UK To Require Drone Registration And Safety Exams (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg: Drones will have to be registered and their users required to pass safety tests under new rules to be announced by the U.K.'s Department for Transport... Registration will be mandated for owners of drones 250 grams (8.8 ounces) or larger after research found that drones as small as 400 grams (14 ounces) could damage the windscreens of helicopters. Other security measures like "geo-fencing" -- GPS-based technology programmed into drones to prevent them from flying into sensitive areas such as prisons and airports -- are also under consideration, according to a statement from the department.
The BBC points out that "There is no time frame or firm plans as to how the new rules will be enforced and the Department of Transport admitted that 'the nuts and bolts still have to be ironed out.'"

"The UK government says 22 incidents involving commercial airliners and drones were investigated between January and April of this year," adds TechRadar, "with police unable to trace the owners of the drones -- one of the reasons for the new legislation."

Comments

Re:Be careful

[jareth-0205]

Mandatory registration is usually the first step toward criminalization.

Eh? We do registration and licencing for cars/driving, and there's a fairly clear parallel here. Unless you think driving licences are an unacceptable curtailment of your freedom, I can't get worked up about this. There's plenty of terrible things that the government are doing to rile against, this isn't one.

Re: A knife is dangerous..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does Vermont, with no gun controls, have a lower murder rate?
Why does Venezuela, with a total gun prohibition, have some of the worlds highest murder rates?

Re:"drones"

[serviscope_minor]

Why was this not required before?

Most legislatures don't sit around thinking up new laws in a vacuum, they are on the whole pretty reactive not proactive.

So, essentially the advent of cheap, high capacity, high power li-po batteries for the power supply, high strength neodynium magnets and amazing MOSFETS for power control, remarkably good, cheap 9 axis IMU chips (3mm by 3mm) and cheap 2.4GHz radio comms have made making plug-and-play drones viable. CPU power hasn't had much to do with it, you can run the control loops on a couple of ATMegas.

But the point is these things are (a) very cheap and (b) fly themselves for everything but direction (even that if they also have GPS).

Previously, RC planes were (and still are) much, much more expensive, much more specialist bits of kit. They required many many months of dedication, lots of money, and nice big wide open spaces and the sort of user community of knowledgeable people who would tell you how to get going. Helicopters were that times about 20. Phenomenally hard to fly, experts only.

Now any idiot can go to maplin, buy a drone and be flying it where they want in the time taken to unbox it and charge the batteries. So, it's gone from "expert only" to "any idiot can do it" and so many idiots are doing it.

Previously the RC aircraft community was very small and very well behaved. Now it is large, and with enough ill behaviour that it's attracted the notice of the MPs.

Kinda means the system works.