Drones are the newest frontier for the DIY/maker community — and you don’t need to be an electronics or programming expert to create your own. John Baichtal, the #1 best-selling author of hardware hacking books for beginners, will guide you gently up the learning curve, teaching you all the skills you need.
However, the permits are expected to come with limitations, including that the unmanned aircraft be used only on closed sets and that they be operated by a three-person team, including a trained drone operator.
Until now, the only permit for commercial drone operations the FAA has granted has been to the Conoco Phillips oil company, which has flown two kinds of unmanned aircraft in unpopulated areas of Alaska and over the Arctic Ocean with significant limitations on their use.
The FAA is under intense pressure from Congress and a plethora of industries that want to use the technology or sell it to others to relax its ban on commercial drone use. Companies want to use drones to monitor pipelines, inspect the undersides of oil platforms and bridges, and spray crops. Amazon and Google want to use them to deliver packages. Wedding videographers, real estate agents, journalists and other many others are clamoring to use them as well.
The seven movie and television companies are regarded by agencies as trailblazers, the first of what are likely to be dozens of industries that could be approved in coming months for drone operations under limited circumstances.
“The floodgates will open and we’ll see all kinds of other entities looking to use these things,” said Lisa Ellman, an attorney with McKenna, Long & Aldridge who formerly headed the Justice Department’s working group on drone policy
