Drone Ban - Part One
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
The US government has been considering putting bans on drone technology manufactured in China in recent legislative discussions. This has drone spraying companies concerned, and led to the formation of the American Spray Drone Coalition. Bryan Sanders at HSE-UAV is a member of the coalition. He believes agricultural drones are being unintentionally lumped into the ban.
Sanders… “We in the agriculture sector, really got lumped into a ban that was intended for a different audience and a different industry altogether. There's been a lot of concern for years about our first responders, military, et cetera, using Chinese made drones, especially around critical and important infrastructure. I think the big difference in why I say ag got looped into this kind of inadvertently is because we're not flying over critical infrastructure. We're not recording things. If anything, folks are looking at a live view camera just to see where the drone is in real time, to tell how close it is to trees or the end of a row of crops. Crop production insights is not new, and it's been publicly available for years. In other words, we've gotten lumped into something that the regulations weren't originally targeting.”
Sanders added that there aren’t currently American made spray drones that can replace the Chinese technology should a ban go through.
