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Comment by bjt2n3904 | Hacker News Reader

Calling the state of drones the "wild west" pretty much puts the conclusion at the start.

How about, "Drone hobbyists angered at pointless laws that treat their hobby like it's a problem"

How about, "Drone hobbyists angered at pointless laws that treat their hobby like it's a problem"

I thought it was pointless, too, until I saw that video taken from a drone that hovered right above a passenger jet as it was landing at KLAS.

(Sorry I can't search for the video at work — no YT allowed.)

Yes, now that it's double illegal, no one will do that anymore.

It's more like quadruple illegal.

The thing is, these laws are really, really hard to enforce at the federal level and in general municipal and state governments already do an efficient job (and are happy to collect the fines from rich folks with a hobby) executing on local laws.

It's really quite unnecessary.

Foxhunt the control signal.

I don't use or scout military hardware but if I were planning to use fpv quadcopters for military use the first thing I'd do is get spread spectrum control hardware.

Most RC anymore used frequency hopping spread spectrum for control. Different brands use different amounts of frequencies they hop between. Though all still in the 2.4, 5.8, or different band. A very select few use two different wavelengths at once. (Dragonlink, crossfire)

You know what the difference between a regulatory infraction and a felony are?

One is a fine. The other is a few years in prison. It has quite a bit of a deterrent effect. It won't get everyone, but it will cut down on the number of people who try stunts like that.

All they had to do was tweak some wording in 18 U.S.C. § 32 to cover reckless use of drones and other egregious behavior. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/32

But drones are hot so why not pass a complex bill with a complex mandate to satisfy regulators itching to pounce on drone hobbyists.

Frankly I assumed the behavior was already criminal under Federal law.[1] Anybody who thought it was okay to buzz airplanes is almost certainly not thinking about consequences.

[1] I'm not completely convinced it's not, FWIW, but I'm satisfied it's not covered by the above, which is the only relevant Federal criminal statute I could find. I'd bet it's already illegal in many states, though.

This is the United States congee we're talking about here their are no simple solutions /s

"Do you know what the difference between 20 years and life in prison are?"

What changes people's habits is the likelihood of punishment, not the severity of it.

Sure... slap on the wrist, prison time, same thing. Of course it makes a difference. Everyone sets an “acceptable” level beyond which it’s no longer worth it to break the rule. This is where the severity makes the difference.

The USA has high punishments for murder but less then 50% of murder investigations are solved.

Germany has much lower punishments for murder, but around 90% of murder investigations are solved.

Which of these do you think is the greater deterrence?

Per local German coverage on reported crime statistics, many crimes go unreported, and a number of crimes that would be included in US crime statistics are exempted from German reporting.

Also, now that Germany has...diversity...the crime rate went up pretty significantly.

So I would say, all in all, that homogenous populations are the greatest deterrence, followed by the magnitude of punishment being significantly more important at a societal level, though the risk of getting caught dominates the thought process for regulatory/low-punishment crimes.

are you saying that murders go unreported in Germany? I have a hard time believing that.

There’s also another aspect: whether it’s one life sentence or 5 consecutive might make very little difference. Since prisons in US are big business nobody deals in short sentences. Rehabilitation or deterrence are not the goals, so of course the strategy won’t have the effect you imagine.

When punishments are so disproportionately high a good chunk of the ofenders will stop caring. The preventative effect is gone, it’s more an incentive to escalate the crime to a level where it matches the punishment.

But without knowing how many murders and the relevant population sizes I'm not sure that your point is made.

If they'd shoot me for speeding I'd do less of it.

if speeding was punishable by death but i were as likely to be caught as to die in a terror attack, i would definitely speed as much as i wanted.

Kid, I used to be a public defender. I'm pretty sure I have a better idea of what motivates people not to commit crime than you do.

Pretty sure that one was CGI: no lights, and the drone did NOT get completely wiped out by the jet's wake, which I think is pretty conclusive. I suppose we could assume that maybe one day a drone pilot COULD do that for real.

Also… mighty fast 'drone', to nearly accelerate to the speed of a landing jet. I don't think they make quadcopters quite that brisk yet.

Wake turbulence moves down and with the wind. Looking at the video the drone was above the aircraft and would therefore not experience significant wake turbulence.

Also… mighty fast 'drone', to nearly accelerate to the speed of a landing jet. I don't think they make quadcopters quite that brisk yet.

We must be thinking of different encounter videos. In the one I saw, the drone didn’t move much. It sat in the flight path waiting for a jet to come by.

The drone waits for the jet to come down below it, then leans sharply forward to chase it. In doing this, it drops quite a bit of altitude and hits probably a couple hundred miles an hour before it subsides and lets the jet fly on. The manuevers are quite plausible, the speed not so much. Unless the jet was actually a blimp shaped like a jet :)

That isn't necessarily a justification.

* Is that behavior already illegal under existing law?

* Do these new laws meaningfully address that behavior?

you obviously haven't been keeping up with the current state of gun control legislation. governments are keen on making the illegal even more illegal as a means to look like they are doing something and to chip away at rights people are current exercising.

drones will eventually become so heavily licensed than anything outside of law enforcement, large news organizations, and politicians, will be restricted to the point of needing specialized parks just to enjoy them.

RC planes generally fall under 112-95 Section 336 which pretty much should work for drones

The problem is that RC planes almost universally require a much higher investment in skill-building to become competent enough to even fly, let alone fly well.

There is also a large community of builders and flyers [1], a network of clubs with actual airfields for the purpose, and a multi-million dollar insurance policy with membership.

Both the difficulty, the investment, and the training and peer pressure drastically reduces the number of participants who behave like asshats with their aircraft - to essentially zero.

With hobby drones, it is exactly the opposite -- just go buy some overgrown toy, and you can now put up in the air a device that with any of hundreds of failures of the device or pilot, can become a lethal projectile falling from the sky.

So, yes, serious requirements for anything over a few hundred grams is very reasonable[2].

[1] Academy of Model Aeronautics -- www.modelaircraft.org

[2](no, I'm not implying that the Govt automatically implements every reg in a reasonable & effective way, that could still end badly.)

[Edit: footnotes]

Not to worry. Trump would never sign such redundant regulations.

Here you go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlQsYPGtjTE

I saw that one illegal thing that is already illegal, so lets make more things illegal, that will show them!

It was already illegal, there is no need to make it more illegal.

What would be important is forbid passengers planes from flying lower than 500ft.

  > What would be important is forbid passengers
  > planes from flying lower than 500ft.

so how do you propose they land?

well outside of the environment obviously

Can't land. Front fell off.

in the zones that have been conspicuously forbidden to the drones.

Like a port? For airplanes?

yeah, locally we call it a sky harbor, but the area is a little bit "special".

Isn't there already a floor on general aviation operations (over most areas, barring crop-dusting and things)?

How about, "Some drone hobbyists angered they can't keep flying their drones at landing aircraft like assholes?"

All the uncontrolled airports near me have to have drone advisories because nobody respects the 400' or line of sight regulations. I was landing on 35 at KTHV last year and nearly hit a drone at almost 900' turning to downwind to base.

There needs to be registration and regulation so that when you as a drone operator violate airspace regulations you can be punished.

I want these things as highly regulated as possible. I found it extremely uncomfortable to have drones flying about over my kids head in the park. What do I know about the competence of the pilots? Or the onboard AI? Nothing. They're basically high speed aerial blades from my POV.

I don't like drones flying over public places from a privacy perspective.

I've been hit by an admittedly, fairly small drone. I't didn't hurt much at all, and the rotors didn't break the skin. I don't think they're like aerial blades, unless someone attaches some to one.

It really depends on the drone.

Those small toy drones? Yeah, might cut you a bit if the rotor cages aren't installed.

Something heavier like a DJI Phantom? Even if the blades don't cut you, those carry enough mass/speed to seriously injure.

I mean yeah of course. I was talking about small hobby drones.

Taking it to the absurd, if you get hit by one of those Reapers[0] you might get really seriously injured!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper

Good to know.

What about the part of the article where the FCC gets 100 complaints a day, including from pilots seeing drones in dangerous areas?

100 reports per month.

The relatively small city I live in gets this many or more animal-at-large reports on a daily basis which likely constitute a larger public safety threat than people flying their quads around throughout the entire country.

Where is the regulatory capture on leash laws?

Animal populations aren’t growing at exponential rates. The future scale of drones and autonomous airborne vehicles is going to be huge. The growing possibility of midairs with drones is more significant than bird strikes or deer on a runway. Hobbyist drone pilots are going to lose the safety battle. Just as you can’t drive however you want on public roads, class G airspace is going to resemble class A airspace. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspace_class_(United_States)

>The growing possibility of midairs with drones is more significant than bird strikes

That seems amazingly unlikely.

> Animal populations aren’t growing at exponential rates.

Erm, yes, if you ignore outside factors, they do. In fact, population growth has been a poster child to explain what exponential growth means for a while...

Really? There are more drones than birds?

More unaware drones/flying objects with greater mass than birds, maybe?

I'd rather come across an animal at large on the sidewalk than watch a drone get sucked into the jet engine of a plane I'm on....

Every large outdoor event I’ve been to recently has had at least one drone buzzing over the crowd at some point — and that’s been verboten from the start.

Are you sure that's not the event flying/contracting out the drone work themselves?

I think you mean the part that says 100 complaints per month. "Each month, the FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens, and law enforcement"

Note also it says “reports”, not complaints.

100 reports a month, which if you think about the scale of the US is remarkably low.

If the FCC gets that many, I wonder how many the FAA gets...

Hey, numbers and letters are hard. FCC, FAA, 100 reports per month, 100 complaints per day. Same thing, surely. Besides drones are bad, so exaggerating and misrepresenting is morally justified, as it will save the lives of billions that would otherwise have died from the flying evil.

>“Each month, the FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens, and law enforcement,”

Drones interfering with manned aircraft or emergency services is already illegal.

And these things are transmitting radio in both directions, putting money into tracking and prosecuting people interfering with flights is completely achievable, without any change in law.

I suspect that this is more about protecting the interests of the commercial businesses by introducing licensing as a barrier to entry.

>The bill is supported by the Commercial Drone Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group representing Alphabet’s Wing as well as other drone businesses.

100/day isn't that bad when you consider that there's >300 million people in the country and how much of a hair trigger some busybodies are on when it comes to reporting stuff to the government.

100/day is on the same order as the amount of "doing X while black" or "teenagers looking sketchy" complaints that get called in to local police departments across the country. You just don't hear about them because they're thinly distributed to local PD's across the country..

If only 100 people/day are complaining to the government about something then that something isn't a problem.

When California has to ground fire control aircraft because idiots are too stupid to realize that flying drones near them is a bad idea, yeah, the hobby is a problem.

The good drone operators didn't get control over the bad ones, so here we are.

> The good drone operators didn't get control over the bad ones

What does this even mean? I buy a drone and now I'm responsible to go hunt down every idiot with a drone and tell him to knock it off? I'm sure that would be very effective. Definitely much more effective than the FAA regulations already in place that these people choose to ignore.

The early drone operators and builders had the opportunity to propose and install mechanisms to manage drones properly.

Instead, they spent their political capital fighting regulations instead of making good ones that the FAA could simply adopt wholesale.

Because of that, the FAA stepped in and now everybody gets to deal with the fallout.

The hobby can be dangerous. Overall, it isn't problematic, but there are a few drone hobbyists that ruin it for the rest, frequently due to lack of training. There's the person who hit the Space Needle [0], the person who crashed their drone mid-day in SF after they lost connection with it and it almost hit people walking on the sidewalk [1]. The ease of buying one and being able to use it means it's possible to fly it without having any knowledge of all the ways it could go wrong.

[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/man-charged-... (Open in incognito if you run into the paywall) [1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/drone-crashes-ou...

Don't forget the idiots who fly drones at forest fires, which several times last year resulted in fire-fighting tanker planes being diverted away.

I've heard people say that keeping the tankers away when a drone is in the same airspace is an overreaction, but those people are not thinking it through.

There are several factors that make fire-fighting flights very difficult for the pilots.

1. They are flying very low.

2. The air over and around large fires is often very turbulent.

3. The plane is heavily loaded, making it less nimble than normal, and making maneuvers put much more stress on the plane than they would on a less loaded plane.

The pilots are in a dangerous, stressful situation that requires their upmost concentration. Anything that distracts them is dangerous.

Don't forget the guy who crashed his drone in a Yellowstone geyser potentially causing irreparable environmental damage:

https://www.idahostatejournal.com/members/a-crashed-drone-co...

This one really pissed me off...

AFAICT the SF crash was done by a professional hired to inspect the crack, using a drone for business of any kind requires a part 107 certification.

> The hobby can be dangerous

People have been killed by RC aircraft. I don't know if any accidents with quadcopters have caused injury (I'd assume having one fall on you from height wouldn't be fun), but there was a story a few years ago where a bloke killed himself with an RC helicopter.

https://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-cont...

Well, that puts the opposite conclusion at the start.

It is a problem.

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