Near Misses Lead To More Consumer Drone Legislation

stowie writes: Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced the Consumer Drone Safety Act that looks to shore up safety features on consumer drones and the federal laws that govern them. This bill has nothing to do with the FAA's proposed rules on small commercial drones, this is all about hobbyist drones. It's looking to regulate the maximum height for flight, the weather and time-of-day conditions for flight, and any areas where flights may be prohibited. If passed, the act would require manufacturers to update existing consumer drones to meet these requirements, potentially through an automatic software update. The bill would require safety features for new consumer drones such as Geo-fencing to govern the altitude and location of flights, collision-avoidance software, and more.

Comments

Re:Feinstein as usual

[ColdWetDog]

We need a consumer protection bill consumer protection bill.

Let's try this for a law

[kbsoftware]

Here's a novel idea. How about instead of creating laws for drone manufacturers to try and protect everyone from stupid people how about we create laws to deal with the stupid people. Here's how it works, clean slate everyone can buy a drone if they wish. Once someone does something stupid like fly your drone too close to planes/helicopters, of fly your drone in a crowded area and so forth then that person has their drone taken away, they are charged accordingly and are put on a permanent banned list and never allowed to buy another drone again. Even better let's make a stupid people list so we can stop or help stupid people from continuing to make stupid decisions.