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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

How do you make a drone delivery service without having to get the permission of millions of property owners? If just a few don't consent your business is dead. It's absurd.

Hunting is actually taking resources from someone's property. A drone flying over your property doesn't harm you at all. Airplanes don't have to get permission from me to fly overhead. They can even legally take photos of my property if they want.

Just the other day some recreational pilot crashed in a field near me, and he didn't have to have a flight plan or anything. You don't even need a pilots license if it's something like an ultralight. Drones are vastly safety than that.

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>How do you make a drone delivery service without having to get the permission of millions of property owners?

Maybe you can't. And that's just fine?

It's not fine. As we continue to resist new technologies our country will stagnate and others will outcompete us.

Right, because delivering expensive drinks to lazy yuppies is the most important thing in the world.

Drones can be the fastest way to deliver medicine in some situations.

Flying drones are noisy and create visual distraction. If they became very popular they could definitely harm me. Wreck a beautiful sunset with flying drones going by. Wreck peaceful outside activity with drone buzzing. Industrial and commercial areas, sure. Maybe not residential. It would be interesting if people would try small, slow, quiet, wheeled drones on sidewalks for local delivery. Probably illegal with current laws, but those could be modified.

>A drone flying over your property doesn't harm you at all.

Until it falls on your head. Not to mention the gross privacy violations that this allows.

Light aircraft could always fly over your house and take pictures as far as I know.

But they couldn't hover just outside your window.. and unless I'm mistaken, they were forbidden from flying 1,000ft below the highest point in a half mile radius. And you need a pilot's license to fly.. and come to think of it, they're not remotely similar.

Technically you don't need a pilots license for certain kinds of aircraft. I don't know what the height restrictions are, but I see recreational pilots get away with flying less than that all the time. One just crashed and died near my house and could have killed someone.

But the point is that a small drone is orders of magnitude less dangerous than even the smallest aircraft. The regulations should reflect that and be far less strict on them, not more. I'm ok with height restrictions or regulations against hovering outside of someones window. That's probably already illegal under peeping tom laws anyway. If it's not it should be.

But banning them entirely is just a knee jerk fear to new technology. This has potentially immense utility for delivery and other applications, just give it a chance. Despite all the media fear mongering the number of people killed by drones is negligible after more than 5 years.

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