The US federal court is being asked to overturn a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ruling about unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’.

Commercial UAV pilots, model-aircraft hobbyists and university researchers each filed a lawsuit on 22 August calling for the US Circuit Court of Appeals to review the ruling, which came into effect in June.

The ruling defines who qualifies as a hobbyist and what precautions they must take when flying drones. Restrictions for hobbyists include keeping the aircraft within sight of the pilot, avoiding other aircraft and notifying air-traffic control when flying within five miles of an airport.

The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) argues that this establishes an array of new regulations that model aircraft enthusiasts have never been subject to in the past.

Dave Mathewson, executive director of the AMA, said: “Aero-modelling has been a stepping stone to careers in aviation and aerospace for many young people in this country.

The AMA is concerned that the FAA’s interpretation of the law will diminish our ability to be the pipeline for young talent that will become the next generation of engineers this country so sorely needs.”

The FAA has been working on regulations that would permit commercial drone flights for more than 10 years. A law passed by Congress in 2012 directed it to issue regulations permitting commercial drone flights by the autumn of next year but prohibited the agency from imposing new regulations on model aircraft.

Brendan Schulman, a New York attorney representing the groups that filed the lawsuits, said that the FAA ruling is a “backdoor imposition of new regulations on model aircraft hobbyists and commercial drone operators without going through the required federal procedures for creating new regulations.

“People who have been using these technologies for years in different ways are concerned that they are suddenly prohibited from doing so without having their voices heard, and without regard to the detrimental impact on the commercial drone industry.

”In situations where there really is no safety issue, there appears to be an outright prohibition on activities that have been done for a long time very safely.”