go outside. They can get practice. This is good.

But that’s also the bad: That’s pretty much all I can do. I can make a class assignment. Go photograph something with a drone under these rules. And they can do it. And it pretty much stops there.

If I choose to do research regarding student flight -- if I write about what my students are doing -- then it’s not hobby use. If I ask a student to do something for my research, it’s not hobby use. If we work with a professional partner, it’s not hobby use. 

So if you want to do drone journalism for a class, your students can now do it under FAA rules. But if the output goes beyond the classroom, you’re most likely back at square one, or at the very least in legal limbo that exposes you and your employer to regulatory risk.

Where is square one?

You have two options right now. First is getting a 333 exemption. That requires you to have a pilot’s license and get clearance from the FAA. We are just days short of waiting 8 months for our 333 exemption request. We’ve heard exactly nothing since the FAA says they received it in early October.

Your second option is to wait for Part 107, the new drone rules that the FAA has been saying for months will appear in June. It does away with the pilot’s license requirement and replaces it with a knowledge test. So, if you’re good at math, two months is less than eight months, so your only real choice is to wait.

That is, if you want to do anything more than just assign a student to take a picture with a drone in a class and only a class and you, faculty member, can’t do anything in, near, around or on it.

Is it a step in the right direction? Even this is a debatable point.

Yes, the FAA acknowledging that educators want to use drones and there are many good reasons to support that is a step in the right direction. But the limited ability of faculty to participate in training trades one problem -- regulatory -- and create a gigantic secondary problem I don’t think people appreciate enough: risk and liability.

What the FAA has said is that I, with the most flight experience and the bloody pilot’s license they told me I had to have, can not participate in flight training beyond ground instruction. I can’t be a part of flight operations except to take control in an emergency. So instead of the person with the most flight experience flying, it’s the person with the least. That just doesn’t seem sensible to me. I’m willing to bet my friends in the liability insurance business agree.

My opposition is tepid. I do believe simple reason dictates that people have a right to the skies above their property. I do not want someone flying low over my back yard making a nuisance of themselves. I don’t want to be photographed in places where I have a reasonable expectation that I won’t be. But this bill made few distinctions for egregious conduct and reasonable expectations, so I testified that it created unintended consequences that do not solve the problem the bill attempts to fix. 

My written testimony, most of which I got through in the three minutes I was allotted, is pasted below:

Members of the committee, my name is Matt Waite and I am here testifying today as myself and I do not speak for my employer. But my day job is as a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I founded the Drone Journalism Lab in 2011.  I have spoken around the country and around the world on how journalists might use drones safely, legally and ethically to support their newsgathering missions.

I’m here to testify in opposition of LB720, not because I believe low flying drones over someone’s property is okay. I don’t. I’m a homeowner. I don’t want that either. I’m opposing LB720 because Nebraska’s privacy laws already handle what this bill seeks to stop, does it with less danger of the state trying to regulate areas of federal concern, does it without adding specific technologies into the law and does it without creating unintended consequences.

Under Nebraska Statutes Chapter 20 section 203, one of the few sections of this law NOT amended by this bill, Nebraska recognizes an intrusion upon seclusion tort. The section says that “Any person, firm, or corporation that trespasses or intrudes upon any natural person in his or her place of solitude or seclusion, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, shall be liable for invasion of privacy.” Would not a low-flying drone over someone’s back yard not be highly offensive to a reasonable person? If it’s unclear that an aerial intrusion qualifies, could that not simply be added to this section?

Regulation of airspace is a job delegated to the FAA under our system. Declaring anything below 200 feet a legal hazard zone comes perilously close if not arguably does regulate airspace. States have the right to regulate privacy for their citizens, no question. But if privacy violations are the worry, then what about zoom lenses? If I can get the same photo from 201 feet, doesn’t that obviate the 200-foot restriction and make this bill moot? Does that not create confusion between the amended sections and section 203? And if it’s the low-flying parts that are worrisome, isn’t that better handled in nuisance law, or safety and negligence statutes?

The right to privacy is inextricably linked with the notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy. If I am standing in my front lawn, clearly visible from the street, courts have found that I have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Also, if I can be seen from a manned aircraft flying at the minimum allowable altitudes, then I’m visible from a public street, in a manner of speaking. But this bill says that if I’m seen from a drone at 198 feet, that’s actionable. I could use a kite – I have a 9-foot wide kite capable of carrying a camera in my office – and that would be fine. Or a hot air balloon. Both lack navigation capabilities and don’t qualify as aircraft under the bill’s definitions. But because this bill specifically mentions drones, we’ve carved out a specific technology – one that is rapidly evolving – and ignored the central question: Is it the privacy violation that’s important, or is it the technology we use to violate it?

As for unintended consequences, let’s pretend that I am a farmer, and I do not like my neighbor or his drone that he uses to map his fields. I am standing on my fence line, next to the highway that separates our properties. Mapping drones, to get the whole field, will overfly the end of the row, and because I’m standing at my fence line, it’s going to photograph me. Now I have standing to sue my neighbor that I don’t like, because I have been photographed by a drone over my property and I did not consent to it. Was I harmed in any way? No. But now I can make my neighbor spend money on hiring a lawyer because of this bill. And how is anyone to know? We do not go painting lines on the ground where our property lines are. And our depth perception is pretty well shot at about 90 feet. How can anyone tell if a small drone is a narrowly inside a property line at 190 feet? How is a court to decide? What evidence will anyone be compelled to present?

Drones are going to be a significant part of our economy soon – agriculture will be the single largest user of drones in the US. Creating rules specific to drones makes using them for legitimate purposes more difficult.

Given all of this, is it not better to let section 203, the general intrusion upon seclusion tort, carry the weight? That section of the law doesn’t name specific technologies, doesn’t directly or indirectly legislate airspace, and it doesn’t create unintended consequences. It does clearly say that harassing someone in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy is not okay. And isn’t that what we want?

Background

Since 2003, and largely in response to 9/11, the airspace around stadiums has been increasingly restricted. Any time there is a a Major League Baseball, NFL, NCAA Division I football or NASCAR event going on at a stadium with a 30,000 seat capacity, there is a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) in place from one hour before to one hour after the event. That restriction extends from the ground to 3,000 feet above the ground (AGL or Above Ground Level) and outward 3 nautical miles from the stadium. The airspace is temporarily designated National Defense Airspace.

Flying into a TFR without authorization is a violation of federal aviation regulations.

To fly into a TFR, a pilot must have permission from the air traffic control authority in the area (ATC) and in most cases they must also have an airspace waiver, obtained in advance of the flight. If you have seen planes towing banners, or camera crews in helicopters, or blimps above stadiums, they were required to get permission days in advance of the event, and then get clearance from ATC the day of the event.

The means that the FAA uses to inform pilots of these TFRs is called a Notice To Airmen, or NOTAM. The NOTAM establishing National Defense Airspaces around stadiums is here.

So a drone crashed into my stadium. Was the flight legal?

Almost certainly not. And on two levels: Federal and state.

Federal: As of this writing, only about 1,400 entities are legally able to use drones for commercial purposes, like photographing a sporting event, and none of them have been authorized to fly over stadiums of any kind during an event, large or small. Current commercial restrictions require either 500 feet of separation from people not involved in the operation, or a closed set, where only people expressly involved in the operation are allowed. No permitted commercial operator has been cleared to fly in a TFR, and no operator has been cleared to fly inside a stadium when people are there. It is possible that some day, a UAS will be allowed to fly near or in a stadium, but it has not happened yet. However, it’s highly likely that the operator is not a permitted commercial operator, but you should search for them at the FAA. If the flight is not authorized, the FAA says it is a violation of National Defense Airspace and is subject to fines, a year in federal prison or both. As of this writing, no drone pilot has been charged with violating National Defense Airspace.

State: Several states and municipalities have passed drone restrictions making it a criminal violation to fly in certain areas. Also, attorneys have argued that general negligence and disturbance statutes or ordinances could be applied to drone flights that cause damage or physical harm, or even cause the fear of harm. Contact your local prosecutor for this.

What if my event isn’t MLB, NFL, NASCAR or Division I college football?

If your event isn’t listed as a National Defense Airspace, it’s likely there is not a TFR around it, and the crash would not be considered a violation of that airspace. However, that does not mean it was allowed. The FAA has said that it can pursue operators using UAS “recklessly” and fine them up to $10,000 per flight. So far, only one UAS pilot has been fined by the FAA -- Raphael Pirker -- and he settled out of court after some interesting legal events. In a drone crash in a stadium not covered by a National Defense Airspace, the FAA would still investigate. Also: State and local laws still apply. Contact your local prosecutor.

How do I know if there’s a TFR around my stadium?

If it’s MLB, NFL, NASCAR or NCAA Division I football and your stadium seats more than 30,000, there is. To find the exact NOTAM for your stadium requires you to be a little quick. The FAA posts NOTAMS online, but finding one that has expired is difficult and the NOTAM expires one hour after the event. Your local FAA office or ATC facility will have them if you can’t find them online.

What does a TFR look like? How do I read it?

For the most part, the TFRs are boilerplate. The only thing that changes is the start time and title of the TFR. One thing to note: Unmanned or remote controlled aircraft are specifically mentioned as being prohibited in the NOTAM like this: “ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS; INCLUDING PARACHUTE JUMPING, UNMANNED AIRCRAFT AND REMOTE CONTROLLED AIRCRAFT, ARE PROHIBITED ...“

Here is an example TFR around the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium in Lincoln for a football game against South Alabama.

Start Time: Sep 12 19:00 CDT Event end times are estimated. Check the event schedule for the latest information.

FDC 4/3621 FDC SPECIAL SECURITY NOTICE. SPORTING EVENTS. THIS NOTAM REPLACES FDC NOTAM 9/5151 TO REFLECT A TSA WEBSITE UPDATE AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONCERNING AIRSPACE WAIVERS. FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS IN THIS NOTAM COMPLY WITH STATUTORY MANDATES DETAILED IN SECTION 352 OF PUBLIC LAW 108-7 AS AMENDED BY SECTION 521 OF PUBLIC LAW 108-199. PURSUANT TO 49 USC 40103(B), THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION (FAA) CLASSIFIES THE AIRSPACE DEFINED IN THIS NOTAM AS 'NATIONAL DEFENSE AIRSPACE'. ANY PERSON WHO KNOWINGLY OR WILLFULLY VIOLATES THE RULES PERTAINING TO OPERATIONS IN THIS AIRSPACE MAY BE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN CRIMINAL PENALTIES UNDER 49 USC 46307. PILOTS WHO DO NOT ADHERE TO THE FOLLOWING PROCEDURES MAY BE INTERCEPTED, DETAINED AND INTERVIEWED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT/SECURITY PERSONNEL. PURSUANT TO 14 CFR SECTION 99.7, SPECIAL SECURITY INSTRUCTIONS, COMMENCING ONE HOUR BEFORE THE SCHEDULED TIME OF THE EVENT UNTIL ONE HOUR AFTER THE END OF THE EVENT. ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS; INCLUDING PARACHUTE JUMPING, UNMANNED AIRCRAFT AND REMOTE CONTROLLED AIRCRAFT, ARE PROHIBITED WITHIN A 3 NMR UP TO AND INCLUDING 3000 FT AGL OF ANY STADIUM HAVING A SEATING CAPACITY OF 30,000 OR MORE PEOPLE WHERE EITHER A REGULAR OR POST SEASON MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, OR NCAA DIVISION ONE FOOTBALL GAME IS OCCURRING. THIS NOTAM ALSO APPLIES TO NASCAR SPRINT CUP, INDY CAR, AND CHAMP SERIES RACES EXCLUDING QUALIFYING AND PRE-RACE EVENTS. FLIGHTS CONDUCTED FOR OPERATIONAL PURPOSES OF ANY EVENT, STADIUM OR VENUE AND BROADCAST COVERAGE FOR THE BROADCAST RIGHTS HOLDER ARE AUTHORIZED WITH AN APPROVED AIRSPACE WAIVER. AN FAA AIRSPACE WAIVER DOES NOT RELIEVE OPERATORS FROM OBTAINING ALL OTHER NECESSARY AUTHORIZATIONS AND COMPLYING WITH ALL APPLICABLE FEDERAL AVIATION REGULATIONS. THE RESTRICTIONS DESCRIBED ABOVE DO NOT APPLY TO THOSE AIRCRAFT AUTHORIZED BY AND IN CONTACT WITH ATC FOR OPERATIONAL OR SAFETY OF FLIGHT PURPOSES, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LAW ENFORCEMENT, AND AIR AMBULANCE FLIGHT OPERATIONS. ALL PREVIOUSLY ISSUED WAIVERS TO FDC NOTAM 9/5151 REMAIN VALID UNTIL THE SPECIFIED END DATE BUT NOT TO EXCEED 90 DAYS FOLLOWING THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS NOTAM. INFORMATION ABOUT AIRSPACE WAIVER APPLICATIONS AND TSA SECURITY AUTHORIZATIONS CAN BE FOUND AT HTTP://WWW.TSA.GOV/STAKEHOLDERS/AIRSPACE-WAIVERS-0 OR BY CALLING TSA AT 571-227-2071. SUBMIT REQUESTS FOR FAA AIRSPACE WAIVERS AT HTTPS://WAIVERS.FAA.GOV.