All the big consumer drone makers are in China. I love how all sorts of unregulated surprisingly powerful tech comes out of China. The last mischief they engaged in was way too powerful lasers. They just don't have the fear of science in that country like we have in America.
U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
61–70 of 159 posts
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#62Drones are army planes that can fly for hours and probably weight hundreds if not thousands of pounds... Quadcopters are toys that can fly for minutes and weight only a few pounds...
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#63Drones are army planes that can fly for hours and probably weight hundreds if not thousands of pounds... Quadcopters are toys that can fly for minutes and weight only a few pounds...
"Drone" covers all UAVs/RPVs whether small enough to fit on your palm or large enough to need a full size air strip to launch.
All UAVs are drones and all drones are UAVs. Not all drones are quadcopters but all quadcopters are drones. Even in the strictest definition, what we commonly call "R/C Planes/Helicopters" actually qualify as "drones."
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, certainly. I just also want them registered and generally recognised as being "drones". I get really annoyed at people who scream about "future killer drones changing warfare" and "how can they possibly be safe" while they're sitting on an airliner that's been under computer guidance since it finished taxiing and when the US military has been using guided missiles since the 50s.
An aircraft flying under autopilot with a human pilot present who is monitoring the situation and can respond to ATC instructions and take manual control if necessary is not remotely similar to a UAV from a practical perspective, despite the superficial similarity of both being flown by a computer.
You are correct and I don't think sitting in the pilot's seat but not having your hands on the controls qualifies as "unmanned."
Again, UAVs are not computer-flown. They're remotely piloted. They are not completely autonomous (yet.)
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#65In case anyone is reading from NBC, would you mind using the term "UAV" or "RPA" over "drone"? When we throw around the word "drone" here on reddit and hacker news I feel like it's okay because many of us know the key differences between what we're flying and the hellfire raining completely terrifying semi-automated flying death machines deployed in war-zones around the world. However, many people who read your artic…
> However, many people who read your articles might not be so well informed. Many people have an incorrect and confused understanding of them and to them the word "drone" carries that jumbled mess of an associations. Do you actually know anyone who has made this mistake? I've heard scores of people online claim this, but I've never met anyone who has actually met someone with this confusion. Who reads this article an…
> I think most of the FUD about public perception of consumer drones actually comes from the RC model aircraft community
Can you clarify this? What is the RCMA community contrubuting to FUD?
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#66This has to be one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life. Not because it doesn't possibly have some noble intent behind it, but - if for no other reason - because it's going to be bloody impossible to enforce. When any hobbyist can easily build a drone/UAV without much in the way of special skills or equipment, how in the hell do they ever expect they'll get everybody to register them?
replace drone with car. still stupid?
It's generally harder to build a car than a drone, so the analogy really doesn't hold. But yes, car registration is still stupid.
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#67One thing about the RPV/Quadcopter debate that is rarely mentioned is the reason why they don't use ADS-B transponders. The FAA requires ADS-B trasponders to have high accuracy GPS, and that pushes the cost to over $2,000 per device. It would be logical for the FAA to relax the GPS requirement slightly, so a cheap GPS module is sufficient to alert nearby aircraft of RPV activity over a certain altitude (eg. 200ft AGL…
There is nothing about aviation GPS's that make them high accuracy. In fact they're mostly inferior to consumer GPS equipment.
What drives up the cost is certification of the equipment.
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#68They probably should require all birds to be geolocated as well... since they present about the same level of danger to real aircrafts..
Is this true? Does anyone have evidence of this claim? I hear it a lot, but I don't know.
Many "drones" are build with super-tough carbon fiber frames. Additionally, LiPo batteries (very common in quad copters) can be quite hazardous.
Combine these together and toss one into a running jet engine - I don't believe the danger would be "about the same" as a bird.
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#69They just need to make these drones kit only and harder to fly. I've been flying RC with my dad since the early 90s. You would spend a month building these gas powered planes or helis. Only way to learn to fly was through other people or crashing a lot. It def kept irresponsible people out of the hobby. Plus you have to have skill to fly a 6 channel collective pitch heli. These things are not toys.
Re: U.S. Will Require Drones to Be Registered
#70All the big consumer drone makers are in China. I love how all sorts of unregulated surprisingly powerful tech comes out of China. The last mischief they engaged in was way too powerful lasers. They just don't have the fear of science in that country like we have in America.
It's all good until you fall down an elevator shaft.