You're walking along the street minding your own business when bam, out of nowhere something hits you hard in the chest, winding you. You fall backward and lose your feet, landing on the sidewalk. You've been hit by something solid, then you feel wet and cold. Looking down you realize that you are saturated and there is ice on the floor, with what must have been a full one-liter take-out cup of coke. As you come back to your senses a truck drives past, with a couple of guys in the front howling with laughter, the remainder of their drive-through now covering you.
Put a couple of jerks in charge of a one-ton vehicle doing 30 mph and anything can happen. In this case, it was throwing something out of a moving vehicle which hits you hard — very hard. Imagine that was, well, a drone. Put a couple of jerks in charge of a two-pound drone doing 30 mph (the DJI Mavic Pro weighs 1.6 pounds and can do 40 mph) and, if it hits you, you are really going to know about it. And that's before you get into near misses with passenger aircraft, delivering drugs to prisons, flying over sensitive military areas and general issues around the right to privacy.
We require people to be licensed to drive cars and, thankfully, aircraft, but not (at least non-commercially in many countries) to fly drones. This is a tricky area because drones are cheap, anyone can fly them and (perhaps the biggest problem) it's difficult to police. Even if we did criminalize it, it would affect every 12 year old who picked up a mini-drone for $9.99.
So, with this backdrop, the BBC reports on planned U.K. government legislation to increase non-commercial restrictions (proposals due Spring 2018). The Civil Aviation Authority already has the helpful DroneSafe website but wants to see:
- Registration for pilots of drones weighing more than 250 grams.
- Mandatory drone safety awareness testing for this group.
- New seizure powers for police.
- Greater commercial use, for example, parcel delivery.
I imagine we'll see a range of similar proposals appearing piecemeal in different countries. Given the explosion in the commercial and non-commercial use of drones by photographers, do these proposals go in the right direction or are we on the verge of over-regulation (and yes, I speak from experience about being hit by flying coke)?
Images used with permission of pixel2013.
all of these UK restrictions would still not stop 2 knuckleheads flying it into your chest, or delivering drugs or flying over super secret gov bases. people will just do dumb things sometimes, and sometimes bad people do them too. nothing you can do to stop it.
Regulation is not about eliminating problems. It's about lessening occurrences and mitigating damage. There's no way to completely prevent a person who is willing and determined to cause damage from doing so. Just because there's nothing you can do to stop an extreme example of a person that's being purposefully reckless doesn't mean that you shouldn't do anything at all. The goal is to adjust the risk/reward calculation so that less people (hopefully far less) deem the reward to be worth the risk. The tricky thing is to introduce that change without being overly zealous or oppressive. It's a delicate balancing act.
This sounds a lot like the gun debate in the U.S. I'm not trying to equate the two, obviously, but there it is. In both cases, sensible laws regulating their use are in order. I think size is a good way to determine levels of regulation but I have no use for them so I don't really know. I certainly see Michael's point but not regulating them, somehow, could easily lead to some bad encounters.
Yes, people will always do dumb things. Yes there needs to be regulation for drones, but lets not go overboard with them. Using the USA gun debate ther are already enough gun laws/regulations but they only really effect the people that follow them. Where I'm at in the USA, there are several laws that cover getting hit by a liter cup of coke the simplest being littering with a $2000 dollar fine. For drones its you don't fly over or into people, and a potential fine that's much larger than $2000. Do we really need to create more regulations for idiots that aren't going to follow them anyway? For those of us who are flying responsibly (the vast majority) do we really need more hoops to jump through and more regulations to try and keep track of, for what supposed to be a fun hobby.
Genius and regulations have their limits, Stupidity knows no bounds
Drones are the perfect exemples that flying cars won't happen... for the masses