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0 is a good one

As a pilot who wants top live, i'd prefer people without training to stay out of the sky. Flying an extension of you (your drone) is even worse because you have even less interest in the safety since in a mid-air collision between planes, you die too. If your drone hits my plane - you do not die. Want to fly? Get a license. Want to fly a drone? Still get a license!

What you ask (FAA to leave the issue alone) is akin to letting 2 year olds drive 18-wheelers on the roads you drive your kids to school on? Feeling comfy with that?

To people who claim drones aren’t dangerous: YOU might have almost been killed by one last time you flew commercial: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/near-c...

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That's an extremist position. What if I want to build model rockets? They go into the sky, but the commercially available stuff doesn't go high enough to normally affect airplanes so they're legal and unlicensed and have been for decades. Same for model airplanes, and model helicopters, and until we slapped the word 'drone' on quadcopters and strapped on good video cameras they weren't a concern either.

Likewise, I'll take the opposite extreme position that if you want to fly airplanes over populated locations, stay more than a couple thousand feet away as well, you're noisy and small aircraft and their pilots don't have quite the safety record that large ones do. How many people have quadcopter operators killed compared to small aircraft pilots? Seems like the answer should be that pilots of small aircraft, the planes vulnerable to small impacts and the pilots actually killing people should be kept away from the populace. What's the utility of allowing small aircraft to fly over my house anyways?

There's definitely room for both activities in the air.

> How many people have quadcopter operators killed

Zero, meanwhile even Harrison Ford, an extremely qualified pilot, found a golf course when his engine gave out. Shit happens, and we need to plan accordingly instead of trying to prevent the shit in the first place. Oddly enough, I don't see worldwide media focusing on the private aviation hobby and how dangerous it is to everyone even though he landed on a fucking golf course. But no, one drone lands on the White House lawn and it's a national emergency with firmware updates pushed by DJI in response to ban Washington, D.C.

My work, as I point out elsewhere in this thread, is to educate folks about the positive uses for drone technology and the industry that's about to happen. The possibilities of extending our senses into the air around us are endless. I've had people come up to me while operating in public and threaten me and my equipment. People are shooting at drones with some frequency in the more backwater parts of the United States. I'm waiting for one of those bullets to land a few miles away and kill a child, because I predict the backlash will be against the fliers, not the shooters.

I often feel like I'm pushing, hopelessly against the avalanche of media fearmongering, because this technology has real, potent uses that should appeal to this community of startup tinkerers and hobbyists. We could be investing in automatic technology to build upon TCAS and integrate commercial UAS into that system, but we're not: we're trying to prevent the industry from ever happening.

Imagine the Wright Brothers trying to tinker in today's regulatory climate. Remember how all of us fought against classifying our hobby as "drones," even though it's technically correct, because most peoples' exposure to the word "drone" is centered around Hellfire-carrying platforms? Yeah, this is why.

Or Henry Ford.. If the car were inveted today I'm pretty sure it would be illegal. Again, 40k people die per year in cars yet no one blinks.

Don't model rockets routinely go much higher than the 400 feet the FAA has traditionally limited hobby aircraft to?

> Don't model rockets routinely go much higher than the 400 feet the FAA has traditionally limited hobby aircraft to?

Even if they do, they're mostly cardboard, whereas model airplanes have things like small engine blocks. I bet a 737 engine could ingest a model rocket without anyone noticing.

You'd be surprised. Jet engines are designed to be robust against some really crazy scenarios (I'm amazed a jet engine continues to function during the water injection tests I've seen), but all it takes is one blade failure -- with many to choose from in various places in the engine -- and it's game over. One can imagine many ingestions that might cause a blade failure, because the rotating fans in a jet engine are very high energy environments. With the right alignment of planets and hitting just right, a model rocket might cause a failure. It all depends and is hard to predict. Most people would predict modern engines as likely to survive ingestion of geese, but then we had US 1549 (and a USAF E-3 at Elmendorf before it).

Even though the FAA has engine manufacturers like GE test the hell out of engines, it's tough to predict what will happen in the real world. Birds are a huge threat to aviation, both engine ingestion and windscreen collisions, and birds are mostly organic. (It goes without saying to stand the hell away from an operating jet engine even at idle, too, because humans do get ingested with fatal results.) I can't imagine an operating engine ingesting a drone or anything else with non-organic components would go well, and this is why I always advocate very strongly for safe drone operation.

Here's an intentional intake blade failure to ascertain whether the engine can contain the failure without threatening the aircraft; this is useful to see what happens if something is ingested that causes a catastrophic blade failure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAhjSviYVr8

They can, but it's not routine, at least with the model rockets readily available to non-certified hobbyists (think Estes, maybe some of the G-motor Aerotech rockets).

Routine 400+ foot launches are more the purview of dedicated rocket launch events, which typically do go through extensive FAA clearance and such, and which have certification processes in place for those flying all but the lowest-powered rockets. Airspace is usually sanitized, and for good reason: these sorts of rockets tend to be much bigger than your ordinary backyard-launched Estes rockets, and very well could do significant damage to an airplane should a collision occur.

Actually, 1,000 ft flights are pretty routine. Any model rocket engine with a "-5" on the end is going to coast for 5 seconds after the fuel burns out. If the model is light enough to be near the top of its arc at that time, it will be about 1000 feet up. Flights with engines that end in "-3" (3 second coast) tend to end up about 300 to 400 feet up.

Tip: if you want to fly in a baseball field, and get your model back (not drift out of the park), stick with engines like "B6-4" or "C6-3" and models sized for those engines. If you fly a C6-5 or a D12-7, you had better have a good size farm to land in and a few friends to help spot :-)

http://www.hobbylinc.com/rockets/group/enginefacts.htm

Flying G size engines and up? Go to a special event in Nevada. Those can go a few thousand feet up. (or lift some heavy/dangerous frameworks)

I was just playing devil's advocate in light of an unreasonable position on the issue. I honestly don't know much about model rocketry specifics (build a few as a kid like 20 years ago, purchased as a kid, from a local hobby shop). I assume you can make them go more than 400ft into the air without much effort but you're probably not supposed to.

I'm a pilot too, so I sympathize with your position. But I think there's room for a more reasonable accommodation than simply requiring everyone who flies a drone to get a pilots license, e.g. license-free operation of drones less than a certain weight in uncontrolled airspace, under a certain altitude, and a certain distance from airports.

Reasonably a drone flying at 50 - 100ft is of no danger to full size aircraft unless it's within a airports flight path which is illegal anyway. There are 40k deaths in cars each year and yet even with widespread use of model aircraft over the past 50years I've yet to hear about one taking down a full size plane.

0 is a good one As a pilot who wants top live, i'd prefer people without training to stay out of the sky.

Then I suggest you stay out of the sky, because we're not going to make it 100.000000% safe for you, ever. You don't own the universe above 0 AGL. Other people need to use it, too.

Nobody flying a drone below several hundred feet is, or should be, a hazard to you, as long as they're not doing so near an airport. Existing regulations are just fine in that regard without making up a bunch of horseshit about "monetization."

What you ask (FAA to leave the issue alone) is akin to letting 2 year olds drive 18-wheelers on the roads you drive your kids to school on? Feeling comfy with that?

The arrogance it must take to post something like that is simply breathtaking. You probably throw beer cans at bicyclists when you pass them on the road, too.

Is a 1kg drone at 300 feet operated by a stupid person really much worse than a stupid 1kg bird at 300 feet?

What do you think about falconry?

The answer here is obviously to just ban birds (except for penguins and ostriches and emus, since they're effectively flightless).

I can understand your concerns if folks are flying their RC helicopters around airports, but I'm pretty sure there are already airspace restrictions around airports for the same reasons you've mentioned. Beyond that, unless you're routinely buzzing rooftops, a low-altitude "drone" probably shouldn't be of any concern to your own flying, since you're going to be on an entirely different altitude vector.

I'm no pilot, but several of my coworkers are. Based on various conversations with them about flying (altitude clearances, ATC, etc.), I'd reckon you're severely over-reacting by calling for an outright ban on unlicensed RC aircraft flight. Altitude and airspace restrictions are reasonable; outright bans are not.