The sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would fly a drone over a wildfire are the same sort of arrogant self-absorbed people who would flash their drone with hacked firmware to bypass any restrictions.
Rules are for other people.
Rules are for other people.
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.
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
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.
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.
The government could make drones that shoot down unauthorized drones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"It never would have occurred to me" doesn't meet the standard for strong evidence to the contrary.
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".
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.
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.