ydqa 41

John Dickow: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to another episode of Your Drone Questions Answered. I'm John Duca with the Drone Launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions, the ones that you submit. And today's question is a relevant one. It's a very timely one. I'm planning on getting a drone for Christmas.

Do I need to get certified to fly it for fun? How do I go about doing that? What if I want to bring it to work? Do I need further certification? So to answer these few questions, I've got David Young, founder with Drone Launch Academy. David, thanks for being with me again

David Young: today. What's up, John.

Always good to be here. Always

John Dickow: good to have you on. And so let's just kind of start. Somebody gets a drone, wants to fly it for fun, but maybe even wants to. Fly it for business purposes. What would they

David Young: need to do? Sure. Yeah. Sometimes in the past, this has been a weird kind of gray area.

when people are trying to decide what's recreational use, what's not recreational use, a lot of people go out on Amazon, Best Buy, whatever. They buy a drone, they get out of the box just to start with upfront. The rules on if it's for fun or if it's not for fun is the FAA States, according to their rules and the, code of federal regulations and the U S code, whatever, if [00:01:00] you're flying it purely for personal enjoyment is what they say.

So you're out there and you just want to fly around in your backyard to have fun, or you have like an RC plane that you've built that you're flying at like an RC park or something like that. That is fun and recreation. If it is, it doesn't even have to be like commercial use, it is just anything other than fun and enjoyment counts as something that would be flown under what's called the part 107 rules, which means sort of like under the commercial operations rules.

And I'll tell you what's required under each of those. what would count on the part 107 side? So the non enjoyment only side would be like, Hey, I'm going to take pictures of my high school footballs practice to help them out, right? That's not for your fun and enjoyment. You don't, you're not just up in the air capturing photos because you're enjoying it and you happen to take a picture of them.

You're doing it to like help them or like help a nonprofit. They say, even if you receive goodwill, that counts as. Non hobbyist action. So you would need a part one Oh seven, So if you do qualify, let's say you do get a [00:02:00] drone and you're like, I'm just going to fly around for fun with my kids or just to take pretty pictures of the sunset, whatever, take it on my family vacation.

here's what you need to do for that. First off, if it's over a 0. 55 pounds, about a half pound, you need to register the drone. So I think it costs five bucks. You go to the FAA drone zone and you register it and consider this like a license plate for your drone. They're just going to give you a registration number and you just tape that to the outside of your drone.

So that's step one. the next thing you need to do is do something called the trust, which stands for the. Recreational U. S. Safety test. Horrible acronym. I did not make it, but it's a free online course slash test. So you'll just go through some information and then you fill out questions along the way and it's impossible to fail.

Like if you answer it wrong, you just try again until you answer it correctly. they just want to make sure that you know some of the rules of drones and flying in the air. Once you're done with that, that takes about, I don't know, 20 minutes or you can go as fast as 20 minutes. I would say once you're done with that, you get your trust certificate.

And that is essentially like [00:03:00] your, license to fly recreationally. That's now a requirement. So if you're flying a drone and you don't have that, and you're doing something stupid and you're stopped, they're going to ask you for that. There's actually a guy, I think we've covered this, who flew over in Ohio state football game and kind of messed them up.

And one of the things they dinged him on was that he did not have a trust certificate, so it's free. It's quick. You might as well do it. so we're drone launch Academy. We are actually one of the authorized trust providers, so you can take it through us again. It doesn't cost any money. so just drone launch academy.

com slash trust. You can find out more info there. You can take it there. get your certificate. So that's kind of the checkbox there. And then if you have those two things, those are the two main ones. after that, you just need to follow the rules. so that means don't fly in, controlled airspace.

it means, you might have to comply with the remote ID rules. So if your drone, requires registration, it also has to follow the remote ID rules, which if you're buying any drone from like Best Buy or anything like that, the manufacturers are required to put it in there anyways, the functionality.

So. You really shouldn't have to do anything, but let's say you have [00:04:00] an older drone or you built your own drone. Technically, if you want it to be compliant, you would have to have some type of called remote ID module on there. That's too much to get into for this conversation, but that's just one of the requirements.

but generally stay below 400 feet. one of the other ones is you have to follow the safety guidelines of a quote, FAA recognized community based organization. So that's like, different associations for recreational hobbyist pilots, but basically stay below 400 feet. Don't go near airports in controlled airspace.

do your registration and your trust exam. And for the most part, you should be good. And if you see another aircraft, you got to get out of the way. That's your job as the drone operator. So that's on the recreational side. Okay, so that's only if you're doing it for your fun. If you do it for anything else.

You're like volunteering for an organization or any getting paid. Especially if you're a real estate agent, you want to go take pictures of your property, even for your own benefit of your own work, right? You have to have what's called a remote pilot certificate. A lot of people call this the part one Oh seven exam, but you just go and you take a study for and take a [00:05:00] 60 question test.

but this one is not online. You have to go to a testing center. To pay a testing center fee. It's usually about 175. and you have to take this exam. 60 questions is a lot more difficult than the trust exam. This one's got a lot of like aviation maps on it. You got to know about aviation, weather, regulations, loading and balance, maintenance procedures, physiology, a lot of different topics.

It'll test you on that. If you get that, you'll get like an actual card, sent to you in the mail. Like I've got mine on my wallet here. Like this is my like. Drone license, and you can keep it in your wallet. So that allows you to fly commercially. You also have to go through the same drone registration process.

but now you just, you register it under part 107, you registered as like commercial use. Drone versus a recreational use. I mean, it costs the same, no matter what. but yeah, once you have that and you've passed it, you follow similar rules, right? Standard 400 feet. Now, if you want to fly in controlled airspace, you have to request access before you do it, but you can request access to fly in controlled airspace.

That's like near airports. and do that. and the only other requirement on top of what you would need maybe for the [00:06:00] recreational use is that every two years you come back to the FAA's website and you take like a refresher course, and that is free as well. So it just updates you on any new regulations that are out, make sure you know, kind of the most current stuff, and that's your sort of two year recertification. and you should be good to go. So those are the two differences. basically when in doubt, I would just go ahead and do the part one Oh seven, exam and get that license just in case you ever do want to use it for any non hobbyist use, but those are the distinctions that the FAA makes. and those are kind of the, two differences.

John Dickow: And even if you're flying, you know, beyond just being a hobbyist, beyond just flying for fun. like you said, you need to take the part 107 exam, but you still need to register it and you still need to take the trust exam,

David Young: for if you're flying commercially. Yes. So if you're flying commercially, you don't have to do the trust technically that's only for recreational pilots.

Yeah. I mean, you might as well get it if you want it. I mean, it's just. Good information to know. Again, it takes 20 minutes. but yes, you do, no matter what, if it's over 0. 55 pounds or everything, that's about 500 grams. you have to register the drone. it's like [00:07:00] 5 on the FAA drone zone site. and I believe that the registrations last three years.

Could be wrong on that, \ it'll ask you, is this for recreation or is this for, part 107, you know, commercial use, and if you're not sure. Or if you think you might use it for both, put it under the part 107.

If you're only ever going to use it for hobbyist use, you can put it under the hobby category.

John Dickow: Well, thank you for clarifying that. And you showed us your, your license there, and that's obviously some proof that you could show to someone if you were stopped, is there something, you could have on you and say, if you're stopped and need to show that you've taken the trust exam and show a certificate or show that you're registered, is that something that you can just throw up on your phone?

Are you given an

David Young: actual certificate? No, so that you get a pdf certificate. Yeah, you mean you can print it out, but so the trust exam providers, we have to demonstrate to the FAA like, Hey, when someone finishes the trust exam on our website, it emails them or makes available to them a pdf of their certificate that they can then print out.

And they have their own unique number for their certificate. And as trust exam providers, we, every month have to upload all of [00:08:00] the new certificate numbers to the FAA so they can. Check that and cross reference it to be like, Oh, this is a valid certificate number or not. It's not linked to anybody's names because they have like all this privacy stuff.

So like we even have to like delete all the data after you go on our website and you take your draft exam and we issue your certificate thing runs and it deletes, deletes all your information. So sometimes people like, oh, I didn't get my certificate and I'm like, well, it automatically got deleted. So you have to like do it again because F.

A. requires us to like wipe everything. So there's no privacy issues or, data issues. So they don't even have your, your name. They just have. Numbers are out there that are valid. and so if they ever, you know, so if you fake a certificate, which I don't know why you would fake it, if it takes 20 minutes to do and it's free, but if you fake a certificate, they can at least check, is this a valid number or is it a not valid?

John Dickow: Okay. Well, excellent. And actually We recorded an episode, A YDQ episode with you a while back, and it was actually going over the hardest question on the part 1 0 7. So if you're interested in that, go back, take a look. it's one of the earlier YDQA episodes. David answers that. good to know.

David Young: Yep. And we have some [00:09:00] other stuff too, like we have a 21 question, kinda like practice test that breaks down a lot of the more difficult questions and we give super detailed explanations. for each one. So if you want to kind of like practice, you can just type in, you know, drone launch Academy, 21 questions it should pull up, but you can kind of get a feel for what type of questions will be on the test if you're looking to go that route.

Excellent. Well,

John Dickow: David, I appreciate you coming on again, talking through this question for me, and I'm sure we'll have you on again, until then, hope you have a happy holiday. And if you have questions, for us to answer here on, your drone questions answered, please send them along. You can send them along on YDQA.

io or if you're a part of the Drone Launch Connect community, go ahead and type it in there. We'll see it. We'll find someone to answer the question. Until then, we'll see you in the sky.