The joke was that we both daydreamed about being able to go to school there, and building a drone that could go across the country would be cool enough to get their attention. They'd have to admit us!
This was the type of thing that we would probably never, ever do, but sitting around drinking beer and talking about how you could do it was still a fun time.
Then the joke got smaller. My mom makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. Trouble is that she lives an hour away. How cool would it be to have a cookie delivery robot? Build a plane that can fly across Phoenix to my Mom's house, pick up some cookies, then fly back? Cookie robot sounds almost feasible.
The most discouraging thing was to learn that if we even tried this, we would probably end up in jail. Flying an unmanned model plane like that is very, very, very, very illegal.
There are safety concerns, you see. It's possible to get drones certified as legal by the FAA, but it requires either sponsorship by a University (Roomate graduated, I dropped out, so that is out of the question), or sponsorship by a defense-contractor.
I understand the safety concerns. The reason that the FAA calls this illegal is because they don't want unmanned model planes wandering into controlled airspace, or crashing and starting a fire or something. I get that.
But I understand the safety concerns. Over half of the beers were consumed while having conversations about failsafe mechanisms to SCRAM the thing if it lost radio contact. This is very immature of me, I know, but it's still frustrating.
It's frustrating that this [TFA] is newsworthy because the person who built it wasn't arrested. Arrested? How did we get to this point where, if you tell me a story about somebody flying a model plane around the statue of liberty, my first reaction is that he is probably locked in an interrogation room somewhere being "questioned"?
Does stuff like this put people at danger? Yes. Having a 10-20 pound chunk of couregated plastic and balsa wood crash into the street is dangerous.
Should the person be thrown in jail? I don't know, should the people who drive 4000 guided hunks of steel around populated areas while texting and adjusting their radio knobs be thrown in jail? Is my cookie robot really more dangerous than my 4200 low-speed, guided battering-ram called "Jeep"?