ydqa ep 36

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John Dickow: Hello and welcome back another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Ticco with the Drone Launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions, the ones that you submit. And today's question is what are the rules around FAA fines? How are FAA fines determined? How much trouble can you really get into?

Today I have with me, David Young, founder of the Drone Launch Academy. David, thanks for joining me today.

David Young: What's up, John. Thanks for having me back on. this

John Dickow: is pretty good one because it can get a little complicated, but you've done some research. So just dive in, how much trouble can you really get into when it comes down to FAA

David Young: fines?

It's a good question. And since I've been running drone launch for the last six or seven years, it comes up all the time. People are like, well, what is the actual fine? And what is this? And what is this? And. I've searched over the years and there's not like a super on a lot of, there's not a super clear, like this is the penalty for this.

Like, you know, if you're in a state and you're like, I'm speeding seven miles over the speed limit, there's like a specific dollar amount that that equates to. And with the FAA, it's not quite so cut and [00:01:00] dry. They have these, I don't remember the official title for them, but like these enforcement agents, examiners, if you will, well, they'll look at your case and they sort of, decide how bad it should be, but there are guidelines and there are rules.

So I would think of it more like if you're familiar with. someone commits a crime, right? And jury finds them guilty. And the judge says, all right, you're guilty. And then they sentenced them to whatever serves their time in prison. He used to work for the FBI. So I was like familiar with these sentencing guidelines.

The judge can kind of look at the case and determine, you know, how long to give that person in prison or how much to find them, based on, Hey, what, what do we see in the case and what are the circumstances, right? But there's sort of these. These guideline ranges that they work with. obviously I'm not talking about if I send people to jail, it doesn't like civil stuff, but it's a similar thing where they have, they operate within some guidelines and kind of look at the case and then they can sort of bring forward an action in court.

So I'll break it down as best I can. And I discovered this information recently. So some of you may know, I went to, went back to school to get my master's part time, from Embry Riddle in [00:02:00] uncrewed and autonomous systems, basically. Drones, but it also covers like cars and robots and stuff. Uh, cause I wanted to get into a little more than nitty gritty, like this kind of stuff.

So I'm in a class right now. It's like issues in uncrewed regulation or aircraft regulation. So basically we're just looking at laws, doing case reviews. So I guess it was interesting. And one module we covered this, right? We had to like dig through all the FAA enforcement policy documents. And I was like, Oh, here it is.

I found it. So if you want to be like a total nerd and dive in. To the document. I will tell you what it is. You can Google this FAA order two one five 0. 3 C. That is the name of the document. It is called the FAA compliance and enforcement program, right? You go there. It is a 266 page PDF. It is as interesting to read as you might imagine, but I'm going to tell you exactly where to scroll.

All right. You're going to want to go to. Page number 201 of the 266 and that's going to land you on chapter nine, which is [00:03:00] titled legal enforcement, action, sanction policy, and it describes how, when someone messes up, this is any aviator pilot, commercial pilot, whatever to include, how they determine the violation amounts, right? And I'm not going to bore you reading through all of it, but we'll just jump down to the juicy stuff. there's like figure 9. 1, figure 9. 2. These are the tables of those sort of sentencing guidelines, if you will, like the range of things that can happen. And let me kind of lay out how they think about this from my understanding.

Obviously don't work for the FAA. I'm not out there enforcing these, but from what I've learned doing research, you know, and being in the drone world, this is how it's typically is, seems it is determined. Number one, they look at they state if you are a commercial airline pilot or a flight instructor, you are held to a higher standard than let's say a student pilot or a total recreational flyer who just doesn't know maybe, right.

According to their policy documents. if a student pilot or a recreational flyer does the same thing as someone who let's say is a commercial operator or a flight instructor or [00:04:00] something, the flight instructor is going to incur harsher penalties. Because they quote, kind of should have known better, right?

So they, they first look at who you are. Because the FAA, their stated policy is not that they want to just go around slapping fines on everyone. They're not like a police department who needs to make a speeding ticket quota. Like their, their mandate is aviation safety. So whenever they're issuing these fines or violations or whatever, theoretically it's supposed to be to encourage safety, right?

And this is more of a deterrent. to people. So they're not necessarily looking to punish their documents, state their state. They're supposed to. The goal is to first hopefully educate, put like a remediation plan in place and make sure it's almost like, pilot rehab, right? You want to get it to where they're people are complying.

That's their main goal. But this is one of their enforcement options is suspending people's flight certificates and punishing people monetarily. So they first look at who you are and that determines the fine. So figure 9. 2 is a table is called sanction ranges table, and it starts off with an individual acting as an airman, which means you do not have any type of Pilot [00:05:00] certificate.

you're not a certified remote pilot, but you are now acting as an airman. So you're doing some type of commercial work or you don't have a pilot's license and you hop in the plane and start flying around. I imagine you might face some other stuff if you stole plane, but yeah, but, but let's say, let's say you're like a student pilot, right?

You're not, a full on licensed pilot. Right. and then they look at the severity level. So severity level, they have them one through three, and then they look to see different things. So they look at, they call it careless, reckless or intentional. So are, were you just being careless with the laws?

That's going to bring it to the lower end where you just, were you being reckless, like you weren't intending to do something, but you were being pretty dumb or the worst is like intentional. Like you knew the rules. Again, this kind of goes back to the, how much, you know, you knew the rules. Uh, you intentionally broke them.

You don't even care, right. That gets you to the top one. And then, then there's another one, severity level. how much danger did you put people in? Right? So let's say you flew a 300 pound drone over a giant crowd, right? That's putting people in a lot and you didn't have a license and you didn't have any waivers and you were doing, loops with it or something. I don't know. You're flipping the, you got the world's largest FPV drone [00:06:00] and you're doing, bunch of flips in the sky. That's going to be on like a more dangerous level. And you were drunk, right? That's going to be like high, high, high severity versus you had a drone that weighs one ounce that's going to be on the low end of severity level.

so you look at how careless and reckless and then how severe, and that's going to put you into the range, either low Moderate high or maximum. So if you're severely level three, super dangerous, and you were intentionally doing it, that's going to give you maximum the range for like, I'm an individual acting as an airman, which means I'm punished the least cause I know the least, and I have the low end.

The minimum, fine is like 100, right? So the low end is like 100 to 400 moderate goes 400 to 700 high 700, 1100 maximum 1100 to 1500. So if you don't have a drone license and you do something wrong, this is for an individual action, you can kind of face a hundred to 1500 bucks if you do have a license, right?

And you, you know, so now you should know better. Now the fines range from a thousand to 13, 669. Okay. And that's per action. I don't know if I think this is fair or not, but I guess they're, these are supposed to be sort [00:07:00] of corrective actions like, Hey, you know, if, if you're a huge organization, if you're, giant news organization, time magazine or CNN or whatever, and you do something and they slap you with a thousand dollar fine, you're going to be like, Who cares, you know, so they have categories of businesses, small business, large business, category one, category two, all these crazy categories I'm not even going to get into, but it can get up to like, uh, larger and larger fines, the larger you are.

So if you're a large business on the high end, it can be like 35, 000 per violation. Wow. So thinking through those now. and again, these can be any of the laws, if you break any of the aircraft rules that are in part 107 for commercial drone operators, or I think it's, either part 91 or 61, I can't remember, for like, civil aviation, regular airplane operators.

They go on in the document to talk about degree of hazard, violation history, this is holders of a high level certificate are held to a higher standard. if you scroll down, you get to figure nine point through another little grid and it says numerous violations resulting from a single act or omission.

So if you do something, but you end up breaking like 10 rules in one. it actually is a lot higher. So now for [00:08:00] those additional Rule breakages that led from the first one for an individual acting as an airman, you're kind of lowest category. You're looking at 5 fines. And then for an individual that does have a certificate, you're looking for from 50, 000 to 200, 000.

Okay. And again, this is kind of like per instance. So let's say I go out and I do something and I'm flying my drone. I do all this crazy stuff. technically you could get up to like 200 grand for that instance. And then. you go out and you do it again on another date. Like that's a whole new thing. So some people are thinking about there's this guy who is like one of more famously fined people.

The FAA sent him like a punch of notices and slapped him like 182, 000 worth of fines. And he was an individual, right? So, he would fall in that he was not licensed as a partner in a seven operator, so he would fall in that kind of 000 range, but he did it. Like they had a bunch of instances they racked up on him.

I mean, I'm not sitting here reading his case, but I would imagine it was those that stacked up, you know, I guess you'd have to get to about nine, nine different [00:09:00] occurrences sort of at the max range. I don't know. Nine times 20 is one 80. Yeah. So somewhere in there. so that's sort of how it's determined.

Okay. And the FAA examiner will look sort of at your case and what you've done. And, was there alcohol involved? Were you being totally reckless? where did you, bring it forward and be like, Oh, Hey, I messed up. I think I broke this rule. Right. They view that as like a lower category than like, Oh, you knew better and I caught you, you know what I mean?

so that's sort of your ranges again. It's unfortunate. It's like really broad range and it's not like a specific action, let me call out a few things that do have very specific penalties, right? and people do need to hear this.

This one's important. UAS, there's all these things like very broad categories, like individual certificate holder has these ranges and all of a sudden one line on this category is like an unmanned aircraft interfering with wildfire suppression, law enforcement or emergency response has its own line, you know, and it only has one category.

It's not like Okay. Low, moderate, high. I think that they just consider it all pretty severe. That is 15, 000 to 20, 923 per instance. So [00:10:00] if they say, Hey, there's a forest fire and we're trying to fly planes into drop, you know, chemicals and water or whatever, and your drone is in the way, minimum fine, 15 grand.

And that doesn't matter who you are or

John Dickow: anything like

David Young: that. No. Yeah. Yeah, you could be anybody. or the law enforcement is doing something like there was a guy in LA. He flew his drone being careless and hit up LA police helicopter and they arrested him. And so this is just the civil penalties. I'm not even talking about any potential criminal violations that could come of that type of thing.

I say all this with the caveat of, again, the FAA is not necessarily out there just like looking to fine everybody and their mom, but these are the potential consequences if they did want to drop the hammer on you like that dude with the 180, 000 fines, right? Or whatever, I think their goal is education.

They have. Tended to, or some law enforcement agencies will pull this up. They could drop the hammer on you is what I'm saying. So, so there's that one, which is interfering with wildfire. and then the other one is, failure to register your drone. On the FAA's website, if you just Google, is there a penalty for failing to register [00:11:00] my drone, it says failure to register an unmanned aircraft that is required to be registered may result in regulatory and criminal penalties. The FAA may assess civil penalties of up to 27, 500, okay, for not registering your drone.

Criminal penalties could include fines of up to 250, 000 and or imprisonment for up to three years. Now, I have yet to hear of anyone being imprisoned for, for failing to register their drone. we're getting that level of fine. I'm just laughing. That sounds so extreme. I imagine this is on the books for, let's say you strap a grenade to a drone and you're going to like go hurt someone.

And they like, they have this as a. Regulatory option to include with all the other charges. That's just my guess. I've never heard of that, but again, here's the potential scope of what you're, you're looking at. So when people are complaining about like, Oh, it's 5 to go register my drone FA drone zone.

I'm like. Come on, I would encourage you to just go ahead and register it. so that's sort of the scope you're looking at. And if you're [00:12:00] interested again in digging in another resource that I could recommend, Jonathan Rupert, he's a attorney.

he's pretty well known in the drone law space, but he keeps a nice, document on his website of all like the drone enforcement actions. Like he has a list I'm looking at right here of drone lawsuits in federal court, drone lawsuits in state court, and he's got them all linked out. So if you can, dive in, he's got a bunch of, screenshots and stuff.

So if you really want to dive in and look, you can see, what's going on right now and how many. People, the FAA isn't forcing against. I would say that, you know, that you might get a letter that says, Hey, please don't do that anymore, or you could get in trouble bottom end of the financial spectrum is a hundred bucks.

Top end is you go to jail for three years, hundreds of thousands of dollars. But again, I've only heard of one case where it's like in the hundreds of thousands for an individual. the chances of you getting smaller slaps on the wrist are higher.

So, the more you know, there you go. We'll link up those documents if you really want to dig in. Chapter nine is where all the goodies are. Well, thank you, David,

John Dickow: for walking us through that, that you laid it out pretty well there.

And the whole time I was thinking, what's the likelihood of me getting a warning and the likelihood it would be, I guess, if I were a [00:13:00] beginner, probably a student doing kind of a low severity infraction. maybe first time, would be the, more likelihood of actually get a warning, but then , as you get qualified and it may be, if you're working in the commercial space, that risk tends to go higher as, as you should

David Young: know better.

Yeah. I will say there's, there's one recent example. I should have brought this up. recreational flyer bought a drone from Best Buy on a Friday. This was his story. At least on Saturday, he's in Columbus, Ohio. On Saturday, he goes to a parking lot. He says he's with some friends. He said he wanted to see how far the drone could go.

He flies the drone. He flies it over the Ohio State football game mid game. Okay. we've talked about TFR is another one. I think I mentioned, this in the TFR episode, but, um, yeah, he flew right through a TFR temporary flight restriction. So not only is he breaking much rule now, he's flying in a area where he's not allowed to fly from a flight restriction he ended up getting arrested and charged with several crimes.

Now, I don't know if he's been. Found guilty of those, or they're going to drop it or whatever. but you know, again, he got arrested for, flying over a football game. And again, he didn't quote unquote, no better. Right. So even though he's in that bottom category, still dropped the [00:14:00] hammer on him. and the other guy who hit the LA police helicopter.

So, you gotta be careful what you're doing. It seems like it's just a fun toy, but it could potentially have, more severe ramifications than you think. Yeah.

John Dickow: Do your research before flying for the first time for sure. And, uh, I'm sure there's a lot more you can read on the FAA website when it comes to general rules for flying drones, especially for if you're a beginner.

really good information. Thank you very much, David. you can submit your own question. We'll find the answer to it. Ydqa. io. Go ahead and type it in there. We'll see it. We'll look for the answer. Or if you're on drone launch connect community, go ahead and type it in there. We'll see it. We'll look for the answer until then we'll see in the sky.