The FAA Proposal for Drone Remote ID
All legislation tends to be reactive rather than proactive.  The drone industry, in my opinion, has been rather irresponsible about educating their customers.  As a result you have people flying drones in places, at times and altitudes they should not.<p>A few years ago, where I live, we had a rash of new drone owners doing stupid crap like flying over homes, roads, highways, parks and supermarket parking lots, to name a few.  This culminated with the inevitable.  Someone got hurt, badly, when a drone fell out of the sky.  The drone owner&#x2F;operator got arrested.  They ended-up in jail and lost their home in the lawsuit that followed.  Pretty f-ing stupid behavior if you ask me.<p>As someone who has been designing, building and flying all kinds of remote controlled aircraft for somewhere around 35 years, I have been looking at what the consumer side of the drone industry has been doing with horror.  I have crashed so many aircraft and helicopters I can&#x27;t even list them.  I am not talking about cheap toys either.  My highest cost crash was $6,000 in one day.<p>The point is these things are toys made with toy-grade electronics.  They are nowhere near reliable enough to dare fly over structures, people or roads unless the pilot is willing to face the consequences of killing one or more people and possibly burning down an entire neighborhood.  Having done extensive work in aerospace I know full-well what proper fault-tolerant design looks like --cause I have many fault-tolerant designs under my belt.  These things are not even close to being safe enough to fly over a crowd of kids at the park or above a neighborhood.  And yet it happens all the time.<p>The industry has had an opportunity to address these issues, either technologically, through education or both.  And they have note.  Therefore, they are slowly being constrained through  precisely the legislation they deserve to have to face.<p>One of the things I said years ago as drones started to become popular and people started to do stupid things with them was that &quot;these people are going to ruin the model aircraft hobby for everyone&quot;.  I am sad to say I was right.  They are doing precisely that and more.<p>Not sure if there are any solutions at this point other than the kind of legislation responsible drone owners do not need and do not want.<p>Oddly enough this is precisely the same situation we have in the US with the firearm issue.  Responsible firearm owners don&#x27;t need legislation to be, well, responsible law-abiding citizens who harm nobody.  Those who are in a range between careless and demented are the one&#x27;s who ruin it for everyone else.  This is now happening to drones.  Same thing.  Different hardware.