Hacker News Reader

Comment by prawn | Hacker News Reader

You have to watch a video and answer basic questions before they give you a permit for Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park too. I have done that a couple of times, as well as Australia's simple drone test, and they're both no-brainers.

View on HN

Flying lawn mowers have existed for decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI

Let's say you're in America rather than Australia, because context matters.

If it happens a few people cannot operate domestic lawnmowers correctly and chase crowds down with them out of acts of terrorism because they slip a gasket, should we have licenses, certifications, and tracking of all lawnmowers? Is that a "no-brainer" too? Maybe we should think first before trying to regulate or educate ourselves out of every edge-case risk.

This is ridiculous because the default use for a lawnmower is solely your own yard, and it doesn't fly. Most literally power down if they leave your hand.

And the reality is that drone testing and licensing isn't based on hypothetical risks, but real world incidents which have disrupted public safety and caused injuries. So if you have sources for lawnmowers threatening the public safety and injuring anyone outside the owners' household, let me know.

Lawnmowers have aren't shopping carts. They don't know the boundaries of a yard.

You haven't seen "The Lawnmower Man?" Carry or swing a running lawnmower upside down through a dense crowd, and it will injure many people.

I think the idea with drones is that it's much easier to cause great harm to a great number of people accidentally. A lawn mower has very obvious risks: a spinning blade. A drone has many non-obvious risks: scaring wildlife, power lines, planes, restricted airspace, falling out of the sky onto people, etc.

The air is a public thoroughfare. We have a long and established history of licensing for activity that require public cooperation on publicly shared resources: driving, boating, hunting, fishing, radio operation, etc.

"No-brainer" is purely my describing it as a simple test. If you have an issue with the licensing itself, that might be better as a top level comment.

I hear you, but this is apples and peanuts, not even oranges. There's little risk you're going to accidentally launch your mower into a car, building, a person. It stays on the ground. A small mistake or moment of inattention, or mower failure won't cause it to drop from hundreds of feet down onto who ever is below.

There's also awareness of where you can and cannot operate drones and people should know this. You are after all occupying air space. If drones could only fly up 30 feet it would be a different story but they can go quite far. People fly them over protected airspace, crash them in random places... Last thing you want is people flying them over airports, over busy streets or highways where they can crash into planes, get sucked in to engines, crash into cars and cause accidents, etc etc...

They're not asking people to take hundreds of hours of flight to get certified, just a short awareness course for those who have no common sense... You don't need to blow a gasket to have a drone accident. It's not like drones are crash proof and all aware of airspace restrictions. Just don't want to have accidents in places that can affect others or have people fly them into places that will automatically trigger an emergency responses and disrupt operations and waste time and money... Like a drone over an airport where they'll dispatch security to take down the drone and interrupt all flights taking off or landing. Thats a LOT of money for one person's ignorance or stupidity.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2190096-drones-are-caus...

I'm all for freedom as long as your 10 minutes of good times don't cost others a ton of money and the reality is there's a ton that can go wrong even with no intent on doing anything wrong.

This particular analogy in the US lead to a whole variety of safety measures, eg you can't mow with a riding mower in reverse without holding down a override switch, and there still dozens of children a year being reversed over by an inattentive operator.

Unless things have changed recently that's a California only thing.

My coworkers were recently pontificating about how "not for sale in California" is practically a marketable feature on anything with a blade or engine after one of them suffered the misfortune of buying one.

The blade brake on a walk behind was mandated in 1982 at a federal level by the CPSC. Riding mowers were mandated by ansi 2003 standard, including everyone's favourite 'operator presence control's aka the seat safety switch.

Most everything safety can be disabled if you really want, but anyone pontificating about CA compliant emissions on small power equipment can go sit with the coal-rollers as far as im concerned.

Edit: to stay on topic, if people start getting frequently maimed by drones then I'd expect to see some crazy CPSC action like an altitude safety switch or something...

I’m curious why this context matters?

Because most former British colonies tend to welcome education and regulation with open arms as a panacea instead of with suspicion of onerous, unnecessary drudgery and expense.

Which matters in terms of a non emotion based discussion on an international forum why exactly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com