I’ve already had a drone hovering outside Daughters bedroom window.
Some people have very different concerns about accountability of drones.
Some people have very different concerns about accountability of drones.
A couple of years ago, a guy up the street got a "drone" for Christmas, and spent the next couple of weeks flying into the backyards of everyone on the block, presumably to look in the windows or see what else he could get away with. I don't know why he thought that was a good idea, especially since the thing was noisy as hell.
It stopped suddenly. I don't know if someone called the police, or hit it with a tennis racket, or what. But by Saint Valentine's Day he was back to racing his remote controlled cars up and down the block, instead.
Every time I try and assuage fears laypeople have about drones and privacy there’s a story or anecdote about some dumbass who does stuff like this anyway...
Surprised that even tech enthusiasts are often so fearful of drones while not worried about the hundreds of cameras already filming their activities in most public places.
In the scenario I wrote about above, every house in the neighborhood has a seven-foot-tall cinderblock wall around it. The guy was flying over these walls to look in the people's first-floor windows from their backyards. A cell phone on a stick isn't a problem in that scenario.
Large lenses are very heavy and benefit greatly from a stable platform. Tripods and low earth orbit are preferred by spies of consequence.
The cameras are also in neighborhoods, and if you have neighbors, you probably have several cameras pointing at your property, too.
Ring cameras are everywhere, and since they upload to the cloud, their recordings are one request to Amazon away from being in the government's hands.
Most of the concern with proposed Remote ID regulations was because 1) The regulation didn't actually solve the issue of untrained drone operators and 2) Added a high barrier to entry that would stifle the large hobby/enthusiast/startup industry while giving large companies like Amazon free reign over the airspace.
On a dad level, well. Protective emotions can be intense.
The solution is to raise the height for normal aircraft. That makes room for drones. We could give the drones from 500 to 1900 feet, putting normal aircraft at 2000 feet and above.
There are also plenty of good reasons to be under 2,000 ft. The most general is that all training and approach for VFR ops at airports is done at 1,000 ft. by default.
Airspace and altitudes are pretty complex, for a more involved example: A VFR flight departing North from Boeing field in Seattle HAS to stay below 1800 ft but above the highest parts of the city at ~750 ft. Because the air-space above 1800 belongs to jets on instrument approach to Sea-tac. In other words, to get out of that airfield you have to fly underneath the 747s. Seattle is just one example, there's weird airspace like this that balances the needs of different users just about everywhere.
In any case, raising floor altitude for non-RC/unmanned aircraft to 2k feet would pose fairly substantial challenges as, even ignoring the fact that airports require approaches below 2k feet and are often near populated areas, lots of commercial applications for light aircraft require low altitudes. Survey, photography, news gathering, law enforcement, sightseeing, etc. These are many of the same applications drones are posed for... there doesn't really seem to be any way to simply separate these types of traffic entirely.
Step 1 should always be to go talk to your neighbor before escalating further, but in cases like this it seems like it would be easy enough to have the police pay them a visit too.
"Whoever willfully imparts or conveys any threat [against an aircraft] shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."
Come and get me.