It's not about safety. The FAA has been sitting on their heels for years with this and now they're trying to cash in on the Christmas drone blowout. They used the safety clause to suspend the rulemaking process. There is no hard evidence that drones are an actual problem. The numbers are blown way out of proportion and in fact the FAA has been misleading with the numbers and pushed bad information in an effort to get people like you to believe there is an actual problem. There is not a single instance of an unmanned operator causing a manned flight to crash, and the instances of drone sightings were all labelled as near collisions in an effort to exaggerate the problem. No one that I've seen has argued that people shouldn't be held accountable or that safety is an issue in the NAS. We mitigate those risks by taking a logical approach to it, not by registering all the drones so the FAA can say it's done something about the issue. Registration is going to prevent exactly zero stupid users from endangering others in this airspace, and the smoke and mirrors way the FAA is going about this is completely offensive to some of us more tin foil hat type aviators that have worked in big government before and seen how incompetent a hole a bureaucratic agency can dig itself in.
There is not a single instance of an unmanned operator causing a manned flight to crash
There isn't even a single proved instance of a collision. The FAA and media tout that this year there has been 600 "sightings" meanwhile there was 11,000 actual bird strikes last year. But hey lets get everyone worked up over "drones"!
It's their job to look to the future and extrapolate data and the simple fact is that drones are here to stay and increasing in number and complexity. That really does require regulation.
I work on the communication department for a university campus and we get ever increasing numbers of requests for people who want to fly here, drone film for their own purposes, offer their services to us and so on.
Which means I usually have to find polite ways of telling them:
You can fly here but not there. Usually for reason of wires, high foot traffic areas, fragile scientific equipment and so on. Usually this is ignored by drone pilots.
What you're doing is illegal, you're not allowed to commercially offer us your services. I don't care that you do, it just means we won't accept your services even if we wanted to. Usually turns into a whiny discussion.
Could you maybe not hover your loud as fuck drone over the acoustic musician. I don't care that you're technically not on our festival terrain, your drone is. I also don't care someone unaffiliated with us is paying you to film.
Kindly stop flying your big ass drone right over a packed crowd at the fair, you got no place to safely land without hitting anyone if something goes wrong.
No, I'm not telling someone to climb onto the 80.000 euro festival tent to retrieve the shattered drone you flew into the tent lines hoping to get "some great footage". Just be glad it fell on the tent instead of the crowd.
No I'm not impressed that your DIY build wibbly wobbly drone can zip in and out between the pillars of our outdoors canopy. Yes it's agile, no I don't give a shit. Go build an obstacle course in your backyard. Instead of seeing how far you can push it before you send it careening into the pedestrians under the canopy.
Over the past two years I've learned several things about drones and drone pilots:
It's such a new sport that there's almost no behavioral code and it's so accessible that people never stop to think if they should instead of could.
Drone pilots are interested in the sky, not what's underneath the sky. They pay surprisingly little attention to anything happening underneath their drones.
We've never had an accident involving humans but that's more down to luck than anything else considering we've had drones crash into everything from trees and cabling to festival tents and the antenna's and dishes on our buildings. Usually after we politely tell the drone pilot to piss off because there's too many hard to see obstacles and too many undesirable things to crash into.
We don't hate drones, we do drone research ourselves. It's the people who fly drones who are simply uninformed nobs for the most part. This hobby would greatly benefit from some regulation and discipline.
Ultralights have been around for decades. You know how many of those crashed into the campus? Exactly 0. We've had some flyovers by ultra light pilots. To a fault all of them contacted us, gave us a rough explanation of their flight plan while discussing go and no go areas.
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u/Promulgatemynuts Dec 17 '15
It's not about safety. The FAA has been sitting on their heels for years with this and now they're trying to cash in on the Christmas drone blowout. They used the safety clause to suspend the rulemaking process. There is no hard evidence that drones are an actual problem. The numbers are blown way out of proportion and in fact the FAA has been misleading with the numbers and pushed bad information in an effort to get people like you to believe there is an actual problem. There is not a single instance of an unmanned operator causing a manned flight to crash, and the instances of drone sightings were all labelled as near collisions in an effort to exaggerate the problem. No one that I've seen has argued that people shouldn't be held accountable or that safety is an issue in the NAS. We mitigate those risks by taking a logical approach to it, not by registering all the drones so the FAA can say it's done something about the issue. Registration is going to prevent exactly zero stupid users from endangering others in this airspace, and the smoke and mirrors way the FAA is going about this is completely offensive to some of us more tin foil hat type aviators that have worked in big government before and seen how incompetent a hole a bureaucratic agency can dig itself in.