It's a real shame that large ready-to-fly drones aren't required by law to prevent arming in no-fly zones. About half of the DJI pilots I know actively prevent their firmware from being upgraded to the one that will respect static no-fly zones.
Rules are for other people.
And “stricter regulation” is literally “you need to prove you need a gun and that you are sane” in most of the cases.
This is not true for guns. The UK police are required, by law, to issue a gun certificate unless they have a specific reason not to. Rifles are different.
Now - if you use a gun outside the hunting area or marksmanship competition, what do you think would happen to you?
I have started this thread because that's exactly what drone owners are currently doing. Trying to defend them because they "didn't know about non-static no-fly zones" is a good reason to take away their license to use the drones as opposed to saying that "people make mistakes".
Argumenting ignorance as excuse is strange after all those years.
Additionally, my father isn't overly technologically competent but does own a drone, they've been fairly standard gifts for family members who buy everything for a while now. I can easily imagine him and his golfing buddies talking about getting footage of a fire on their drones.
"It never would have occurred to me" doesn't meet the standard for strong evidence to the contrary.
If ignorance is an excuse, then drone operators should be tested on such knowledge and licensed. Someone who doesn't realize their drone can impact another aircraft shouldn't be operating drones in the first place.
The problem is there's no certification or training requirement, there's no barrier to entry. Any cretin can go and buy something like a DJI Inspire, not read any of the rules/regulations, not understand how dangerous it is, and fly it straight into their neighbour's garage door.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TQQcBWV6Vs
There's a small handful of people who know the rules and choose to break them, but they're also the people who will immediately land and bail if they hear air traffic because they understand that the consequences of any fuckups will be life-ruining. The guys holding back firefighting operations are just clueless idiots.
And some people might want to see the fire.. but maybe not enough to risk bricking their drone. Introducing additional financial risk could be all the disincentive they need.
If you caught a flashed drone and found the user, it would enable stiffer penalties also. Flashing the drone would signal clear intent to break the law.
Same thing with consumer routers, I wouldn't want the FCC to forbid custom firmwares to cease to exists because some bad actors could use frequencies they're not supposed to. These custom firmwares are useful in many cases, including supporting them with security fixes when the manufacturer doesn't.
It's not uncommon for them to break rules to get the shot. Arguably it defines a big part of their profession, and if it's paying their bills they're going to keep doing it.
The film Nightcrawler provides an interesting lens to view this situation through.
But this still does not explain why so many fires and why now and not one month ago.
Drones on the other hand may not carry registration requirements at all (depending on jurisdiction, power and weight), and building one yourself doesn't require more-than-hobbyist level knowledge of engineering.
A technical solution probably is required, but what that technical solution is I can't say.
The government could make drones that shoot down unauthorized drones.
I know it's tempting to essentially say "fuck them, just force them to comply" when people partaking in an activity you don't really care about cause problems, but imo this is not the best solution for a free society. if you believe car registration creates an effective deterrent, why not advocate for stricter registration requirements for drones? if you believe drone enthusiasts are ignorant, why not require an exam?
> building one yourself doesn't require more-than-hobbyist level knowledge of engineering
this seems like a red herring in your argument. the DIY crowd is not likely to bother implementing no-fly-zone enforcement in their own project.
I do care about drones, I've built several myself.
A technical solution doesn't come without regulation, so yes, this area does need better regulation, so that people can't ruin a hobby with terrible behaviour such as getting in the way of fire-fighting. (I'm Australian, bushfires are one of our hot-button issues.)
The regulation can be used to enforce the technical solution, so that the DIY crowd knows there is a hurdle to entry they need to comply with. Some won't, but you'll have significantly less unknown drones in serious danger areas.
I don't have a significant answer, and I've already said that.
Is any licensure required for large drones? For instance, the amateur radio exams, specifically the technician (first level), don't require a ton of study, but you do need to know the rules to pass and be granted the associated privileges. From there, radios are fairly open and don't place many or any restrictions in software or hardware.
Congress had told The FAA they were explicitly not allowed to regulate model aircraft, and delegated some regulation powers to hobbyist groups, the only recognised group being the AMA. The drone community doesn't want to respect the AMA regulations, because the rules don't accommodate first person or semi autonomous control of aircraft or commercial uses. But there is no-one else to advocate for the drone users when the FAA starts trying to regulate drones.
Is it possible to have the firmware signed so that if it doesn't match a hash then it bricks the device?
I say it's better to use the rule of law - make drones registered, and licensed. If you fly it and got caught doing no-fly zone, you get punished.
It's completely impractical to do something like this to evade a geofence block. It would be much easier to just add a tiny microcontroller between the GPS receiver onboard and the processor that just introduces a large offset in the NMEA messages such that it would think it's hundreds of miles away from it's true location and evade the geofence that way.
Perfect is the enemy of good. [0]
DJI has a 70% market share.[1] If they made the changes which the parent requested, then it would certainly lower the number of times this would happen. IMO, not all self-absorbed people are into flashing hacked firmware. Lowering the number of these incidents has the potential to save lives, and also lowers the risk of regulatory changes for radio controlled aircraft.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
What if I have a permission to fly there?
A friend of mine struggles with this a lot. He does real estate photography and has photographed even at international airports (under strict supervision).
I have never heard of someone obtaining FAA authorization to fly a UAS in one of these zones, so I seriously doubt someone using a ready-to-fly kit would be able to do so.
One common misconception is the difference between a no-fly zone and controlled airspace. If you want to fly in controlled airspace (within 3 miles of an airport or so), you can obtain said authorization using the LAANC system. It's extremely easy, you just install an app, verify your phone number, and submit the flight request.
May want to refresh your 107 information.
[Edit: changed "no-fly" to restricted]
But would clear the pass to helicopters that could just send a shoot of water in the same area to grant that this would not occur and then keep doing their job. The result would be still less hectares burnt than if keeping the helicopters parked.
Honest question. What would be worst, a lithium fire surrounded by soaked soil, or a match fire surrounded by dry combustible?
Of course if the landing happens in an area burnt yet, would not have anything more to burn except this battery and some plastics.
Or was this sarcastic and I just got wooshed ?
Arming? Are these drones carrying some kind of weapon or explosive?
An arming sequence prevents accidents when tinkering and requires the controls to be reset. Like if you're connecting a battery preflight, you don't want the rotors to suddenly spin up and slice your arms to bits. Exposed CF blades spinning at 5k RPM can really mess you up.
See also: http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/arming_the_motors.html
But it's no wonder why many device owners would push back having their devices implanted with inescapable third party controls. The people with enough awareness to do this also likely have a enough awareness to not disrupt emergency air traffic as well!
Generally if someone wants to direct their drone to do illegal things, the common sense assumption is that they're going to make that happen somehow, rather than reacting by trying to bake in technological authoritarianism. It's naive to think that since it's possible to write code to enforce a condition, that this can scale to the level of society!
It could be someone in fire operations themselves that wants to try out using off the shelf technology to improve their operation, but instead stuck budgeting and requisitioning a single "government priced" drone rather self-purchasing a few expendable ones on a lark. Or sure, it could also be some shithead who laughs as they help the fire spread. Despite the amount of hypothetical attention, the latter asshole is extremely rare, and the right way to deal with them is heavy civil and criminal punishment as going around the safety defaults has established their firm intent.
I realize that we should not be rushed in disturbing a blooming industry and I have a lot of respect for the progress made in recent years, but as things stand in my (uninformed) opinion something akin to license plate registration/piloting license is the best long term choice to protect good actors.
However, it's worth remembering that car license plates have become a major surveillance vector in the modern age. It would be straightforward to fix this - imagine RF or eink transponders with a number that changes every minute, with a cryptographic key required to tie the broadcasted nym to anything else, and a public audit trail every time it is done - but government inertia is huge. This regime should really be fixed before it is expanded.
I'd really like to know who owns those 4-5 scrap bicycles standing around near my home, so they can be removed and spots made available. For drones I feel similar... determining the owner of something close by should be possible without going through police.
Essentially you are asking to legislate a IoT frameworks that is resilient enough to be used in courts or law.
It's a conflagration. The people in fire operations have better things to do than play with toy "drones." They also know better than to fly in areas where water is being deployed.
It's naive to think that since it's possible to write code to enforce a condition, that this can scale to the level of society!
We can control technology a lot easier than we can control people.
That's a strong assertion, given all of the information one can imagine obtaining about the fire. I don't know the current state of practice, but it seems like even individual ground crews would benefit from cheap overhead views.
I was just pointing out the firefighters, you know the people using their sweat, intellect, and long term health to control the fires, just might themselves cook up some use for consumer drones. For which they would then have to convince their commanders, one of the objections being price, and so giving drone manufacturers an excuse to implement market segmentation would hinder them.
Imagine a swarm of personal and news drones hovering around a fire, but in harmony with assorted emergency response craft, dodging away with a generous safety envelope. Hopefully the current chaos is transitional and we can have our own eyes in the sky without getting in the way of the solution.
You know what works better than everyone's software being correct, up to date, not affected by a log file filling the flash stick unexpectedly or the heat or a battery getting a bit hot or a null pointer error or being overloaded by needing to track too many other drones or sheer murphyesque buggery?
Empty air. It's a well-proved safety technology, empty air. Doesn't require much in the way of upgrades to make it work, reverse and forward compatibility is assured, it's simple to implement and has an excellent record against catastrophic failure modes of the not-enough-space variety.
I am all for maintaining user discretion over absolute lockouts and work on education, situational awareness and heavy fines and punishment on meaningful infractions.
And lastly if the systems are to encumbered people are just going to roll their own software which is an avenue I then investigated for my Mavic after that incident.
This is a country that expects people to be responsible enough that we don’t require pilot licenses to fly homebrew aircraft, I think we should encourage more personal responsibility rather than hacking around stupid people with firmware updates.