President's Perspective
Dave Brown AMA president
Who has regulatory authority over model airplanes?
IT HAS BEEN an eventful month in the Brown household. As I write this, I am recovering from back surgery two weeks ago. I have had a lot of time on my hands, but not a lot of mobility.
In any event, I'm recovering nicely and should be able to make the Executive Council meeting in July. With all of the "stuff" they installed, the security line at the airport will be interesting!
During the month, a couple of interesting subjects came up which show that AMA is constantly working behind the scenes on your behalf. Unfortunately, we do not have a magic wand to wave and address some of these subjects, so it takes time and perseverance to have any expectation of results.
Neither of these subjects have any definitive answer, but we will keep working with the people involved, trying to forge a solution which will be usable for the members.
I'm going to try to give you an idea of how complex the seemingly simple stuff can become.
How high can we legally fly? It may seem to be a simple question but it isn't; not by a long shot. To begin with, we need to define "legally." There are few, if any, laws which absolutely address this question, and yet we are subject to limits.
Who has regulatory authority over model airplanes? The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does, and while this may have been questioned in the past, I can assure you that it does now; however, the FAA doesn't have any regulations that specifically address the issue. What it does have is an advisory circular (AC) AC 91-57 — which restricts model aircraft to 400 feet in altitude and at least 3 miles from airports.
The AC is advisory in nature. It isn't actually a matter of law, although the FAA could make a case that lack of adherence to that AC constitutes "reckless operation of an aircraft" which does bring the law into play.
The AMA Safety Code, which isn't law either, is loosely based upon the FAA's AC, and it is a well-known fact that models exceed the 400-foot restriction in many—if not most—normal flights.
So what is the maximum legal altitude at which we can fly model airplanes without special permission from the FAA? Well, it's surely something below 18,000 feet. All altitudes above that are under "positive control," meaning that nothing flies above that altitude without Air Traffic Control (ATC) clearance. That is not much help since few of us have any interest in flying anywhere near that high.
This would indicate that the legal altitude limit can be anywhere from 400 feet to 17,999 feet, depending on how you interpret the regulations and advisories—and upon how much you want to push the limits in the eyes of the authorities and the general public. We all realize that we commonly exceed the 400 feet established by the AC.
Some would even take the "in for a penny, in for a pound" approach, so that any time you exceed the altitudes specified in the AC, you might as well go as high as you want. I guess the thinking is the same as saying that if I go 64 mph in a 60 mph zone, I might as well do 150 mph since I'm exceeding the limit anyway.
That tactic puts our sport and the freedom of the person flying the model in jeopardy. AMA has been regularly involved in meetings with the FAA which is well aware of our plight. When they asked my opinion about how high a ceiling we needed, my response was a minimum of 700 feet and preferably 1,000 feet.
Looking at other airspace regulations, we can make a good case for being "just another piece of VFR (visual flight rules) traffic," so we should be allowed to fly in any uncontrolled airspace subject to the see-and-avoid rules applied to all air traffic in such airspace.
This is the key. At all costs, we need to avoid having any close encounters with full-scale aircraft in flight. It doesn't matter if you think you have a right to be flying where you are; you need to take whatever measures are necessary to stay far away from any full-scale aircraft in flight.
As long as we adhere to that one rule, we can probably avoid having laws written which we could have a tough time living with. The bottom line is that if we act responsibly, we may still end up with a law, but it will be one we can live with. If we act irresponsibly, then that law may effectively shut us down. The result is up to us.
The second issue is even more complicated, and it has to do with trademarks and scale model kits. Although there have not been any changes in the law in recent times which affect this situation, there has been an increased focus on the enforcement of trademarks.
A few companies that hold such trademarks have begun to demand royalties from the makers of scale models of "their" aircraft. In particular, this involves models of military aircraft, which makes the situation so hard to understand.
Our government paid for the development of most of those aircraft, and in most cases named them and gave them a military designation such as the P-51, etc. Suddenly the manufacturers of those aircraft—or more appropriately, the contractors who built those aircraft for the government—are claiming that making model kits of those aircraft is subject to the payment of royalties for the use of their trademark.
Ironically, they may be completely within their rights to take this approach, and in fact, I understand that they are literally forced to do so in order to protect their right to do so when they need to. This problem has the potential to expand well beyond the realm of military aircraft, and can even apply to models of full-scale aircraft which have sponsors' logos on them. In most cases, those logos are copyrighted.
The reason this is coming up now is that some companies have turned the process of defending their trademark and intellectual property rights over to companies which specialize in that area, and those organizations are being more zealous in their approach.
This is a very tricky issue with which we are wrestling. We have some ideas about how to approach this problem, but it will take time. In the meantime, it would be helpful if the aeromodeling community were to lay out the situation as it exists and discuss it. The last thing we need is legislation of this sort in the military, this is one of those "don't ask, don't tell" situations.
Til next month. MA
Dave Brown AMA president [email protected]
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
