Drone laws in the USA | How to LEGALLY fly a drone | Do you need a commercial drone license?

ah drone footage the secret ingredient that makes an average looking vlog seem epic [Music] and that's why we use footage just like this in our videos it sets the scene the mood but with these amazing shots it also brings in a lot of complicated rules and a little bit of stress [Applause] now we knew we couldn't just fly the drone anywhere so before we started flying we did a little bit of research we registered our drone we checked different airspaces before flying and make sure we don't fly in places it's clearly against the rules you know the obvious we'd even go to websites of cities and counties to read their policies on drone flying we thought we were doing everything by the book then we got this email hello sarah and chris my name is i'm an aviation technician at the federal aviation administration office here in nashville please give me a call at your earliest opportunity thank you oh i'm sorry can you say that again now just to give you a little context this is one week after we had moved into our new house we were spending the morning watching a white christmas hence the cool looking robe when we receive this email from the faa if if it's okay i have a few questions for you right now there's no fine or anything like that and this is just like a informational warning get get your ducks in a row if we need to get our ducks in a row because we do i mean i understand where you're coming from saying that we we earn money from our youtube channel the whole like recreational verse business i just know it's like a weird gray line because we do it more as a like we like doing it like it's our hobby but it's not our main job at all does that make sense all right thank you so much i really appreciate it all right you as well somebody anonymously reported us to the fda not fda that's the federal judge correct i'm sorry not the fda so who i just spoke to very nice her job is to inform people because she said you are not the only vlogger i have to talk to basically where they're drawing the line is that even though our youtube is sort of our hobby because we make any sort of income from it it is now classified as a business no matter what there's no fine right now there's like they're not um trying to to stop us they just want us to do the right thing if we don't comply the fine is a hundred thousand dollars holy cow i'm like oh i guess i'm gonna comply there's a quick welcome home we're gonna lose our house okay so let's recap the faa contacted us explained how we were using the drone was in fact illegal because we were making money from youtube and if we fly the drone again we would be facing up to a hundred thousand dollar fine or potentially higher and we needed to apply for the part 107 commercial license okay let's be clear youtube isn't our main gig sure we do get paid very little from youtube because people like you watch a video like this but it's not our main income in fact a lot of the times we just like to upload our videos to youtube because it's a way for us to document our memories and i think that's where a lot of our misunderstanding came from and so when you're flying a drone like the one i have in my hand and you make a penny a million dollars whatever the profit is technically you need to have a commercial license the faa even goes so far to say that if i were to take this drone and fly it to check the gutters in my house that i would need a commercial license even though nobody's paying me for it why the intent everything comes down to the intent on why you're flying you can only fly your drone without a commercial license if the intent was just to have fun and as soon as you change that intent for something other than just recreational fun that's when you need a part 107 commercial license so why is the faa cracking down is it because they want to keep everybody safe is it because they really just want to make a penny off of everybody what is the intent of the call that they made to us to other youtubers why are they cracking down on this well we're going to address this later in the video but first i've got to go get the part 107 license all right let's go [Music] now getting your part 107 license isn't really something you can just go pick up you have to study for it enter greg from the pilot institute a few friends of ours mentioned how much they enjoyed his youtube channel and highly recommended his course so i joined right away let's get to studying are you ready i think i'm ready you're ready so we're on the way to take the test it's in rome georgia which is about an hour or so away from our house i've got i've been doing it late this is really nice because the pilot institute has flash cards so i've been doing flash cards on my phone you're so prepared though like chris chris is underestimating himself he's taken two practice tests and he's aced both of them so i i've been aced i've passed no you've done really well on them i'm a terrible test taker too i get i start overthinking i get really anxious today i know i and i'm i'm nervous i'm really nervous but i have two hours to complete the test the test is only 60 questions which means i should have a lot of time to think and ponder and maybe i don't know cry over the answers i don't get but he'll be fine yeah so what are you allowed what's the lowest you can get 70 70 is the lowest that you can get so out of 12 questions or out of 60 questions i think i can miss 12 questions i'm not allowed to take a camera i'm not allowed to take any electronics into the test center the next thing that you see after this will be if i enjoy if i yeah if i if i have tears of joy or tears of sadness if i pass so we shall see oh and by the way if you're wondering whose car we're in we had to rent a car because our van's a construction zone right now it's the first place we've got in forever we haven't needed a car he passed first try so obviously this has been a crazy couple of months and we're really glad that whoever did reporters reported us to the season in our life where we had no intentions of traveling in fact all the videos we had filmed we already had plenty of drone footage that we didn't need to fly the drone that was where we got off a little bit lucky on this yes and the faa did say for past drone footage that we've already filmed that we could use it we just needed to mark it in the description below yes so from now on we're free to fly again thank goodness but today we're going to answer some of the questions that you all submitted over on instagram things about what drones need the commercial license height regulations cost why are they doing this all that kind of thing that you guys submitted on instagram all right let's do it does weight limit on a drone matter so for example the dji mavic mini is was it one ounce under the regulation for something explain that there is a dji product a little drone and on it you know it's got the weight because it's technically one gram or something like that underneath the weight limit but that is a common misconception you still have to get a commercial license in order to fly it because you're still flying it always comes down to the intent if your intent of using the drone is for something other than just i'm going to teach my 13 year old nephew how to fly a drone today for fun if it's anything besides just fun you have to have a license if the intent is not just having recreational fun now if you're out flying the drone and saying avalanche happens and you capture that avalanche on film and a news station says hey we want to pay you for that avalanche footage well technically you can sell that footage because the intent was just having fun and you just so happened to capture the avalanche footage and the faa is okay accepting that excuse only so many times there's a cap on how many excuses you can use it kids look a little fishy i mean be honest it's kind of what it yeah if there's ever a gray area the gray area is going to be ruled against the drone pilot yeah the faa is always going to win so if you're ever like well it's sort of a gray area this is what we wish we had knew yeah noon you will always lose this is what we wish we had known you will always lose if you're in that gray area faa is going to say you're messing up is there a height requirement like if you fly only to up to 100 feet is that the same thing could you keep it below a certain level and it's so if you need a license so every drone has a cap of going up to 400 feet and that is agl which is by the ground 400 feet now so so you can go up 400 feet now if there's an obstacle you can go 400 feet above that obstacle to get around that where it gets tricky and when you're in where you're reading the charts so this is great information where the pilot institute comes in because you know that you can only fly 400 feet in the air but a lot of the charts are by sea level not by ground level because you know ground shifts and changes you have to be able to read the charts to know how far you can go now if you're in different air spaces those have different caps and you have to be able to read the charts to say oh i can only fly this high but the tricky thing with the height for example we live next to a really steep mountain it's a short mountain but it's steep like a cliff so if we were to go up there's a park up here called point park if we were to go up to point park fly the drone off from that park and it instantly goes over the cliff which is almost 2000 feet within you know not very far as it goes down the mountain we cannot go off the mountain 400 feet out and then we'd be you know 2000 feet above the ground we have to stay with the curvature of the mountain to keep with 400 feet of ground level so it gets kind of tricky kind of fast so you have to always be extra safe yeah is the license needed to fly drones in certain places for example state park no this commercial license is for anywhere i mean there are definitely places that do not allow drones to be flown this does not by getting this commercial license does not give you free rein to fly in places that are no-fly zones without the license for example national parks yeah so you still have to call and get permission from whoever you're trying to wherever you're trying to fly but in fact if you have the commercial license and you decide hey i'm going to take this off in a national park then the faa can really come after you and be like you know better or you should know better why does a commercial license matter just a money maker for the government and how much was it we get it it's really easy to get mad at the faa or the government or whoever's in charge of this because it comes across sort of hostile and sort of pointed and aggressive towards us it's not a personal issue towards us so first off the faa wasn't just trying to troll chris and sarah they don't give a second thought about us they've already forgotten this probably let's start off with the price typically it's going to cost 95 or 100 to take the test it's around 100 to take the test the testing facility chris took his test at which was a community college they charged additional 60 as a facility fee or something like that which we understand there was a proctor he was the only person in there you have to pay a little bit so 160 to take the test first off then once he passed the test we had to re-register our drone but as a commercial drone so that was just five dollars the faa pocketed so right off the bat the faa is not really making a lot of money off of us especially since they're not they're not getting a lot of new people off of youtube like us to go and take the test they're not making much money i mean the faa is dealing with billions and millions of dollars not five dollars you know what i mean so they're not it's not a money maker for the faa so we have talked to several friends who are pilots who have been pilots in the past or are currently and there are things being lobbed before in washington right now where it's stricter drone laws and stuff like that this is going to be the future of drone flying as drones become more cost effective and everybody wants one i mean i'm sure tons of people got them for christmas this year we we know firsthand we almost hit one driving home christmas morning as more and more people get drones they're gonna have to crack down to keep people on the ground safe to keep pilots and citizens up in the air state it just becomes there's a lot of new laws they're going to be put into action so what our understanding and our belief is that the faa they're not out there trolling on youtube looking for people like us there's enough people who are anonymously submitting people like us calling up the faa you can't even do it online you have to call the faa give them the person's name which would be our name and show videos where we've flown the drone and then they investigate into it there's plenty of people out there who are submitting people anonymously it's not just us who's been you know had their names submitted the faa is not trolling online they could just have a hat pull a name out of the hat and our name happened to be the one that they pulled out of the hat that day yeah i think our frustration comes from the point of we were already following the rules we already sort of knew where not to fly and where to fly and the the people who don't or typically the people who cause problems for other drone pilots are the people who don't know the rules or really care for the rules like sarah said it's somebody who gets a drone for christmas and they're just really excited to fly it because it's really kind of fly yeah we don't think the faa sought us out we've been told by people who are very into aviation who are aviation professionals in different arenas that there are plenty of people's names being submitted that they don't have to have secret agents out there as some of y'all actually propose like well how do you know they don't just have secret agents trolling online they don't need that there's enough bitter people out there who are submitting people's names to get them in trouble however all the people did when they gave us submitted our name they may have thought they were trying to hurt us well one it came at a really good time in our lives we weren't flying our drone we just bought a house yes it came during an exciting season it was sort of a debbie downer for like five minutes and then we were like whatever we gotta get a license yeah they just gave us a step up and we don't want you to make the same mistake that we did yeah and so if you're on youtube if you're a creator by any means and you use drone footage go ahead and get the commercial license because it will save you headaches yeah it'll save you frustration and it's 60 questions two hours of your time if you need it we'll talk about that i'll ask about that if you have drone footage from before you monetize your channel those videos count that's a really really good question the answer is the intent if you intend to put this footage in a video you need to get a commercial license because your intent wasn't just a flight refund even though the nature of your videos is i'm just doing this for fun because that's what our channel is like yes we make a little bit of money but it's a small percentage of our annual income this is just a fun channel yeah so you need to get a license we hate the word intent by the way now it's just so ambiguous it's so great can you still use drone footage that's already been recorded yes yes we can we can use the footage that was recorded before we ever had a commercial license that we already had on youtube that's not a problem even in the process of studying and getting the test or taking the test we the faa told us you can still use the footage that is already pre-recorded if you record anything new with the drone before you pass the test you cannot use that in fact that's subject to a fee but anything prior to that call at that very moment we actually had to sign a paper saying that we had talked to faa that this is the time stamp on it and we will not fire anymore anything before that is still free yes and the faa is honestly pretty gracious she was super understanding she was very nice she wasn't accusing she was just saying these are the laws and we have to follow these she even told me a story about a guy in philadelphia who broke the rules and he continued to fly he didn't listen to their warning and he got slapped with i think she said 140 000 dollar fine so i mean it's not something to laugh about unless you just have a hundred thousand you know lying around that's all that that's a large chunk of our house we would have lost our house if we had flown the drone that's why i put it in very real terms like that kramer would not be able to eat doesn't the faa have better things to do all right so this is one thing we want to be really clear it's really easy to villainize the faa or anybody who comes at you with rules we're not mad at the faa in fact the lady who called us from the faa she said my job is to educate she didn't she wasn't calling and just pointing fingers she was saying you're doing something illegal she's like i'm here to help if you have any questions please let me know and chris actually sat on the phone with her and talked with her for probably 20 or 30 minutes she took a lot of time to talk to us just asking her questions of like okay well what does this look like do i need to take my old videos down you know all these kind of questions their jobs to educate they're here to help you their job is to also keep other people safe is to keep people in the sky safe people on the ground safe from things up in the sky their job is just to help to protect and enforce rules no they don't have better things to do that's their job i think if we were to get frustrated anybody would probably appreciate the people who reported us but after our 15 minutes of frustration or whatever it was we realized that we were gonna have to get this drone license anyway and all it's gonna do is give us a step up over other people because we got our license yeah and now we can sell our drone footage do whatever we want not really but what does it entail to obtain a commercial license to fly this is all you all right so in order to get a commercial license you have to register for a test and you have to take an exam that is 60 questions long it's super i'm not going to say the exam is super easy because you need to know your stuff but the process is super easy you register you show up at this site and they stick you in a cubicle and it's on a computer and you have three multiple choice answers and that's it you have to get 42 questions correct on the exam so you have to have at least a 70 passing grade you double check this yep which if you know your stuff you can do it we know people who have crammed overnight took the test and they passed that's great and fine for them i really kind of feel like that's setting them themselves up for failure later down the road because the the pilot certificate only lasts for two years and then you have to renew again so you still have to take this exam every two years to stay current so if you have a better idea of like if you have more knowledge about it if you have a better idea of what's happening the the easier the exam is and the better it is for you in the long run having a basic grasp and knowledge of it and not just cramming for and understanding it is only going to help you in the long run they may make this way harder for people to get drone licenses in the future and so he's already a step ahead so he learned the information well from the course is sarah going to take the test too probably i don't really find the drone i think i've flown the drone twice and we've never one time using the footage from it because i wasn't very good at it i'd like to practice more i think that i probably will take the test i'm just not sure when what did you do to prepare for the test and how long did it take so like you've seen in this video i studied through the pilot institute their 107 course the link is down below and full disclosure we are affiliates with them only because it works greg and his team over there have done an amazing job this honestly was probably the first online course that i have taken that i felt like i'm like this is a really really good course and i don't feel like i just regurgitated the the information i feel like i know it is it isn't regurgitated regurgitated i don't know don't use it i don't think you're saying it's all right so i really feel like i know the information like i walked out of the test and i'm like hey sarah i'm a pilot now and you know yeah well it's all how they teach things in that course i highly recommend it even if we weren't affiliates i would 100 point people towards them we have lifetime access to this course so as long as change or in two years if we need to do a course refresh we can go back and use flash cards we can see what we can use the new content that he's provided out there of updated laws and that kind of thing so when you buy the course you're getting access to it forever so we're not going to just use it this time we're going to use it in two years again and again and again yeah and that's the beauty of this course is that not only if this is your first time taking it he walks you through what that's going to be like but then when it comes from two years from now he's got a whole section on what the reoccurring test looks like and what to study for that so how long did it take you to do it oh so chris got access to the course in it was like late december i think late december and then he just took it in february 23rd or something like that but you i mean there were weeks he wouldn't even touch it because things were so busy but how many hours of video footage is it i mean it's it's over 12 hours of video footage it's a lot of content and it's it's a lot of practice tests and classes yeah a lot of practice tests quizzes and look taking this test to get your commercial license for a drone it's a lot and it can be a little daunting especially for people like us who have a little bit of test anxiety and um he was so cute he was so nervous like he's about to go take his act again or something hips like sweating videos my palms are funny chris is a commercial pilot now commercial drone pilot he passed his part 107 drone test so enjoy some drone footage here have any questions we didn't answer about drone flying make sure to leave them in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer them for more adventures on the road and in our new home be sure to follow along on instagram and like and subscribe here it really helps creators like us [Music] you

Channel: Let's Be Us

Views: 33,239

Rating: 4.9031415 out of 5

Keywords: drone, commercial drone, commercial drone license, part 107, drone laws usa, drone laws 2021, how to legally fly a drone, how to fly a drone, youtube drone law, youtube drone footage, youtube drone fails, drone fails, drone fines, faa, federal aviation administration, drone mistakes, drone laws in the usa, drone news

Id: NDiJXIXedFQ

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021