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Comment by D9u | Hacker News Reader

All it will take is one UAV crashing into some people, resulting in horrific injuries, and the UAV will be banned, or more heavily regulated.

These UAV are not toys, and have a high potential to cause grave injuries.

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Remote-controlled model aircraft has been around for a long time, and I suspect there have been plenty of crashes and horrific injuries. I fail to understand why, all of a sudden, terms like "UAV" and "drone" are being used to describe aircraft which from a safety perspective are fundamentally very similar to RC aircraft decades ago. I do understand the privacy issues that have changed in the last decade due mostly to the miniaturization and price decrease of quality cameras, but safety doesn't seem to have worsened.

Absolutely, flying them over the people masses at Burning Man is definitely not a good idea. I operate UAVs commercially in Germany, and both my insurance and flight permit explicitly forbid overflight of people or animals.

However, even when not directly overflying people, responsible UAV operators take a number of safety precautions to ensure maximum operational safety of the devices. For example, using an octocopter instead of a quad would allow a motor and/or a propeller (and sometimes even two) to fail in flight without losing control. Another example are GPS-assisted autopilots, that can monitor and enforce safe flight envelope (distance, altitude) and return the aircraft to its starting location in case of radio signal loss or low battery charge.

I agree. Burning Man has evolved from a very unsafe event towards more safety. I doubt if we'll see any more blowing up oil derrick type events. Someone is still going to try to take down a drone though, especially if it appears to photographing naked people.

As long as the operator of the photographing UAV follows the same photography rules and guidelines as the people running around with cameras on the ground, I don't see a problem. Also, shooting down a UAV is a) illegal (property damage) and b) even more dangerous that the actual UAV operation, since a shot-down UAV will surely come down uncontrollably - the responsibility for that damage will then rest on the shooter.

Just as Burning Man is a test bed for civilian use of drones, it will also be a test bed for civilian anti-drone measures. These don't actually have to involve shooting it down, but people are already thinking about it

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/local-an...

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