YDQA: Ep 48 - "What are the rules for kids flying a drone? "

John Dickow: Hello and welcome back. Another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Dick with the drone launch Academy here to answer your drone questions. Now, today's question is. What are the rules when it comes to drones in kids? What are some tips? What do I need to know when getting a drone for your kid?

And so today I have with me David Young, founder of Drone Launch Academy, also

David Young: father of five kids. Yeah. Well, thanks for, uh, thanks for having me on John. It's a good question. for me to answer since I've got five children aged six months to ten years old, and I've bought many drones, for them.

They seem to always also take my drones, uh, I try not to let them get their hands on the more expensive ones, but, I, have a lot of experience. Dealing with this issue. So one of my sons just turned seven. His name is Nolan, and for his birthday, we bought him a drone and so if you're, you know, in that category or if you happen to be a seven year old or a 10 year old or 13 year old or whatever watching this and you're wondering what are the rules for you and also give some tips, let's talk about that.

So [00:01:00] as far as rules go, there's not a ton of specific rules for kids, right? We talked a lot on this podcast and in our other resources about commercial drone rules and for those you need to be 16 or older if you want to do any type of non recreational activities with drones. Whole different topic. Just search, you know, part 107 stuff.

If you want to find those, those rules for kids, they would need to still follow the recreational guidelines. So we talked to talk about some exemptions that there are for that. but the only real new rule or regulation that you would need to look into something called the trust exam T R U S T.

And what that is, it's very simple. It's free. It is essentially like a mini. information course, training course, along with some quiz questions that the FAA developed to make sure that recreational flyers, to include kids, know some of the rules and, limitations that they need to follow when it comes [00:02:00] to drones.

This is free to get. The FAA has approved, I don't know, about a dozen. to be able to administer this quote test, even though it's impossible to fail. and so drone launch Academy is one of those. So if you just go to drone launch academy. com slash trust, you can find it on our site, you can go through it and take it.

The material is the same, no matter who you take it with. and the requirement for everyone is for it to be free. So it doesn't matter if you take it through us or someone else, but basically we offer it available. We submit all the. certificate numbers to the FAA every month after people are done.

So they know, they have like a record where we actually don't transmit your name. It's literally just the number. So when you show your certificate number, let's say for some reason someone stops you and you show them your certificate number, they could give that number to the FAA and the basically FAA would be able to just check if that is a valid number or not, because since they're dealing with my, you know, potential with minors and stuff, they didn't want to be transmitting like other PII, you know, personally identifiable information. So in case you were curious or wondering about that, but really it's just, I think we got through it. The fastest we've done it is 20 minutes. I mean, it's pretty quick. If you're going through it for the [00:03:00] first time and you're really wanting to learn it, you can spend some more time with it, but we've got a YouTube video where I'm literally.

Going through the trust exam, every single question, every single like slide. So you can see exactly what's on it if you want. And the video is 20 minutes long. So you would need to take that. and again, it's free, it's easy, go take it. But some of the stuff it'll teach you, many things that are similar to what, commercial pilots have to abide by, right?

400 feet. you know, making sure that you can see you're not going to fly in any type of controlled airspace near an airport without permission. Uh, similar, honestly very similar rules, but those are the, those are the main ones. Don't go higher than 400 feet. check the airspace that you're flying in before you fly there.

and the way you can check that, I guess if you're not familiar with that is you can use apps. You could look up an app called like the before you fly app. the one I always recommend using is one called a loft. A L O F T. you can Google them. They've got apps and you can just say, Hey, I'm flying recreationally.

And it'll show you the airspace where you are and what's around you and where you can or can't fly. So it's pretty easy to make a decision there. However, if you're a kid, right, when I say kid, I'm talking, you know, 5 to [00:04:00] 12, 13, and you're buying a drone. A lot of times they're not buying drones that are going to be going, you know, 6 miles away or something, crazy.

I mean, maybe, but when I buy my kids drones, typically they're ones that are pretty, localized. they're not going to be flying them. Super far away from themselves. A lot of them don't even have GPS in them, because this GPS drones, like the DJI drones, you're going to spend hundreds of dollars to get those drones and they got the nice cameras on them and that's great and cool.

So if you are getting those, you definitely want to know the airspace limitations and how high you're going and all that. But my seven year old we just bought him a drone on Amazon for 35 bucks. I would be amazed if that thing could even make it to 400 feet and it's, maybe 10 inches.

So you would not, not be able to see it at all, up that high. So typically they're flying around the front yard. My three older boys, like I said, they're 7. They just have a great time. They fly around the yard. the only problem, let me, this is where we'll get into some tips. So these are tips from an actual experienced dad of children flying drones who, Frequently encountered problems.

tip number one. Trees are [00:05:00] not your friend. on a lot of these drones they have these real small light bulb batteries. And they're going to have, 7 minutes worth of flight time, 7 to 10 maybe, and then it'll take 40 minutes to charge that battery up. So you're pretty quick little sprints with your flights.

you'll fly them, again, they don't have GPS, usually they're pretty light so the wind will blow them around, kids typically don't have the best, unless they have a lot of experience, you know, they're still figuring it out, so the best control of it. So I would recommend first, try to start inside. A lot of your drones that you're going to get these kids.

They're not very big. Try to find ones that have like propeller guards. A lot of them will just have like circles around the propellers, so you're not going to dice anything up. fly it around inside. It's going to be so much easier to not lose your drone. just kind of practice. Go to the biggest room in your house and fly it around.

You won't have wind pushing you around. You know, the kids think it's pretty fun. Most of these drones, you can hit a button and like do some flips and stuff. I think it's pretty cool. Once they feel kind of comfortable inside, you could move outside, but these things get taken by the wind a lot. So we had a problem where a seven year old was giving my 10 year old son a turn with the drone.

My 10 year old son got a little cocky, thought he's going to take it up a little higher. see what he could [00:06:00] do. He got it up. We have like a very tall palm tree in our front yard. It's probably 30 or 40 feet tall. And he got that thing hung up in the top of that palm tree and it flipped over and it stayed up there.

You can't climb that palm tree. I mean, there's nothing to hold on to all the way up for 40 feet. And, you know, it's crying. You distraught Brooks, you know, lost my drone and all this, drama. he was pretty sad. We're going to make him buy him another drone. but luckily it's pretty light. The wind blew it out of the tree a couple of days later, and it landed in the road, a neighbor found it and, it worked fine.

And so they just kept going with it, but literally the same day. My other son, the eight year old got a little too aggressive And remember, the winds get stronger as you go up higher. So you're on the ground thinking, Oh, it's not that windy out. But as soon as you get that drone above, let's say 20 feet, the winds are much stronger there because you're getting it above this sort of a roof line of all the houses.

There's nothing to stop the wind from coming through. So they got it up that high and whoosh, it took it. Put it in a neighbor's yard across the street or in their driveway. they thought they lost it again, but they went [00:07:00] and found it. You're probably thinking about Dave's got some really irresponsible kids, but this is the stuff that's going to happen.

I will say this all happened when I was not home. So don't blame me. but this is going to happen with kids. If you go outside and you fly, you get it up high. It's going to get taken by the wind. So practice. Maybe down a little lower, away from trees, and don't buy a drone so expensive that you're going to be incredibly sad if it breaks.

You know, I think a lot of pretty good drones are in that sort of 30, 30 to 40 dollar range on Amazon. I could give recommendations, but they come out with new kind of cheapo drones all the time. I would just find, honestly just find one with good, decent reviews on Amazon. changes frequently. but in that 30 40 range, they're all going to be very similar in what they can do and how they operate and all that stuff.

so yeah, wind is not your friend. As soon as you get above 20 feet or so, it kicks up a lot. Stay away from trees. buy one so expensive that you're gonna be afraid to lose it and replace it. Make sure you get that TRUST certificate squared away so that you know the rules and that way you're technically eligible to fly the drone and there's no minimum [00:08:00] age on the TRUST exam stuff.

It's called TRUST. So TRUST stands for The Recreational UAS Safety Test. Terrible acronym in my opinion. A lot of like double, counts in there, So even if you have a six year old, technically they're supposed to go through and take the trust and have that. So, if you're an adult, maybe you can sit there with them and help them understand some of those concepts.

But at the very end it says, Hey, what's your name? So you can put your name on the certificate and they can get it. you can print it out and they have their little certificate with the trust logo on there and their name and their certificate number. So it's kind of a cool thing. We have some, school curriculum that we work with other schools on, that they can buy from us.

And in all of those school curriculums, the first thing we have the students do is they go and they get their trust certificate. So that way they're, Legally allowed to then go practice their drone stuff in class and outside and that's when they start flying. So before then it's always it's just kind of big book knowledge.

They get their trust certificate and then they they start flying. Awesome. And I can

John Dickow: kind of see they get it's good practice take the trust exam But also that probably makes your kids feel pretty good too to be able [00:09:00] to have their own certificate and feel official.

David Young: Yeah, it's got your name on it.

It's printed out like there's a nice little official template and stuff it's cool for them to have to say hey, i'm allowed to go fly my drone recreationally. So Very cool.

John Dickow: Well, one, just a quick follow up on just going back to those cheap drones that you can find on Amazon. Are those still drones that you would control with a, with a phone, like a smartphone, or do they come with their own remote controls?

Would that kid need access to a phone?

David Young: Good question. So the one I bought my son, the seven year old, no, it's got its own controller. most of those have their own controller. The one I know that you can control with a phone is, there's one called the Tello. It's sort of made in partnership with DJI. It's about 100, 120.

that one's got the option to do both. So you can fly it with a phone if you want, and it's got a camera on it and you can record and, take pictures, albeit not very good, but you can see it. and it's got the option. You can buy an additional game controller and then that connects to the drone through Bluetooth.

And so you can see the camera on your phone and then you can control the drone, through Bluetooth with the controller, but you do need a [00:10:00] device. to connect to that drone, so like the controller connects via Bluetooth to the phone, which the phone connects via Wi Fi to the drone, if that makes sense, so it's not complicated if you set it up, but, all the other ones that I know of that you're not visually Viewing a camera.

they usually come with their own controller, the ones in that sort of 30 to $40 range, and don't expect to get either any camera or any type of good camera in that 30 to $40 range on the drone. It's just gonna be a drone to fly around and have fun. Okay, and typically those drones

John Dickow: are like fairly

David Young: small, right?

Yeah. Am I correct? I mean, if you're watching this video maybe about this big, around maybe a foot in diameter or less. You know, 10 inches, something like that. And I will say something that was helpful on the drone. I bought my son when you're learning to fly a drone, it's sort of hard to understand the orientation of the drone.

So like, on the controller forward is always forward like for the drone. But if you're flying the drone around a circle and the drone's facing at you now, it's different. Or, but so if the drone's in the sky and you're not quite sure which direction it's pointed, especially since you don't have a [00:11:00] camera that you're looking at and you hit forward, you're not sure which direction the drone is going to go unless you know.

which direction is forward for the drone? So the drone we got him has around two of the propellers is a blue light and around two of the back propellers is a green light. So anytime you're looking at it from underneath in the sky, you know that the side that's blue is always the forward direction.

So it sort of helps them. Learn the orientation and understand, okay, it's facing me. So if I hit forward, it's going to come at me. If I hit the right, it's going to go to my left. You know, it sort of helps them understand that flow. Very cool. No,

John Dickow: that's a, that's a cool idea. And actually this just seems like, you know, after having this discussion, kind of a fun thing to do is, is getting a drone for your kid and helping them learn kind of the ins and outs of it.

And drones aren't going

David Young: away. And so, uh, probably a good skill to have. So, yeah. And let me, let me tell you one more, game that they enjoy playing with the drone. Now again, take it or leave it if you want. And this is a game probably more for, for little boys who like to destroy things, but they also have a lot of nerf guns and some drones, the propellers, they just, um, they're [00:12:00] held on by tension.

So the DJI Tello, the motors are just a little tiny metal. Stick and then the propeller just slides onto the stick and it's held on with tension. There's no screw or anything like that So you're gonna pop them off You can just pull like pretty you just pull it give it a good pull The propeller comes off that way you can replace the propellers or things like that.

But one thing they enjoy doing is they will get their Nerf guns and they will sit down on the ground at various places throughout our house and my job is to fly the drone, over their heads as fast as I can and they try to shoot at it with the Nerf gun and the Nerf bullets are actually strong enough to take, if it hits the propeller from underneath, it'll actually pop the propeller off, so if they hit it on the propeller, the propeller will pop off and the drone crashes to the ground.

Now, I did put a cage around the, So that way when it falls, it's protected and we're not going to break it. Cause it's like, you know, someone's on like a hundred bucks. but man, they get a big kick out of that and they think it's the coolest thing ever. Where I'm just, I'm circling the drone around the house and they're just trying to shoot it down and whoever shoots it down like gets a point or whatever.

So it's a fun game to play. but yeah, requires nerf [00:13:00] guns, requires, I put, I think you should put a cage on the drone. but yeah, something fun to do. I mean, that sounds like a

John Dickow: lot of fun. I'd play that game. That

David Young: sounds awesome. Yes. That's, those are my tips for kids and drones. Well, David, I really

John Dickow: appreciate you, you digging into this question and it was thorough too.

Covered all the bases hopefully it gives a little bit of peace of mind for any parents out there hoping to get a drone for their kid. Hey, if you've got a drone question, we are happy to answer for you.

just type it in, go to ydqa. io. We'll see the question. We'll find the answer to it. Or if you're part of the drone launch connect community, type the question in there. We'll see it. We'll find someone to answer your question. In the meantime, we'll see you in the sky.