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The Problem With Mandatory Drone Registration (roboticstrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Drone lawyer and commercial pilot Jonathan Rupprecht believes any drone registration plan is a necessary first step, but he's also doubtful that registering drones will be a valuable solution. "Who is going to regulate this? Point-of-sale? Wal-Mart? Best Buy?" he asked. "What if I'm ordering parts off the Internet and put them together? That's what the gun industry does." A registration number, he said, could quickly be lost if a drone is bought and sold multiple times. Rupprecht believes geofencing will produce far better results by preventing problems as opposed to trying to figure out who is responsible after something has happened.
Drones are interesting but beyond their scary name they are just the classic tool. Like knives, gasoline, matches, and leaf blowers there are the vast majority of people who will do good with them and a tiny few who will do bad things.
Fertilizer monitoring probably is a good thing as a single bad person can do a tremendous amount of damage. But right now a drone is going to give someone a bad cut or maybe take out an eye.
What I do smell is the government getting really pissed off that drones are being used to inform. That is their worst nightmare. Drones monitoring police, or fire is not what they want. They love when they have an excuse to push the public back and exert their authority. They love when they can put armed patrols around a pollution site where some big donor has been given cart blanche to pollute their way to another billion dollars. They hate when a drone flies overhead and exposes the truth.
As for drones interfering with flight operations, have you ever met a goose? If you are a pilot and your choices are to hit a goose or to hit a drone pretty much every pilot will chose the drone.
But sadly various criminals are going to buy better and better drones and come up with better and better ways to use them. So drug deliveries, even armed robberies are coming.
So this is going to be the classic war on drugs stupidity where they don't have any impact on the criminals while having a massive impact on the benefits that drones could provide the public.
I also wonder if some of these regulations are coming from the really big aviation companies who have pretty much entirely missed out on the commercial drone market and they know that if they craft the regulations carefully enough they will shut out the innovations pouring out of small companies all over. This way it will end up only being large corporations selling to the police, the military, and other large corporations? This completely screws the little guy. But at what point has government taken the needs of the little guy into serious consideration in the last 50 years when it came up against huge corporations?
This is giving me a headache. I had better take one of my cheap aspirin before the TPP allows Bayer to somehow renew their patent.
PHEH!
This is obviously a case for robots.txt
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just like drivers and vehicle licences. Those regulations don't stop people from operating a vehicle illegally, but it does provide a system to punish people who do.
Rawr
The problem isn't that the majority people doing illegal things with quadcopters aren't acting maliciously, but are acting in ignorance. It's just like licensing people to drive: it forces them to learn the rules of the road, so fewer people will be ignorant of them.
Rawr
The vast majority of people flying quadcopters don't already do illegal stuff. Nobody is gonna read regulations, it's just gonna be more paperwork nobody give a shit about...
they don't stop criminals
You're right; criminals will do as they will and they won't hesitate to file a number off their drones any more than they do their guns.
However, I have noted that the headlines involving drones are frequently not hardened criminals attempting to facilitate some criminal enterprise. They're knucklehead schoolteachers, government bureaucrats and doctors at the US Open or some football game trying to video the events and post it on facetoob or whatever.
When pulled up on their recklessness they plead ignorance and seem to have trouble understanding why they shouldn't be permitted to fly their toy over a huge crowd of people. The former part of that is an act to weasel out of consequences. The later part will be mitigated to some degree by making it clear to these entitled assholes that their names on file.
If that cuts the frequency of headlines about idiots using their excessive disposable income to interfere with air tankers around forest fires then great.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Reductio ad Absurdum
Good-bye
Or at least the vast majority of people flying quadcopters aren't getting caught flying them illegally, and it's really easy to fall astray of the existing FAA regulations. Did you know it's illegal to fly over crowds? Or within a certain range of airports? Or during a number of events where the FAA may institute temporary no-fly zones? Or flying over 200ft AGL? Or for commercial purposes (unless for every quadcopter you operate you register for a special, expensive, exemption with the FAA that requires filing a very detailed disaster recovery plan, and registering for a tail number and operation requires the presence of two people, one of which must be holding an active pilot's license with the FAA, and the copter may never leave your line of sight)? Or that "commercial" use includes posting to YouTube as they monetize their videos (even if you're not)? I think there's a fairly sizeable number of people who may have unintentionally violated on of those, or other, rules about unlicensed aircraft operation.
You mean like how nobody bothers to look at the driver's manual their first time ever taking a drivers' license exam? They just say "screw it," and drive unlicensed? You think the majority of American motorists are driving that way?
Rawr
I agree with the folks that say licenses are not the answer. My dog is licensed, and he STILL can't drive well at all. I told him "The speed limit in school zones is 15 mph", but it's like he doesn't even listen. I'll tell you the truth, I really don't like riding with him much at all. I don't think he could control a drone any better than he can drive a car. What did getting him the license solve? Nothing!
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
You're so right. For the same reason, we need a federal licensing regime for owning binoculars. And cameras. And eyes.
Come to think of it, we've already HAVE privacy laws. Because we already have eyes.
That drone isn't doing anything to the plane that a large bird can't. IMO, that's a design flaw of the plane. Worse, if that's really such a risk, it's an obvious way for a terrorist to bring down an airliner. They're not going to care about drone regulations.
I get your point about bicycles and skis, but the flip side is that the airliner example is probably a one-in-a-million chance, whereas cycling and skis do routinely get both the operator and bystanders hurt or even killed. Yea, they're not going to take out more than two or three people at once, but the likelihood is far greater.