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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for the whole "let's just ignore the rules and be disruptive" attitude that some new companies take these days, but you can't just go driving these things into roads that've been designated for legit taxi traffic and expect to not get the book thrown at you. Heck they were doing this in NYC.

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That's just not a similar comparison. Would you be jumping to Uber's defense if the drivers just started ignoring one way street rules, or perhaps if they just blatantly used bike lanes? That would be a similar situation.

Uber driving people around will not endanger lives. Drones in class B airspace will.

What's the danger from drones? How do our current aircraft handle birds?

Birds aren't made of plastic and metal and lithium-polymer.

The birds are slaughtered.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/nyregion/13geese.html

That sounds more like a danger to the drone than a danger to the plane.

Occasionally, they crash and kill people: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2012/may/17/deadly-...

Here's a report from the NTSB about a helicopter flying at normal speed and altitude which hit a red-tailed hawk and resulted in the deaths of 8 people.. so there's that..

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=...

People keep bring that up, but they actually take great pains to keep birds away from places that airplanes fly, because of the danger. For instance they use falcons to ward off bird packs from airports. Just one of the things they do. But birds are still a danger, we just can't control them.

But this? This is controlled by a human. So what is the excuse? Personal freedom? That's not going to cut it with the public.

Birdstrikes are incredibly dangerous.[1] Flying drones into class b airspace and ignoring FAA requests to cease should be a criminal matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549

Sometimes well, sometimes not. Bird strikes are relatively rare, but do happen. I've had two. One tiny guy on the wind screen on landing at about 150mph which caused no damage and one on the nacelle of a jet engine at around 270mph that did cause structural damage. I also own a little DJI phantom "drone" and have no doubt that it could snuff out a turbine engine if it was ingested or cause significant structural damage. Unfortunately the FAA can't go after birds with fines for busting class B airspace, but they can and should nail drone operators.

The little copters are really awesome to play with but the FAA needs to start upping the enforcement. You need to be licensed to talk on a ham radio, you should be licensed to fly a drone. Not a full on pilots license, but written tests on airspace every year or two. It would be nice if future drones continuously transmitted the operators credentials on a publicly available frequency.

Uber leverages cars that are already on the road driven by licensed drivers.

A better analogy would be riding your bicycle on array, and not necessarily with traffic.

Until someone disrupts air traffic control, I'm afraid that airspace is stuck with the status quo.

Care to explain how you go about "disrupting" air-traffic control?

People can easily route air traffic from their smartphones like the air traffic controller game. You have a bunch of people directing traffic in the game, and you find the most commonly agreed upon flight path and use that to direct the pilots! It's like how Duolingo crowd sources language translations. It's so obvious!

This is both genius and horrifying.

I was being facetious but now that I think about it, it does seem fairly inevitable that one day air-traffic control will be consider to have too low a margin for error to entrust to human operators.

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