The Congressional Research Service has issued a new report on US drone policies. This was released on Jan 31 did anyone else see it? Apparently it says that the FAA has till the end of 2015 now? I thought the deadline was supposed to be 2014. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42940.pdf
No the final rules were needed by 2015. They have multiple milestones between now and then and so far have missed all of them, or course in their governmental doublespeak they are right on time. The legislation also calls on the FAA to establish rules for smaller drones weighing up to 55 pounds within 27 months. The schedule for all drones is Sept. 30, 2015.
I used to work at Hotmail in the early days of the webmail revolution. My role was designing and implementing the back-end services that made Hotmail work. Circa 1999, I designed a system to analyze, categorize, and block spam emails. At my employer's insistence, I began work on a patent application (which was eventually granted: http://bit.ly/WsXa69). One of the very interesting bits of legal crap with which I had to contend was a law on the books from the 19th century (yes, that's the 1800's) that governed the imminent domain of an American citizen's mailbox. Suffice it to say that our lawyers rightly believed that law could be used to determine what was legal with respect to the kinds of things we could do to a Hotmail user's email inbox. Why do I tell this story? Because all my readings on this issue make it very clear to me that (at least in the USA), we're being dragged through the muck of hundreds of years of legal wranglings that might, could, or maybe be used to complicate this issue. And therefore, nobody wants to go out on a limb and propose a sane, forward-thinking, and progress-supporting set of rules and regulations. Sadly, I don't have a lot of optimism that we're going to get something in the law anytime soon that'll give us a clear way to enjoy and/or monetize this great and promising field. But meanwhile, I'm going to continue practicing my landings.
Steve as a hot air balloon pilot the same thing has been going own for 20 years to get the minimum altitude regs changed for hot air balloons. Today the minimum altitudes for balloons is the same for regular aircraft yet helicopters don't have the same restrictions. They simply have to be able to land in case of power failure while under control (paraphrasing a bit). I can put a ballon into a 10x10 spot nearly every time. But the regs after years of multiple studies have not changed. Common sense? Not in a regulators vocabulary, at least most of the time.