FAA Appeals Commercial Drone Ruling, Cites Safety Concerns

Yesterday, a National Transportation Safety Board judge ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration could not fine anybody for using small, hobby-plane-sized commercial drones use because it hadn’t made any legally binding rules against them. That went against everything the FAA had ever claimed with regard to commercial drones. So in an unsurprising move, the FAA today appealed this decision.

“The FAA is appealing the decision of an NTSB Administrative Law Judge to the full National Transportation Safety Board, which has the effect of staying the decision until the Board rules,”  the organization wrote today. ”The agency is concerned that this decision could impact the safe operation of the national airspace system and the safety of people and property on the ground.”

For the time being, then, the legal situation around drones remains as murky as ever. While it seems plenty of real estate companies are shooting photos of houses from small quadcopters and they remain in heavy use for video production and other uses, the FAA continues to argue that commercial drone usage is essentially illegal.

Because it’s perfectly okay to fly these same small drones for non-commercial reasons (though the FAA would prefer it if people at least followed a few common-sense guidelines), the FAA seems somewhat out of step with reality on this issue.

The FAA wasn’t expected to make any rules for commercial drone usage before the end of 2015. Maybe all this activity around this court case now will get it to speed up the process a bit.

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Why Commercial Drones Won’t Deliver Tacos Anytime Soon

Amazon scored one of the greatest tech PR coups in recent history when it got CBS to put its quadcopter-powered delivery service on air the day before Cyber Monday. Sadly, CBS pretty much ignored that this was a pretty unrealistic proposal for the time being, not in the least because commercial drone flights will remain illegal in the U.S. for the next few years.

If journalists aren’t even allowed to use a standard quadcopter to take images of people on a beach, having autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deliver the latest Stephen King tome to your door is obviously still a while out, too.

With the hype around Amazon’s drone dying down, let’s take a look at what’s holding commercial drones back and what we can expect once they take flight.

The technology for drones is here, no doubt, but government regulation isn’t and there are good reasons why the FAA is taking things slow.

By 2015, the FAA is supposed to create rules for integrating unmanned planes, quadcopters and other flying contraptions into the regular airspace. That’s quite a challenge. For a human to start flying around in a small Cessna, it takes an average of 60 hours of instructions and a written and practical exam before they are allowed to start puttering around in U.S. airspace. And that’s just for the most basic of pilots’ licenses.

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NomNom Launches First Plugin-Free Commercial Game Based On Asm.js And Unreal Engine 3

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Earlier this year, Epic Games and Mozilla showcased a demo of Epic’s popular Unreal Engine running in the browser without the need for a plugin. Based on Mozilla’s Asm.js JavaScript subset and its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript Compiler, this demo was meant to showcase what developers can now do in the browser thanks to the asm.js project and WebGL for bringing 3D content to the browser. Until now, though, virtually all projects that combined these technologies were demos. Now, NomNom Games, a subsidiary of Trendy Entertainment, has launched Monster Madness, the first commercial game that uses Unreal Engine 3 and Mozilla’s technologies.

As expected, the game runs best in Firefox, which recently gained full support for asm.js, but it will also happily run in Chrome and Opera. The game, it’s worth noting, is officially in alpha, but it’s now available for anybody who wants to give it a try – including some multi-player elements.

Bringing Monster Madness to the browser, Mozilla says, only took about a week (though they got some technical support from Epic and Mozilla).

Asm.js and Emscripten obviously help developers port many of their C and C

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