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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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