FAA Moves Toward Treating Drones and Planes as Equals
When I started my first coding job, I once made the joke that &quot;testing is hard. I&#x27;ll just push the code to production and see what happens.&quot; An old, crusty engineer just looked at me and said, &quot;you&#x27;re the kind of person that gets people killed.&quot;<p>I feel like 99% of the engineers who comment on HN don&#x27;t work in fields where their technology could kill someone if it messes up. If an error meant someone&#x27;s death, you&#x27;d probably think a little harder for committing. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m not taking anyone who calls this &quot;draconian&quot; or derisively &quot;risk averse&quot; seriously.<p>Being a safety-first industry is not a punch line. Life is stochastic, not deterministic, and the FAA exists to add as many 9s to the likelihood of success as possible. Sorry your fun is ruined, but when I fly in a plane I don&#x27;t want to be worrying if some hobbyist with more money than accountability will put my life at risk because they wanted to make a cool video to put on YouTube.