FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

Do you really think if a company could prove it provides double the survivability of accidents compared to others, the free market wouldn't reward it?

Your claim simply doesn't match reality.

Why can’t Tesla just give us an option to keep it consistent? I guess adding video games is more important.

They should be safe, so they don't fall on people etc, but that is a separate issue.

I don't know what, if any, approaches are implemented but one solution is that you can design a safety feature in the motor control to turn off the motor if it detects blockage.

Some people have very different concerns about accountability of drones.

If you’re regularly selling photos from your regular drone flights then that’s hard to argue about. But a once off because you happen to take a news worthy photo is another story.

Different regulations are handled by different authorities. Noise is often regulated at a local level.

For example, someone living close to the Niagara Falls may not be bothered by the same drone noise that someone in a remote area without much ambient noise might be.

Maybe this can be efficient if the drone had a fixed wing so it can glide. Or we can make the "structure" really really tall -- perhaps the delivery plane can launch drones that basically paraglide into the city below, and the drones can fly back to a collection center once they've delivered the payload.

Alternatively, you could use a ground-based slingshot to vertically propel gliders, an approach that is already used in the military and for some long distance UAV testing. However, the wing-based UAV vs. rotor-based UAV physics are very different. Landing an elevated glider with a clear path to its target is one thing, maneuvering between trees and power lines in a complex environment without rotors is quite another.

Then you need to look at a 'convertible' UAV with both features... undoubtedly this raises the cost, reduces the carrying capacity, and is already being pursued.

Finally, you could zoom out and re-evaluate the business case. Why not use a network of local dispatch points (handover points to ground-based UAVs or vans) to reduce the distance to the consumer and with the smaller geographic scope negotiate private airspace access on locally agreeable terms. I believe this is the future for general consumption (food, regular deliveries within small package weight/dimension limits).

Wouldn't the cost of elevating the loaded drones to the rooftop of that tall structure negate any monetary gains? Wouldn't the cost be exactly that of simply using grounded vehicles that elevate themselves?

(edited for clarity)

In summary: Rain the deliveries onto the neighborhood with a railgun.

A better way to think about it is as a shared data structure. It is a 3d vector space with some attributes that help predict the future. Each drone has a different version of this data structure in memory. The data structure has an initial state at take-off and is updated using radio communication and sensor data.

If the data structure is perfectly synchronised then planning is easy. There is plenty of sky and simple rules can be applied. But it never will be perfectly synchronised. in that sense it is like a globally distributed database.

The data structure may have been edited by another drone and the change not communicated. You may have lost communication and not even realised. Local conditions may have reduced GPS quality giving you false location information.

So perhaps an interesting metaphor is concurrency control. Do we lock airspace or can we have transactions? Can we partition or shard the airspace? When is consistent state required?

I don't know if I can put much stock in the frequency argument either... If you live in a neighborhood and 3 guys with motorcycles move in, you'll be hearing them very regularly. Drones aren't going to come any more often than delivery trucks do today, and they're certainly loud enough to be heard, not even counting the extra wear on the local roads, and increased pedestrian danger.

It's already illegal to fly drones outside of line-of-sight of the operator, and once they start getting big enough (>250g) to allow a longer flight time, the operator is also required to have a spotter, a license and register the drone with the government (USA). The new rules mentioned in the article also directly try to address this with remote ID - the idea is that it's a "digital license plate" which must be openly broadcast from all drones > 250g. So if you see a drone doing something illegal (eg no operator within line of sight), it should be trivial to report it and for the operator to face consequences.

My point about Harleys was that of precedence - we already live in a very noisy world where it's perfectly acceptable to buy/modify incredibly loud machines (louder than drones by a lot) for primarily entertainment purposes, to be used in public or residential areas. My leaf blower literally makes more noise than my drone and usually runs for 10x as long, to say nothing of a multi-stage gas-powered snowblower. My point here is that things are loud, and drones aren't even close to the loudest things we already find totally acceptable, so it feels arbitrary to ban them over noise concerns. For what it's worth, I'm totally on board with restricting night-flying for noise reasons, I just don't think we need additional laws beyond existing noise ordinance for daytime flying.

Finally, if you're feeling very paranoid about this from a camera/anonymity perspective today (TFA says the new rules have ~30 months before coming into effect), most drones broadcast their video feed on analog channels, so you can buy a $10 receiver that'll plug into any modern smartphone and you can see exactly what the drone sees. That should lead you back to the operator if necessary (bonus points if you record your screen for evidence of any wrongdoing).