Free Republic

There are lots of entrepreneurs who would love to fly drones — tiny unmanned aircraft — all over the country. They dream of drones delivering packages and taking photos, but there's a battle in the courts right now standing in their way. The battle is about whether it's legal for drones to take to the sky. The question at the core of the battle: Who owns the air? It's a question that goes back to the Middle Ages, to a Latin phrase that translates to "he owns the soil owns up to the heavens." In England, this phrase was the...

The FAA requires every non-recreational drone user in the U.S. to seek its approval. So far, the FAA has authorized only two commercial drones, both in Alaska. Separately, the agency has fined two drone pilots, both for alleged reckless flying. In March, an administrative law judge overturned the first fine—a $10,000 penalty—ruling that the drone policy was a safety guideline and the agency had no legal authority to enforce it. The FAA is appealing. "Fewer and fewer people seem deterred by threats," said one federal official. "Nobody is asking the FAA how to proceed, so it's turned into a modern...

Iranian Copy of U.S. Unmanned Stealth Aircraft is a Fake By: Dave Majumdar Published: May 12, 2014 4:37 PM Updated: May 12, 2014 5:37 PM So-called Iranian version of the RQ-170. Iran claims it was able to reverse engineer the stealthy unmanned aerial vehicle. FARS News Service Photo Iran’s purported reverse-engineered copies of the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aircraft are nothing but cheap mockups, industry sources told USNI News. The Iranian state-owned Fars News Agency reported that the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) showed off a modified version of the stealthy RQ-170 at an aerospace exhibition in Tehran on...

The Iranian military says that it has fully reverse engineered a downed U.S. drone and armed it with missiles "to attack the U.S. warships in any possible battle." The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made the announcement on Sunday as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei toured an IRGC military compound to view the new drones, according to reports in Iran's state-run media.

Iran says it has “succeeded” in copying an American drone it captured in 2011 and will soon take the replicated aircraft on a test flight. State television in Iran broadcasted images Sunday apparently showing a replicated US RQ-170 Sentinel drone alongside the original one, according to the AFP. "Our engineers succeeded in breaking the drone's secrets and copying them,” an officer in the footage reportedly said. “It will soon take a test flight." Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was inspecting the aircraft during an exhibition organized by the country’s Revolutionary Guards air wing, said the unmanned drone is...

A U.S. airliner nearly collided with a drone over Florida earlier this year, a federal official said, a near miss that highlights risks posed by the proliferation of unmanned aircraft in U.S. skies. A pilot of an American Airlines Group Inc. AAL +0.03% regional jet told officials that on March 22 he came dangerously close to a "small remotely piloted aircraft" about 2,300 feet above the ground near Tallahassee Regional Airport in Florida, said Jim Williams, head of the unmanned-aircraft office at the Federal Aviation Administration. Mr. Williams disclosed the incident publicly for the first time at a drone conference...

Harvard Law School scholar David Barron is an Obama administration nominee for a federal appeals court. He is also the author of government memos that make legal justifications for killing U.S. citizens overseas with drone strikes, which is why his selection to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals has been delayed. The White House has agreed to allow lawmakers to review at least one of the drone memos after U.S. senators and the the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concerns, technology website Ars Technica reported Wednesday.

Well well..who's got the stick on this one??!!!!

MCSO DRONE CRASHES INTO LAKE CONROE Friday morning, during training exercises with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Drone, something went wrong and it crashed into Lake Conroe. Divers from the Montgomery County Precinct 1 Dive Team spent much of the day searching the bottom of Lake Conroe for the almost $300,000 drone helicopter. The drone which was purchased by Montgomery County in 2011 was almost entirely funded by Homeland Security Grants which were specifically designated for the purchase of drones.

The death toll of multiple U.S. drone strikes launched on Sunday against training camps of al- Qaida militants in Yemen's southern provinces of Abyan and Shabwa has risen to 55, the Yemeni Interior Ministry said on Monday. Three local leaders were among the 55 dead militants, the ministry said in a brief statement on its website. It said that its security services are working to identify the nationalities of foreign fighters who were killed among al-Qaida militants in the airstrikes. The ministry described the air strikes as the strongest assault launched against the militants since 2012, when the army retook...

Matt Rosendale's shoots down a drone in a Campaign Ad. Link..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJBcBx1XFU4&feature=share

SANA, Yemen — An airstrike killed 13 people suspected as Qaeda militants in the central Yemeni province of al-Bayda on Saturday, a security official and tribal representatives said. Three civilians in a nearby car were also killed, they said. “An airstrike targeted cars that suspected Al Qaeda militants were in and killed 13 of them in the Sawma’a area of al-Bayda,” a security official said.

A group of hobbyists with a weirdly extensive machine gun collection decided to try a modern update to drone target practice. In this case, the targets were smaller drones ranging in size from remote-control toy airplanes to larger flying wings, about as big as the Army's hand-tossed RQ-11 Raven. Instead of special anti-air weapons, they tried a few different machine guns, which are more representative of the weapons insurgents might aim at drones. While many of the bullets fired hit the drones, it took direct hits to the tiny drone engines to make them stop flying. Verdict: It's possible to...

SPRINGFIELD — A Springfield man said he didn’t ignore commands, but rather was never told his remote-controlled drone camera was hindering CareFlight from responding to a crash scene until just before his arrest. Kele Stanley, 31, said he plans on hiring an attorney to help him fight the charges — a felony charge of obstructing official business and misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and misconduct at an emergency scene. He said he was booked into the Clark County Jail on three misdemeanor charges, but after he posted bond and as was being processed out of jail, the obstructing official business...

A Bay Area federal judge says the Obama administration can keep secret a memo spelling out the legal rationale for a 2011 drone attack in Yemen that killed a U.S. citizen and alleged terrorist mastermind.

Let’s review some of the most fascinating drones Pop-up drone Created by Bird Aerospace, this drone fires 300 feet into the air, self-assembles while mid-air, and can navigate around for up to 3 hours. Wow. It can stream HD video back to a pilot who’s 20 miles away. Footage gathered from the flight can be stored on an SD card inside the drone. Sonar Drone PescadAeroPescadAero is a flying sonar apparatus that specializes in completing tasks while in coastal territories. The drone can land in any body of water to gather footage with the camera. While the camera bobs about on...

In the skies above Yemen, the Pentagon’s armed drones have stopped flying, a result of the ban on American military drone strikes imposed by the government there after a number of botched operations in recent years killed Yemeni civilians. But the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone war in Yemen continues. In Pakistan, the C.I.A. remains in charge of drone operations, and may continue to be long after American troops have left Afghanistan. And in Jordan, it is the C.I.A. rather than the Pentagon that is running a program to arm and train Syrian rebels — a concession to the Jordanian government,...

A retired Marine with nearly two decades of aviation experience has stepped forward with a compelling theory about a mysterious plane that was spotted flying over Texas last month. On March 10, photographers Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett took pictures of three puzzling aircraft flying over Amarillo, and posted them online in hopes of identifying the planes. Retired-Marine James Vineyard has submitted one of the more interesting explanations, telling the Houston Chronicle he believes they are SR-72 Blackbirds - a spy plane that can cross the U.S. in less than an hour, unmanned.

first time. Aviation Week & Space Technology journalist Bill Sweetman has posted photos taken March 10 by two veteran sky watchers, Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett. In his blog post of March 28, Sweetman writes that he and two Aviation Week editors agree that the photos depict "something real." In other words, these pictures aren't easily explained away by reports of known military flights or the work of someone who got carried away with Photoshop. So what can aviation experts say about the object in the photos? "The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn't than what...

You have to hand it to the game-makers in the two major parties: they have done an outstanding job of putting the problems of the world into a convenient left-right paradigm. To the average conservative out there, Republican equals conservative, which equals good – while Democrat equals liberal, which equals bad. And to the average liberal out there, Democrat equals liberal, which equals good – while Republican equals conservative, which equals bad. So, all the party game-makers have to do is paint the other guys as liberal or conservative and all of the sheeple within the two parties will blindly...