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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Also contributing ammunition here is there are plenty of actual situations created by random clowns. Anyone can make or buy something off the shelf and be in the air minutes later, with no accountability or training, causing trouble with privacy, aviation airspace, public gatherings, or emergency scenes. The FAA attempted to license operators but it doesn't stop the "anyone" part.

As usual, a few bad actors ruin it for everyone else trying to do the right thing.

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> As usual, a few bad actors ruin it for everyone else trying to do the right thing.

This framing is reminiscent of a lazy schoolteacher engaging in collective punishment. The few bad actors are not the ones ruining it for everyone else - let's keep the responsibility for the overbearing and inept response on the FAA itself.

The issue is without some form of radio ID it's pretty tough to catch bad actors that don't strike in one place multiple times. Right now to find someone they either have to be stumbled upon while doing it or with the device, be dumb and brag about it, crash and have it traced back to them via video on the quad, or get caught with radio direction finding equipment.

To apply that to your classroom example instead of being easily identifiable the kids are anonymous, very fast, and appear and disappear quickly. In that case is it that weird to try to make a way to differentiate everyone?

Quads/drones/UASs are in a pretty tough to regulate sphere because they fly and can do a lot of damage it's not that wild for governments to try to get a handle on them.

DJI, who makes the majority of consumer drones, has already implemented broadcast-based radio ID, but that's not what the FAA proposal suggests and is not the part of the regulation that is being criticized.

In fact, the FAA has explicitly stated that they don't want to use a radio-broadcast system like ADS-B (the equivalent for general aviation). The solution being proposed involves a proprietary internet-based system that has privacy/security implications among other issues -- The system would send the location of any user to a third-party company, would require a subscription, etc.

The solution does very little to alleviate the concerns you are discussing and many more reasonable proposals have been suggested which DO involve radio ID. My favorite solutions involve a combination of a radio beacon broadcasting GPS and registration # in the style of ADS-B for larger drones/aircraft, and for smaller aircraft an app-based system where users "check in" with a flight plan. But keep in mind that the outrage is not over any regulation by the FAA, it's that their proposal completely disregards existing industry standards like those put out by DJI and creates an expensive, hard to enforce system that favors large corporate interests.

Let's keep in mind that there are millions of drones in the US (1.1 million registered with the FAA, and many more that have not been registered because they are <250g or custom-built.) and have not had a single incident involving injury or death. Every single incident involving a drone has involved the concern of violation of someone's privacy or violation of an airspace, and even in those incidents there has been a lot of hysteria involved in the media response. In my opinion this absolutely does not justify preemptively building an expansive surveillance infrastructure around technology that has, so far, proven to be very safe.

I do think requiring a specific 3rd party subscription is silly and over the top. I was generally defending the broad idea of drone regulations which I've seen a lot of reflexive push back to.

And ADS-B style is probably the best and easiest option. It can be an easy add on to existing quads and probably done pretty cheaply. Places with airspace concerns can easily setup a base station to listen to their local area.

> Every single incident involving a drone has involved the concern of violation of someone's privacy or violation of an airspace, and even in those incidents there has been a lot of hysteria involved in the media response

They haven't yet (at least in a mass event, several have fallen on crowds etc) but violations of airspace, especially around airports, don't have to actually cause injury because the threat of an airliner engine eating one somewhere between their commit speed and their rudder authority speed or any time really during take off and landing requires airports be extremely cautious about drone sightings.

I agree, I think there's a much smaller pushback from the more dedicated community about the method for tracking and the limits around DIY aircraft -- If it was a plug-and-play transmitter that you had to pay for and register, I think that would be fine. It could be integrated into the RC receivers on your plane, powered via 5v servo cable, or part of your transmitter. But this odd system involving a proprietary cloud and "phone-home" style telemetry doesn't sit well, especially because it's specified in a way that makes it impossible for any DIY aircraft to comply.

I agree with you that we don't need an expansive surveillance infrastructure around drones (yet), but

> have not had a single incident involving injury or death

That is... very wrong. Don't do an image search on "drone injury" unless you have a strong stomach.

Drone cuts off tip of photographer's nose: https://www.brooklynpaper.com/drone-strike-our-photographer-...

Drone injures Australian triathlete: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921504

Drone injures bystanders in Virginia crowd: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/drone-crashes-into-virgi...

RC plane kills spectator at football game: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/15/archives/fan-hurt-by-mode...

RC helicopter kills 19-year-old: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlle...

Thank you for collecting that list, I stand corrected. I've heard that original statement echoed several times in the RC community -- But I think sometimes people are separating out incidents from gas RC aircraft, RC helicopters, commercial operation etc. in a way that might be a little disingenuous.

but radio ID wont stop bad actors...

The same argument is deployed against gun control too and it's still only partially true. If the system is simple enough every flight controller manufacturer will eventually implement it and the bar to run one without a beacon gets much higher. It means catching anyone without it is suddenly in trouble. Finally it reduces the pool of potential miscreants to people intentionally setting out to be troublesome and raises some technical hurdles presuming the system is deeply integrated.

Speed limits don't stop bad actors either but that doesn't me we get rid of them.

The analogy here would be not speed limits as such, but rather cameras that enforce them. And there is a lot of contention around those - in some locations, enough so for voters to use the local initiative process to remove them.

>Speed limits don't stop bad actors either but that doesn't me we get rid of them.

I was just thinking about this some more today.

I think the analogy would be drone use laws are equivalent to speeding limits.

proposed drone RF ID is equivalent to vehicle registration + real time monitoring of vehicle location and speed.

> The few bad actors are not the ones ruining it for everyone else

Except you are wrong.

We had dipshits taking pictures of fires in California with their drones--IN THE MIDDLE OF ACTIVE FIREFIGHTING ZONES. It was sufficiently bad that the firefighters grounded their aircraft.

So, how do we set up a system to deal with that?

Except dipshits disrupting fire operations are still not directly impacting other drone operators... I wasn't saying that all regulations are unnecessary, just that the fallout from bad regulation needs to be ascribed to the FAA itself rather than absolving it as some blameless reflexive entity. Others have summarized the specific issues with the FAA's proposal better than I can.

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