Extended summary: Except over national parks. Over national parks you are allowed to fly, but not take off, operate, or land, and the FAA's app chooses to say you can't fly.
What’s the difference between flying and operating? If the drone is over a national park, isn’t it “operating” over it?
If you’re saying it’s permissible to stand outside the park and fly the drone in that sounds like the worst kind of hairsplitting to me and totally goes against the spirit of the rule.
As the purpose of the regulation is due to “this new use has the potential to cause unacceptable impacts such as harming visitors, interfering with rescue operations, causing excessive noise, impacting viewsheds, and disturbing wildlife.”
> If you’re saying it’s permissible to stand outside the park and fly the drone in ...
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. They want to ban flying over the park, but they don't have the legal power to do so. So instead they banned a bunch of other things (launching, landing, operating) to make flying over the park as inconvenient as possible.
The hairsplitting that goes totally against the spirit of the rule, in my opinion, is not the hair splitting that lets you continue to fly over the park, but the hairsplitting that let them pass this regulation in the first place.
I’d imagine the NPS has a better understanding of the parks than people who like drones. I’m glad they’re making it as inconvenient as possible and hope they become empowered to ban drones completely from the parks.
I have no opinion of whether or not drones should be banned over national parks, and am happy to defer to them on the topic.
We live in a democracy governed by the rule of law though. I'm strongly against attempts to work around the rule of law by government agencies even if I think the outcome is somewhat positive.
In this case that means in order to ban drones flying over national parks they either need to convince the legislative branch to grant them the power to do so, or if the FAA has already been granted such power they need to convince the FAA to pass such regulations. What they shouldn't be doing (in my opinion) is work arounds like this trying to seize authority that the legislature has not granted them. (I acknowledge but disagree with an argument that this is not a workaround/splitting hairs but instead a legitimate use of their granted power)
Is it generally permitted in National Forests? If so, then the prohibition in National Parks seems totally reasonable.
Drone flying is a fundamentally antisocial activity. If you're doing it far away from others then that's fine, but I have no sympathy for the drone pilots in this thread complaining that they're forbidden from flying over crowded city streets or in similar scenarios. National Parks have tons of people in them, while National Forests are generally rather empty. Those are better locations for drone pilots.
If you’re saying it’s permissible to stand outside the park and fly the drone in that sounds like the worst kind of hairsplitting to me and totally goes against the spirit of the rule.
As the purpose of the regulation is due to “this new use has the potential to cause unacceptable impacts such as harming visitors, interfering with rescue operations, causing excessive noise, impacting viewsheds, and disturbing wildlife.”
It seems like flying is what’s discouraged.
https://www.nps.gov/policy/PolMemos/PM_14-05.htm