FAA Moves Toward Treating Drones and Planes as Equals
Disclaimer: I&#x27;m a licensed private pilot and have a registered drone.<p>I can sum this up simply: jerks ruin everything.  Drones were unregulated and would remain so, except for people being jerks.<p>Pilots have areas they can&#x27;t fly below a certain altitude because the noise would rile up wildlife, like flocks of birds; jerk drone pilots, oblivious to this, started zipping through those areas and national parks, scaring up the wildlife (and annoying people), which led to them being banned around national monuments and parks.<p>Drones have also interfered with commercial approaches at airports in Class B airports so they became banned around airports, unless permission is granted from the airport.  The FAA came out with regs requiring you to register, and you had to make sure you acknowledged that you had to be permission to fly in class B airport, from the airport.  Simply stated, it was so that if you were an jerk and your drone crashed, or you injured anyone on the ground they could find you.  Seems reasonable to me.<p>The new regs are just an incremental update.  Many flights operate on VFR (Visual Flight Rules), which is basically &quot;see and avoid.&quot;  Most commercial flights operate in IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) where air traffic control system guarantees you separation from other aircraft.  Of course, they can&#x27;t see small drones on radar, so they can&#x27;t vector you around them or talk to the drone operator.  There was a case where a black hawk was struck by a drone last year, requiring an emergency landing.  The NTSB ultimately found the guy through the manufacturers serial number, because he his drone never returned.<p>There have been many, many bad actors using drones to harass neighbors, spy on women, and it&#x27;s getting ridiculous.  When a licensed pilot has an accident, they know the NTSB and FAA will investigate.  You file a safety report and own up to any mistakes, or it will be very bad.  The NTSB is very thorough and is primarily interested in keeping future accidents from happening.  However, drone pilots run away abandoning their hardware.<p>I think the next iteration will be drones required to have transponders, so air traffic control can see them, and a pilot who has TCAS can see them also.  This just means they will be become more expensive, and over time, hopefully transponders and ancillary avionics will become cheaper on aircraft as these companies push into general aviation.