Team BlackSheep

. A judge today threw out a $10,000 fine that the Federal Aviation Administration had levied against Raphael Pirker of Team BlackSheep. Pirker is the only person that the FAA has fined so far for violating its rules against flying small drones below 400 feet, Reuters says . FAA could appeal the decision to the National Transportation Safety Board.

For more about Pirker and the future of small drones in American skies, check out our feature, "Drone Skies: The Unmanned Aircraft Revolution is Coming."

The YouTube video "Golden Gate Bridge," posted by nastycop420, begins with footage of the bridge at sundown. As an ethereal techno tune plays in the background, the camera sweeps in across the water of San Francisco Bay toward the iconic orange suspension bridge lit by the setting sun. It has that familiar feel of a helicopter tracking shot from countless movies.

Then things get vertiginous in a hurry. A few swift cuts later and the camera is banking hard over the bridge's south tower, then flying strangely close as the view pulls in tight alongside the roadway. Suddenly it flies over one of the towers and executes a twisting dive toward the water, then recovers and straightens out. A few quick cuts again and the camera is cruising under the bridge, through the crossbeam tower supports. It's then you realize—that's no helicopter.

Nastycop420 is Raphael Pirker, one of the cofounders of Team BlackSheep, a Swiss-based group of radio-controlled-aircraft enthusiasts that has been gleefully pushing the boundaries of what you can do aerially (and legally) with remotely controlled flying machines. Pirker and his colleagues call themselves RC Daredevils, and they sell and fly a variety of what are known in the enthusiast community as FPV, or first-person-view aircraft: modified, battery-powered flying wings such as the Ritewing Zephyr, Ritewing ZII, and Caipirinha, as well as multirotor craft such as the Discovery Quadcopter.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The footage of the Golden Gate Bridge was captured with a highly maneuverable flying wing that has a range of up to 10 miles and is controlled from the ground via a long-range UHF transmitter, in combination with a set of video goggles that receive a real-time analog broadcast from a camera on the aircraft. A GoPro camera attached to the wing captures HD footage of its entire journey. Team BlackSheep has flown FPV vehicles all over the world. The group's popular YouTube channel has videos from Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, London, and Istanbul. On a 2012 U.S. "road trip," the group flew through Monument Valley, over the Hoover Dam, down the Las Vegas Strip, into the Grand Canyon, and, most notoriously, around New York Harbor—circling the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

By now you might be asking yourself, isn't that illegal? The answer is probably, but flight rules for UAS (unmanned aerial systems, in FAA parlance) are still gray enough that Pirker thinks his crew is within the bounds of the law. "The cool thing is that this is relatively new, so none of the laws are specifically written against or for what we do," he says. "In the U.S. right now, it's completely open, so long as you do it for noncommercial purposes."

But the FAA isn't happy with Team BlackSheep. For at least one incident, it has recommended a civil penalty of $10,000 for violation of 14 CFR 91.13 (a): "Careless or reckless operation of an aircraft." It's the first time the agency has cited a UAS operator for that violation.

In a phone interview from his home in Hong Kong (Team BlackSheep is an international crew), Pirker strongly disagreed with the FAA's reckless-operation assessment. "We use foam aircraft," he says. "I couldn't damage something if I wanted to." The FAA's current rules for UAS allow unrestricted noncommercial flight below 400 feet above ground level, so long as the aircraft are kept a sufficient distance away from populated areas and full-size aircraft. There's considerable room for interpretation there, but Team BlackSheep's videos suggest a violation of even the loosest reading of those guidelines. After all, the Golden Gate Bridge towers rise to a height of 746 feet, and flying through populated areas is pretty much the group's defining mission. Pirker answers that Team BlackSheep is hardly the only group flying this way. A quick search for "FPV crash" videos will bring up all kinds of the truly dangerous tomfoolery by hobbyists using UASs.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

But even within this community, Team BlackSheep's slickly produced videos stand out for the shear audacity of their stunts, and, it's worth mentioning, the incredible skill with which they fly. One video from Rio shows two quadrotors playfully navigating a claustrophobic indoor parking garage—at one point pushing an empty coffee cup around with the machine's rotorwash. Pirker says his two cofounders are former glider pilots who gave up flying real planes because FPV aircraft offer more exhilaration with far less setup. (Pirker himself hasn't got a pilot's license. "I'm afraid of heights," he says with a laugh.) The BlackSheep crew brings extra FPV goggles with them when they fly so curious bystanders can experience what it's like to be a "passenger" on their aircraft. "The image is so real that your brain projects the movements into your body," Pirker says. "We've had people fall over."

It seems that Team BlackSheep's high profile has now gotten them into trouble not only with the FAA, but also within the RC community. The group has been kicked out of several hobbyist flying clubs (hence the BlackSheep name), and arrested or detained multiple times. By Pirker's account, he or other members of Team BlackSheep have been detained in Arizona for landing in the Grand Canyon, questioned by police for flying around London, called in for questioning in Austria, and arrested in Italy recently for filming the Costa Concordia shipwreck—all incidents that have nothing to do with the citation by the FAA.

Pirker believes it all amounts to an overreaction to something new. "After all," he says, "this is an aircraft that I can catch with my hands." He'd like to see some sort of certification process arise for these aircraft but says the current legal limbo has left FPVs open to overly restrictive interpretations of various flight rules. He has still not heard a final word about the FAA fine—and he hopes he never will.

"If we have to, we'll find a way to pay it," he says, "but for me personally, it's way beyond what is possible to pay." Regardless of what happens, Pirker says Team BlackSheep will continue to fly. "We love to travel and we take our aircraft everywhere we go."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Team BlackSheep aren't the only ones doing daredevil FPV videos. This one was posted by Gabriel Klabin in 2007. Check out the crazy ending!

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io