Can Drones Really Get National Airspace Access?

coondoggie writes "There is a push by a variety of proponents to give unmanned aircraft more free rein in US airspace, but safety is a major hitch in that effort. The Federal Aviation Administration said this week that data from the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, which flies unmanned systems on border patrols, shows a total of 5,688 flight hours from Fiscal Year 2006 to July 13, 2010. The CBP accident rate is 52.7 accidents per 100,000 flight hours. This accident rate is more than seven times the general aviation accident rate (7.11 accidents/100,000 flight hours) and 353 times the commercial aviation accident rate (0.149 accidents/100,000 flight hours)." An FAA executive noted that an "accident" refers to a situation in which "the aircraft has done something unplanned or unexpected and violates an airspace regulation."

Comments

Re:Here's a prediction

[PopeRatzo]

I think the reasonable thing to do would be to make all lobbying public.

It was called the DISCLOSE Act and it just passed the congress and was signed into law.

The Republicans are promising to repeal it as soon as possible, saying it "violates the 1st Amendment" to force corporations to disclose their political spending.

They just can't get it through their heads that corporations are not the same as people. There's no language in the Constitution that would indicate that corporations are the same as individuals and have the same rights. And yes, there were big transnational corporations in the late 1700s.

Or maybe it's not that the GOP can't get it through their heads that corporations are not persons, but they just don't care because their political future depends upon the complete corporate takeover of government. While there are individual Democrats who also hitch their wagon to the corporatocracy, only the GOP makes is a central part of their entire platform. Significantly, the public is against this unlimited corporate political spending as created by the Citizens United case by nearly 80%, but the media has done an impressive job of obfuscating the issue.

The wordnet definition of treason is:

        * a crime that undermines the offender's government
        * disloyalty by virtue of subversive behavior
        * treachery: an act of deliberate betrayal

This definition is perfectly descriptive of the Right in America. When they say they are "anti-government" it's not the French government they're talking about. So the Right in America, the GOP, Limbaugh, Palin, etc are directly in opposition to the US Government, by their own admission.