“I have been involved with RC fro over 40 years. Prior to that I had balsa and spruce, gliders, rubber band propeller models that were sold at many stores, etc. I watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon for the first time and I was hooked on flight. All aspects of it. I built my first RC plane at about 14 or so. Saved for a long time to be able to afford the electronics in it, and even made some of the electronic myself with things I bought at Radio Shack. That has turned into a life long hobby of creation, learning, and helping to advance RC wherever I lived. I currently have a rather large collection of RC cars, planes, helicopters, and jets. You tend to collect things like that over the years when it is your hobby. All of my children are into rc as well. What concerns me about the Remote Id system is not a simple answer, there is a lot that concerns me about it. First and foremost, is the design of the proposal to basically eliminate rc entirely in time. No, I am not talking about going to Walmart and buying some FAA regulated RC that requires more ID than you need to buy a car. I am talking about building models, figuring out what will and what wont work, and they finally some time later getting the thrill of flying it. For many people living in the US, that wont ever happen again if the proposal goes thru as written. Another thing that bothers me, is a government agency telling me what I can, and can’t do on my own land. I am sure that many other land owners would say the same thing as well. I will use my family farm as an example, since it is a better example than the land I own. My families farm is in the mountains of WV. It is a rather large piece of land and the elevation change is about 1400 feet from the lowest point to the highest point. If I am standing on the lowest point, no plane, shipping drone, etc, is ever going to fly there. To tell me that I can only be 400 feet off the ground when I will still be 800 feet below the highest point on the land is a bit pointless. I should be able to go up 1800 if 400 feet above is my limit. Yet only go 400 feet up if I am at the highest point on the property. I should also be able to fly anywhere on that land from no matter where I am standing on it. And that is well beyond 400 feet no matter where I am standing on it for the most part. Is there really a need to control airspace that will never be commercially used for anything? No, there is not. There has only ever been one manned landing on the property that I know of. And that was a military helicopter on a bathroom break. I know that, because I was there when it happened. That area is now long since overgrown, and your not landing a helicopter there now. Having to start paying to continue a hobby that I have been doing for years bothers me as well. And I will have to pay far more than the proposal suggests. I have one sub 250g RC, one… Some of my RC planes will not stay within 400 feet of you. They are too big, too fast, and they don’t turn on a dime. Many of them are hand built from scratch, and therefore not retrofitable. Some of them cost thousands of dollars to put together. I still have am and fm transmitters, and anyone that knows anything about them knows there is nothing to reflash as suggested in the proposal. I know plenty of other people that still have old rc equipment that is still in use to this day. As it stands now, by the wording of the proposal, none of my RC stuff will be flyable unless I am at a club with FAA approval. Guess what. I already have permission to fly on much larger pieces of land which have plenty of room, and no one is within miles of it. Now you want me to fly a very fast, very heavy planes and jets at a club. That is right smack in suburbia. That puts people at risk, that were never at risk when I was not at the only field here. I am guessing that no one ever thought about that. Now every RC, even very large and heavy ones, will be flying near people all the time. If this proposal is for safety, it is not going to work in areas with sparse population. It is going to bring all of the rc’s in this area, closer to people. Very close…. I would bet that is not what the FAA had in mind here, but obviously overlooked. RC is a hobby, it does not need government intervention. I went back and read years of FAA notes, studies, and proposals. I have no clue who came up with a lot of it either. Sentences like, the rapid advancement of battery technology. (which is not the case, rc would know about it) How there would be millions of commercial drones in the skys by 2020. (well, were finally at 2020, and that was a tad off) This proposal is nothing more than taking the airspace rights away from everyone, and handing them over to an industry that is no where near ready to move forward. Everyone in rc knows the limitations of flight. Some of them even helped design much of what is going to be used in heavy shipping drones. This is about taking from the little people, and giving to big corporations that mislead panels of people into doing something that is not necessary. Why should a hobby, that only sees limited flight hours per year, be forced into paying for 24/7 flight time. There will be basically no difference in cost for a shipping drone that can fly 24/7, and an rc pilot that might get 24 hours a year. If you read a lot of the older FAA proposals, things were almost always calculated based on a million hours of flight time. Now, the people that fly the most are not being considered in that as all, and if you have a real plane it is a one time purchase of a transponder. RC, will pay every month, and far more, than a real plane. Which bring up another point in all of this. The most dangerous class of flight is ultralights, and there are basically zero costs to fly those. That is a hobby for people with lots of money, yet a hobby for everyone else will pay more to fly than an ultralight. An ultralight class, that is know to crash, has been known to be a national security issue, etc. But wait, I know, there is no money to be made with ultralights, so basically no FAA rules. That is what all of this is about. Money, who has it, and who is going to pay the most. And as usual, the people that will pay the most based on the proposal are the people how will be in the air the least, if you look at it by millions of hours. It used to be that FAA rules had grandfather clauses. When tail wheel endorsement went thru, anyone that had ever flown a plane with one was exempt. There are tons of clauses like that. Planes can kill people you know. How many people has RC killed? Zero….. It used to be that pilots were not grounded with changes, just like the tail wheel thing. It used to be that older equipment was not nullified. It used to be that rules didn’t stop production. All of that is about to change so that shipping drones that are not ready can, well, fail…”