Oregon Legislator Takes Aim at New Drone Rules

An Oregon legislator says he will take aim at recreational drone regulation in 2016.

Rep. John Huffman told reporters this week he plans to introduce a sweeping, UAV regulatory bill — the culmination of a three-year UAV working group comprised of civil liberties groups and state officials.

Previously, Oregon’s drone bills have focused on law enforcement – now Huffman says it’s time to offer up more regulation for non-governmental drone users.

UAV laws in Oregon allow law enforcement agencies to use UAVs to track an individual fleeing a crime scene, to survey natural disasters, reconstruct crime scenes, and help with search and rescue. A July 2013 statute dictates that the state will govern use of drones, not local municipalities. Public bodies, such as universities, must register their drones before takeoff.

“A part of that bill was that law enforcement and government agencies could not weaponize drones,” Huffman told the Bend Bulletin. “In that bill we didn’t address recreational or hobby drones at all.”

Huffman will also tackle the much-reported claim of drones allegedly flying too close to aircraft, stating that the FAA has received “roughly 100 notifications from pilots this last year” within the state.

Recently, however, the Academy of Model Aeronautics, a group for 180,000 hobbyists, released its own analysis of the FAA reports nationwide and said that the numbers just don’t add up.

“Our analysis found that the number of ‘near misses’ is substantially lower than the number that was previously presented,” said AMA executive director Dave Mathewson.

The AMA report found that only about 3.5 percent — or 27 out of the 764 FAA drone-near-miss reports — were “identified with explicit notations as a near miss or near mid-air collision” – which may mean an even lower number specific to Oregon.

Nevertheless, Huffman says his drone bill may cover near misses, airports and other key UAV issues.

The Bulletin states that Huffman’s bill may “restrict recreational drone pilots from flying around sensitive spaces, like chemical factories, dams or prisons [as well as restricting users from] flying near wildfires.