Almost every time we have a BBQ or other outside event someone buzzes a drone overhead and just sits there watching us. Almost every time I go out hiking I hear the high pitched whine of a drone flying around the country park. It seems no matter where I go there is someone flying one. They are a total nuisance, create tons of noise pollution in areas that are usually quite tranquil, invade privacy and just annoy me all around to be honest.
where do you live? I'm in the Bay Area and have never seen any drones flying overhead! I'm myself a drone enthusiast, and I take great care not to make anyone feel uncomfortable (at least not intentionally) when I'm flying a drone
I live in norcal (sacramento) and spend a lot of time outdoors here, in the bay area, and near Tahoe and we see them consistently nearly every time were out, even when we're paddling on the water.
Phoenix area here - drone nuisance an occasional but non-negligible problem here too. Sometimes they're a minor annoyance [e.g., 4th of July fireworks viewing], and sometimes genuinely creepy [hovering over backyards in my neighborhood, sometimes at night]
I observe that the majority of drone owners use them with a mind to avoid making others ill-at-ease, but y'know, tragedy of the commons and all that
The thing is, these laws are really, really hard to enforce at the federal level and in general municipal and state governments already do an efficient job (and are happy to collect the fines from rich folks with a hobby) executing on local laws.
I don't use or scout military hardware but if I were planning to use fpv quadcopters for military use the first thing I'd do is get spread spectrum control hardware.
Most RC anymore used frequency hopping spread spectrum for control. Different brands use different amounts of frequencies they hop between. Though all still in the 2.4, 5.8, or different band. A very select few use two different wavelengths at once. (Dragonlink, crossfire)
You know what the difference between a regulatory infraction and a felony are?
One is a fine. The other is a few years in prison. It has quite a bit of a deterrent effect. It won't get everyone, but it will cut down on the number of people who try stunts like that.
But drones are hot so why not pass a complex bill with a complex mandate to satisfy regulators itching to pounce on drone hobbyists.
Frankly I assumed the behavior was already criminal under Federal law.[1] Anybody who thought it was okay to buzz airplanes is almost certainly not thinking about consequences.
[1] I'm not completely convinced it's not, FWIW, but I'm satisfied it's not covered by the above, which is the only relevant Federal criminal statute I could find. I'd bet it's already illegal in many states, though.
Sure... slap on the wrist, prison time, same thing. Of course it makes a difference. Everyone sets an “acceptable” level beyond which it’s no longer worth it to break the rule. This is where the severity makes the difference.
Per local German coverage on reported crime statistics, many crimes go unreported, and a number of crimes that would be included in US crime statistics are exempted from German reporting.
Also, now that Germany has...diversity...the crime rate went up pretty significantly.
So I would say, all in all, that homogenous populations are the greatest deterrence, followed by the magnitude of punishment being significantly more important at a societal level, though the risk of getting caught dominates the thought process for regulatory/low-punishment crimes.
There’s also another aspect: whether it’s one life sentence or 5 consecutive might make very little difference. Since prisons in US are big business nobody deals in short sentences. Rehabilitation or deterrence are not the goals, so of course the strategy won’t have the effect you imagine.
When punishments are so disproportionately high a good chunk of the ofenders will stop caring. The preventative effect is gone, it’s more an incentive to escalate the crime to a level where it matches the punishment.
Pretty sure that one was CGI: no lights, and the drone did NOT get completely wiped out by the jet's wake, which I think is pretty conclusive. I suppose we could assume that maybe one day a drone pilot COULD do that for real.
Also… mighty fast 'drone', to nearly accelerate to the speed of a landing jet. I don't think they make quadcopters quite that brisk yet.
Wake turbulence moves down and with the wind.
Looking at the video the drone was above the aircraft and would therefore not experience significant wake turbulence.
Also… mighty fast 'drone', to nearly accelerate to the speed of a landing jet. I don't think they make quadcopters quite that brisk yet.
We must be thinking of different encounter videos. In the one I saw, the drone didn’t move much. It sat in the flight path waiting for a jet to come by.
The drone waits for the jet to come down below it, then leans sharply forward to chase it. In doing this, it drops quite a bit of altitude and hits probably a couple hundred miles an hour before it subsides and lets the jet fly on. The manuevers are quite plausible, the speed not so much. Unless the jet was actually a blimp shaped like a jet :)
you obviously haven't been keeping up with the current state of gun control legislation. governments are keen on making the illegal even more illegal as a means to look like they are doing something and to chip away at rights people are current exercising.
drones will eventually become so heavily licensed than anything outside of law enforcement, large news organizations, and politicians, will be restricted to the point of needing specialized parks just to enjoy them.
RC planes generally fall under 112-95 Section 336 which pretty much should work for drones
The problem is that RC planes almost universally require a much higher investment in skill-building to become competent enough to even fly, let alone fly well.
There is also a large community of builders and flyers [1], a network of clubs with actual airfields for the purpose, and a multi-million dollar insurance policy with membership.
Both the difficulty, the investment, and the training and peer pressure drastically reduces the number of participants who behave like asshats with their aircraft - to essentially zero.
With hobby drones, it is exactly the opposite -- just go buy some overgrown toy, and you can now put up in the air a device that with any of hundreds of failures of the device or pilot, can become a lethal projectile falling from the sky.
So, yes, serious requirements for anything over a few hundred grams is very reasonable[2].
[1] Academy of Model Aeronautics -- www.modelaircraft.org
[2](no, I'm not implying that the Govt automatically implements every reg in a reasonable & effective way, that could still end badly.)
How about, "Some drone hobbyists angered they can't keep flying their drones at landing aircraft like assholes?"
All the uncontrolled airports near me have to have drone advisories because nobody respects the 400' or line of sight regulations. I was landing on 35 at KTHV last year and nearly hit a drone at almost 900' turning to downwind to base.
There needs to be registration and regulation so that when you as a drone operator violate airspace regulations you can be punished.
I want these things as highly regulated as possible. I found it extremely uncomfortable to have drones flying about over my kids head in the park. What do I know about the competence of the pilots? Or the onboard AI? Nothing. They're basically high speed aerial blades from my POV.
I don't like drones flying over public places from a privacy perspective.
I've been hit by an admittedly, fairly small drone. I't didn't hurt much at all, and the rotors didn't break the skin. I don't think they're like aerial blades, unless someone attaches some to one.
The relatively small city I live in gets this many or more animal-at-large reports on a daily basis which likely constitute a larger public safety threat than people flying their quads around throughout the entire country.
Animal populations aren’t growing at exponential rates. The future scale of drones and autonomous airborne vehicles is going to be huge. The growing possibility of midairs with drones is more significant than bird strikes or deer on a runway. Hobbyist drone pilots are going to lose the safety battle. Just as you can’t drive however you want on public roads, class G airspace is going to resemble class A airspace. [1]
> Animal populations aren’t growing at exponential rates.
Erm, yes, if you ignore outside factors, they do. In fact, population growth has been a poster child to explain what exponential growth means for a while...
Every large outdoor event I’ve been to recently has had at least one drone buzzing over the crowd at some point — and that’s been verboten from the start.
I think you mean the part that says 100 complaints per month.
"Each month, the FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens, and law enforcement"
Hey, numbers and letters are hard. FCC, FAA, 100 reports per month, 100 complaints per day. Same thing, surely. Besides drones are bad, so exaggerating and misrepresenting is morally justified, as it will save the lives of billions that would otherwise have died from the flying evil.
>“Each month, the FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens, and law enforcement,”
Drones interfering with manned aircraft or emergency services is already illegal.
And these things are transmitting radio in both directions, putting money into tracking and prosecuting people interfering with flights is completely achievable, without any change in law.
I suspect that this is more about protecting the interests of the commercial businesses by introducing licensing as a barrier to entry.
>The bill is supported by the Commercial Drone Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group representing Alphabet’s Wing as well as other drone businesses.
100/day isn't that bad when you consider that there's >300 million people in the country and how much of a hair trigger some busybodies are on when it comes to reporting stuff to the government.
100/day is on the same order as the amount of "doing X while black" or "teenagers looking sketchy" complaints that get called in to local police departments across the country. You just don't hear about them because they're thinly distributed to local PD's across the country..
If only 100 people/day are complaining to the government about something then that something isn't a problem.
When California has to ground fire control aircraft because idiots are too stupid to realize that flying drones near them is a bad idea, yeah, the hobby is a problem.
The good drone operators didn't get control over the bad ones, so here we are.
> The good drone operators didn't get control over the bad ones
What does this even mean? I buy a drone and now I'm responsible to go hunt down every idiot with a drone and tell him to knock it off? I'm sure that would be very effective. Definitely much more effective than the FAA regulations already in place that these people choose to ignore.
The hobby can be dangerous. Overall, it isn't problematic, but there are a few drone hobbyists that ruin it for the rest, frequently due to lack of training. There's the person who hit the Space Needle [0], the person who crashed their drone mid-day in SF after they lost connection with it and it almost hit people walking on the sidewalk [1]. The ease of buying one and being able to use it means it's possible to fly it without having any knowledge of all the ways it could go wrong.
Don't forget the idiots who fly drones at forest fires, which several times last year resulted in fire-fighting tanker planes being diverted away.
I've heard people say that keeping the tankers away when a drone is in the same airspace is an overreaction, but those people are not thinking it through.
There are several factors that make fire-fighting flights very difficult for the pilots.
1. They are flying very low.
2. The air over and around large fires is often very turbulent.
3. The plane is heavily loaded, making it less nimble than normal, and making maneuvers put much more stress on the plane than they would on a less loaded plane.
The pilots are in a dangerous, stressful situation that requires their upmost concentration. Anything that distracts them is dangerous.
People have been killed by RC aircraft. I don't know if any accidents with quadcopters have caused injury (I'd assume having one fall on you from height wouldn't be fun), but there was a story a few years ago where a bloke killed himself with an RC helicopter.
In it's current form, it has some really vague wording and definitions. For example, the bill frequently refers to "threat" without a solid definition. It basically says that "threat" will be defined by the Secretary or Attorney General at a later time.
THREAT DEFINED.—In defining the term ‘threat’ for purposes of carrying out paragraph (1), the Secretary or the Attorney General, as the case may be, shall take into account factors, including, but not limited to, the potential for bodily harm or loss of human life, the potential loss or compromise of sensitive national security information, or the potential severe economic damage resulting from use of an unauthorized unmanned aerial system in the vicinity of a covered facility or asset.
Well no, 'threat' is not being defined by the Sec/AG at a later time, it's right there. Where I will concede to your point is that in the context of unmanned aerial flight, actions by the pilot that satisfy the above are not well enumerated or defined-but I'm only partially through reading the text of the bill.
Here's a paraphrase: In defining the term threat, The Secretary or the Attorney shall take into account factors such as potential for harm, loss of life, national security, and economic damage.
That is not a definition, that is a list of things that must be taken into account when making the definition.
"Eiusdem generis: Of the same kind, class, or nature. In statutory construction, the 'ejusdem generis rule' is that where general words follow an enumeration of persons or things, by words of a particular and specific meaning, such general words are not to be construed in their widest extent, but are to be held as applying only to persons or things of the same general kind or class as those specifically mentioned." https://thelawdictionary.org/ejusdem-generis/
"Noscitur a sociis: A latin term for 'it is known by the company it keeps', it is the concept that the intended meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the context in which it is used." https://thelawdictionary.org/noscitur-a-sociis/
Perhaps I should clarify myself then: there is a definition, but unfortunately that definition is sans-actions of the parties held to the legal standard compared to allowed actions enumerated by parties to whom the express, actionable authority is granted under proposed law in (b)(1).
tl;dr - Pilots may not engage in action(s) that constitute a 'threat', nebulously defined, but the AG may engage in action(s) in response, more expressly defined.
At least that's how I've initially read the proposed changes to this Reauthorization bill.
Edit: fwiw, I think we're both in agreement, however the ends-that the proposal does not go far enough to detail the actions of operators.
so, taking off in an airplane should rank very high on that list. the "potential" for all the things listed there is very high. also love the "but not limited to" before a laundry list.
that is the definition of "a law to be arbitrarily enforced". I guess they do not want any minority flying drones.
"(2) REQUIREMENTS.—In taking the actions described in subsection (b)(1), the Secretary or the Attorney General, as the case may be, shall—
(A) avoid infringement of the privacy and civil liberties of the people of the United States and the freedom of the press consistent with Federal law and the Constitution of the United States, including with regard to the testing of any equipment and the interception or acquisition of unmanned aircraft or systems;"
Lets not go all fault-finding on this Act. Commercially available drones has gained some superior capabilities and this worries authorities. As common man we aren't allowed to have such capabilities(by now we should be used to this :)). Risks posed by drones to facilities/routines of authorities far exceeds the interests of drone hobbyists. This is an attempt to put curb on commercial drone and its use.
I'm mildly incredulous on the actual scope of the bill compared to what's being reported (it's a learned behavior), does anyone have the name of the bill or the full text that I may go read for myself?
Mostly because as as a remote pilot, I have a feeling the proposals may be much less onerous than we're being lead to believe by Bloomberg here and what hobbyist groups are complaining about.
Stated as a Licensed Part 107 operator. I think everyone should be required to undergo some kind of training, with tiers for educational, hobbyist, and commercial. I learned a lot more in those classes than just how to fly a Phantom DJI and found the regulatory knowledge alone to be HIGHLY insightful.
The hobby is broad (and changing rapidly). The media and public conflate the different uses. It was mostly stodgy model airplane fliers who regulated themselves through a community group (Academy of Model Aeronautics), somewhat like how gun owners might follow NRA's rules on gun safety at a range (and pass a test first).
The bill would have the newer parts of the hobby (like those aerial photography drones) join in the self-regulation that AMA has been doing satisfactorily for ages. Sensible and not very controversial for most.
But it also puts the hobby directly under the authority of the FAA in a way that it hasn't ever been before. This gives FAA the ability to impose new regulations directly on hobbyists without the input that would happen in either congressional legislation or community group standards.
That is an epic big deal from the point of view of the old hobbyists and the new.
I assume it's language from the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 [1] and specifically § 45509.
Among the requirements for recreational use is "(7) The operator has passed an aeronautical knowledge and safety test described in subsection (g) and administered by the Federal Aviation Administration online for the operation of unmanned aircraft systems and maintains proof of test passage to be made available to the Administrator or law enforcement upon request."
I then searched Congress.gov for the bill title they gave, the "FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018", and found H.R. 4, which appears to be the actual bill in question. The UAV-specific part of the bill is Title 2, Subtitle B ("Unmanned Aircraft Systems"), which can be jumped to directly here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4/te...
I think that is a totally separate concern. Just because I don't research about every single reference in a scientific publication should not be a signal for its omission.
Ugh. Everytime I fly a micro drone ($40) I get some "Licensed Part 107 operator" lecture me on how I need to "undergo some kind of training". I think these guys should shift their energy to firearm laws and stop harassing children at parks.
You should have to undergo some kind of training. It's wildly routine to see drone pilots flying at the end of a runway because they didn't realize the runway was there and they didn't know aeronautical charts exist and/or how to read them. Buying a flying battery pack doesn't entitle you to circumvent airspace rules and endanger lives and property.
a $40 micro drone is training. It's a completely harmless toy, even less harmful than a soccer ball. This is not a $1000 hobby grade drone (for which you definitely should undergo training). A $40 drone typically has extremely weak brushed motors. You don't need training to operate a frisbee but you definitely need training to operate a discus. This comment is an example of how the general public does not know enough about the subject matter.
I think the line between "r/c toy" and "drone" is long range plus camera feed enabling the pilot to fly it out of visual line of sight. Adding any kind of autonomous flight (GPS waypoints or whatnot) definitely puts it over that line. A toy quad isn't a "drone" and shouldn't be treated like one.
So nice of you to decide that is it ok for you to endanger my life because you think that something is harmless. Thanks. Your quad will break my windscreen on short final (since i am doing 80 knots or so), distract me, and possibly make me crash on landing.
A $40 drone is usually an under 2” device that fits in the palm of your hand with an operating range of under 100ft and barely can be used outdoors (due to wind). I’ve had similar size devices fly into me (including in the face) and I didn’t even get scratched, let alone remotely hurt.
If it hits your windscreen, you were more likely driving where you shouldn’t be rather than someone with a literal kids toy doing something wrong.
If you think a palm sized 50 gram toy that can fly 100 ft from the RC is as dangerous as you state then your license should be re-evaluated because you'll be facing worse obstacles while flying.
Also nobody flies those toys in airfields. They're barely suited for backyards as they are.
a $40 "drone" is really a small RC quadcopter with a 5-8 minute battery and probably no more than 150ft range. such a device is unlikely to make it any farther than the neighbor's roof/tree. fixed wing air-hogs that kids have been flying (unregistered) for decades pose a greater threat to public safety.
The supply of transferable machine guns is fixed, and low, and it only shrinks over time. Technically yes, if you have the money you can buy one today. Technically no, we can't all go buy one because there aren't enough to go around.
Interesting take on the matter. Certainly access to firearms is a discussion worth having in society, but gun control isn't the subject of the proposed bill-nor is it the subject of this thread.
Do you routinely ignore advice from those more experienced in other aspects of your life as well? Based on just what you wrote alone, and having never operated a drone in my life, I side with lecturers. Because they're licensed operators with (I assume) experience, whereas your counter-argument is...nothing, and you're the one telling the story.
>Do you routinely stop what you're doing to listen to random people that claim that they're more of an authority on various aspects of your life?
Yes, regardless of what I'm working on, be it construction/maintenance on my house, basic electrical or plumbing work, driving my car, handling/transporting a firearm, and any other number of cases I have to stop and listen to "random people" i.e. cops, regulators, politicians, FAA, and whoever else regardless of how I feel about them because they are, unfortunately or not, the authority
I am intrigued by this, so long you are not flying your drone for commercial reasons you do not need a 107. However if you are flying a drone over 250 grams there are certain rules you should be following.
Im not super into drones but 250 grams seems incredibly and excessively light. Sure, you can buy drones that aren't that much heavier than which could in unusual circumstance be a little dangerous, but if someone was to build some cheap DIY drone at home from parts im not sure how successful they would be making such a tiny model and lightweight model. 250 grams is almost half the weight of a baseball which could easily be going faster than such a tiny drone.
As a pilot and former flight instructor, I'm not terribly sympathetic to the recreational drone complaints. There are recreational kite fliers too, and they have FAA regulations that apply to them, I don't hear them complaining. There are model airplane pilots, they have FAA regulations, they have a community that is very serious about education, training, mentor-peer relationships and self monitoring and reporting.
I do not see this at all with the drone pilot community. It's a community of individuals. And even if it's less than 1% of the total drone pilot population, there is a real problem with this bizarre demand that they have a right to do what they want. They do not. This is shared space. Ham radio operators have more rules, testing, peer review and community than recreational drone pilots.
> There are model airplane pilots, they have FAA regulations, they have a community that is very serious about education, training, mentor-peer relationships and self monitoring and reporting.
Right. And that community, the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) is probably doomed if these new rules pass. A lot of their models can go faster than 100 MPH and higher than 400 feet. A lot of their fields are in controlled airspace where they won't be allowed to fly.
Interestingly much of the (hobbyist) drone hardware also requires a Ham license to operate, so there's quite a bit of overlap there.
There are at least 3 distinct groups potentially impacted by this. First there are the non-commercial, "toy" users that are flying around cheap little "smart" drones using phones. Most of this class are using drones under 5" and that weigh negligible amounts. The second class are the non-commercial hobbyists that mostly build their own drones and use them either for recreational freestyle or racing. These drones can be anywhere from 3" all the way up to 12" on the extreme end, and similarly have a very wide weight and performance envelope. Much of the equipment in this class requires Ham licenses, or in some cases other federal licensing. Lastly there are the commercial operators that are mostly using drones for aerial photography. These tend to be medium to large sized drones (everything from 6" all the way to multiple foot wide monstrosities) which most definitely require FAA licenses to operate.
Part of the problem here, is that each of these groups has different expectations. Little Timmy getting the 4" plastic drone he flies with his iPhone for Christmas shouldn't really be required to pass a FAA license to fly it around his backyard. The professional across the street with access to the 5 foot wide 150 pound hexacopter with the gyrostabilized 4k camera mount and an effective range measured in miles probably should have some kind of license. The guy who built his own 5" drone out of parts and tools around the local park probably falls somewhere in the middle. Lumping all drones under one single set of regulations really isn't going to work because not all drones are the same. It would be like trying to cover unicycles, bicycles, segways, and motorcycles with a single set of regulations just because they all had less than four wheels and required you to balance on them.
> The professional across the street with access to the 5 foot wide 150 pound hexacopter with the gyrostabilized 4k camera mount and an effective range measured in miles probably should have some kind of license.
1) that category of person already had to have a license (a license I hold) before this new bill and does require testing.
2) that size drone weighs nothing near 150lb. I have a commercial grade 5 foot octocopter with advanced gyro and a professional grade dSLR and fully loaded (drone, battery, comms, gyro, camera and lens) it’s under 25lbs.
Long gone are the days of needing only a Technician class radio license to operate FCC uncertified radio and video transmission gear, strapped onto a cheap foam RC plane from China, piloted by a human with nothing more than a controller, video goggles, and an antenna to achieve mile-long distances and thousand foot heights.
OMFG so if I can build a thing within these constraints I can fly it?
(1) Weighs less than 254 pounds empty weight, excluding floats and safety devices which are intended for deployment in a potentially catastrophic situation;
(2) Has a fuel capacity not exceeding 5 U.S. gallons;
(3) Is not capable of more than 55 knots calibrated airspeed at full power in level flight; and
(4) Has a power-off stall speed which does not exceed 24 knots calibrated airspeed.
Peter has become some kind of guerilla youtuber. I have seen him on at least six different channels in as many months (most recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEZCxxKp0hM).
The funny thing is he's about the only one I'd actually like to meet in person. Nothing against the other folks (Mark Rober from above seems really nice), Peter just seems like he'd be fun to hang out with and build something.
What year will we see the following scenarios actually happen:
* Someone flies a drone into a government facility with an explosive | camera | contraband?
* Public figure/celebrity or official assassinated by drone
* Drone causes infrastructure damage or transportation accident
* Drone used for spying /financial gain
---
Honestly, the lack of the above happening in any large scale, notable or meaningful way shows that there arent a ton of people out there looking to wreak havoc with drones.
What I am surprised by is there are not yet a range of security services based on drones - i.e. a swarm of autonomous drone cameras which patrol a given asset/area where they autonomously recharge themselves and fly around - coupled with motion sensors/proximity sensors that being triggered are dispatched to investigate.
Someone flies a drone into a government
facility with an explosive | camera |
contraband?
Yemen, Syria, or Iraq (any time within the last 1-2 years)
Public figure/celebrity or official
assassinated by drone
Attempted assassination attempt of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
Drone causes infrastructure damage or
transportation accident
Yemen, Syria, or Iraq (more then 2 years ago)
Drone used for spying /financial gain
Shit everything has already happened (outside of the US), so I assume this has as well. Just we aren't going to hear about it until the statue of limitations is up.
---
Seriously the asymetic warfare from relatively cheap drones is a massive problem. The US has fired patriot missiles are little more then ~$300 hobbyist drones carrying hand grenades.
Most folks think drones as in the US military's absurdly heavy and old-fashioned style, though, so it's good to point out these antics were all with light duty quadcopters, often custom built on site.
Within the US there have been numerous incidents ranging from the delivery of contraband to prisons, interference with air traffic and surveillance of individuals and facilities.
Conflict regions and milita drone combat pilots are one of the reason quadcopter rigs have such high demand and low price. It's a device with FPV capability, multiple miles of range, and speeds in excess of 60m/s at a sprint.
Their industrial and weapon potential is not very high (they could drop one or two grenades I guess?) but their ability to gather intelligence quickly and safely in urban environments is extremely high.
People could have done those things decades ago with model planes too and it hasn't been a problem. I don't see why we should expect or regulate against such improbable events now. Awareness of existing laws would solve most of the current problems. If someone is illegally flying a drone in a secure area like around the pentagon, the answer is incredibly simple, shoot or knock it down. Hell I don't see why they don't do that around airports either if it is suppose to be such a problem, a foam dart would take down 99% of hobby drones and birdshot could do the rest.
Same story with the "terrorism" threat since 9/11: slow creep of government power and decline of individual liberty. More surveillance, civil liberty intrusions, etc. Until the general public cares more about liberty (insert appropriate tirade about public schools), I expect this unfortunate trend to continue.
Why are HN so keen on defending drones? Serious question. Is there any altruistic reason or do hackers just like drones? What about privacy issues? Drones seem much more intrusive than the CCTVs people here normally are against.
Generally because the folks attacking don’t have the first clue anything what they are talking about. Those opposed are buying into pure FUD. Just read through the comments here alone, we have folks talking about regulations didn’t exist (they do), that licensing/testing isn’t required (it is, for the categories generally needing it), thinking a palm sized drone endangers their life (it doesn’t, unless they were being stupid), that commercials drones weigh 150lbs (almost none are remotely even close, 99% are under 25lbs, 99.9% are under 50lbs), etc etc.
Some time ago I wanted to see what kind of videos people make with drones, and the top result on Youtube was a compilation of videos of nude girls sunbathing who absolutely did not want to be filmed.
When I saw that, I realised that there are too many assholes in the world to allow unregulated drones. Some people will invade the privacy of others without any thought, and the only course of action is to require registration of drones.
It's a shame -- I'm sure there are plenty of responsible drone pilots out there. But the jerks ruin it for everyone.
Ending the Aerial Wild West implies that the wild west is no more. There are plenty of places to buy drone parts, controllers, etc... that do not require any registration. Would it perhaps be more accurate to say, that the wild west is slightly limited to true hobbyists and terrorists? Would such regulations just limit the average person from buying their "toy" drones? The drone hobbyists that I know are not impacted by this. They use 3d headsets and race their drones through buildings up to 6 miles away.
Not at all. They are actually working on methods to extend even further by creating a network mesh in the air. This involves multiple RasPi's and multiple drone blimps and multiple quad drones.
Alright. That's a little more plausible. At least that would give them line of sight. Now it's just incredible and unlikely instead of completely infeasible.
There are companies deploying commercial solutions similar to what my friends are doing. There are a couple companies in the EU that will send an AED drone to emergency callers for heart attacks. The drone's wings collapse and it converts into an AED. It can fly to locations minutes before first responders get there. They are also being used to deliver medicine to remote camp-sites in the mountains and some jungles.
The eventual value of low level airspace for drone use vastly exceeds the value of any current use. If we wait long enough we will get to read lurid articles about reckless people in manually controlled aircraft blundering through drone space, putting the lives of themselves and others at risk for no good reason.
The governments of the world have entirely dropped the ball on anti-collision systems for small aircraft up to now. I anticipate them doing no better now that there are even smaller aircraft added to the mix.
I think it's fair enough that there should be law to choose out fly zone only for drones to still preserve privacy, tranquility and lessen the noise pollution, some people might think that drones are also hobby for people, but not all people don't have the same exact common things to enjoy.
City of LA is now issuing permits for this kind of issue
Excerpt:
The city and the county of Los Angeles have issued nearly 60 permits for drones on film and TV sets in the last year, according to data from FilmL.A., which handles permits for the Los Angeles region. In addition to the permits, applications for drone waivers have poured in, with more than 200 companies and individuals requesting authorisation from the FAA to operate drones for film production, per the FAA website.
While I think many of the provisions for drones are too restrictive, one provision is crucial:
The law also weighs into the controversial issue of whether drones should have radio beacons that identify their position and registered owner. It would grant the Federal Aviation Administration the authority to require that. The agency is drafting such a regulation at the request of homeland security and law enforcement agencies and has signaled it may require retrofitting millions of drones already in use.
Autonomous drones are far cheaper to produce than automobiles. And what if an autonomous drone drops grenades in a public area? Who do you blame? How does the law prevent further issues?
That’s the only way we can catch the drones early. Drone flying without a radio beacon would be instantly shot down by laser or emp or whatever. We would need tons of those. Otherwise there are huge dangers.
About time. I'm F*ing amazed this has gone on so long! As if no one has duck taped some github computer vision human recognition AI's with some strapped on Pistol/Semi automatic hooked up to an onboard arduino.
Terrorists are already using Drones to attack people[1]. ISIS are buying and perhaps using drones in Europe[2]. Unfortunately, this means drones will need to be regulated like they are weapons, because they are used as weapons.
People use all manner of electronics to build detonation devices for bombs. Do you want to regulate cell phones and alarm clocks like weapons too?
Drones are too easy to build and conceal to effectively prevent determined attackers from getting them and using them. Regulations are aimed at preventing accidents and nuisance incidents, not terrorism.
Your line of thought is interesting, that cell phones (should not) be regulated despite their use as detonation mechanism.
If I think along those lines, the drone attacks are using drones as the delivery mechanism for the explosives, and whatever they are using for detonation mechanism is not interesting here.
The explosives are regulated. So should the delivery mechanism be regulated? I think yes-- other delivery mechanisms for explosives to a target are guns, cannons, rockets... all regulated.
Many delivery mechanisms for explosives aren't regulated because like everything it requires a cost benefit analysis.
Can we effectively prevent bad actors from acquiring them without too much cost to everyone else? (plus how bad is it if bad actors acquire them) For some things the answer is yes : rockets, missiles etc... For others no: slingshots, skateboards, lawnmowers, scooters, remote control cars etc....
Drones are too easy to build to effectively prevent bad actors from acquiring them without a huge cost to society as a whole. Restricting all the components you'd need to prevent a terrorist from building their own drone is just too disruptive.
Less restrictive regulations like requiring licensing may be effective for other purposes, but not for preventing drone terrorism.
given that fireworks and powder are easily available (re: Tsarnaevs) or relative availability of ANFO (re: McVeigh) and similar stuff or that just one visit to Home Depot allows you to buy components making for a pretty good explosive, i think the explosives are regulated mostly to avoid them lying freely around under the kitchen sinks and in the garages and to avoid being handled by clueless people, not to protect from terrorists.
Buying explosive precursors together does not automatically trigger any sort of investigation.
I bought acetone, hydrogen peroxide (in the form of a wood bleaching kit), and hydrochloric acid together in 2002 at a Home Depot and never got the slightest bit of attention.
I also bought an 80 pound sack of ammonium nitrate from a fertilizer dealer in 2002 with cash. I didn't show ID. The employees didn't grill me at all. I was pretty surprised, actually. I thought there would be some sort of tracking in place six years after the OKC bombing and 1 year after the 9/11 attacks. Maybe they only start tracking when you try to buy it by the tonne. Maybe my appearance (clean shaven white guy with glasses, no tattoos) gave me a pass where other sorts of buyers might need to show ID or explain why they're buying.
" the new legislation will require anyone buying more than 25 pounds to register, be screened against a known terrorist list, and require any thefts to be reported within 24 hours. "
You realize orders of magnitude more explosives have been delivered via car/truck by terrorists than by any flying vehicle (not just hobby drones, but anything flying in the air). Should we heavily regulate land vehicles to, because ”stopping the terrorists is all that matters?”
When you say heavily regulated it has nothing to do with their potential use as weapons. The stated intent of the "kill switch" was for that purpose. The fact that the kill switch can't generally be used until after an attack is over, and that 2 way radios can be easily be used as a substitute means that it's not particular effective--there were likely ulterior motives for pushing for this ability.
The 2013 shutdown of the BART network during protests shows that the government is at least as interested in suppressing protests are they are in stopping bombs from detonating.
Either way the ability for the government to shutdown cell towers is irrelevant. Cell phones themselves aren't "regulated like weapons". I don't need to pass a background check to buy one. I don't need to be licensed to own one. We don't require owners to prove they have a legitimate need to own them, and we don't require owners to lock them up and report thefts the way we do with explosives.
The reason we don't do these things is that the cost actually implementing all of that wouldn't be worth the benefit. You'd have to implement restrictions on anything with a radio, or anything that could be easily turned into a radio to have any meaningful impact on terrorism.
The same is true of drones. You'd need to tightly restrict so many electronic components to actually deter determined attackers that it's not worth it.
Radio is a public resource that has always been regulated with national security in mind. The fact that the government doesn’t implement draconian restrictions reflects the balance inherent in all matters of public interest.
At least in the US, cars are very much treated as though they are dangerous enough to effectively be weapons. They must be titled, and are required to have an individual serial number (the VIN). Additionally, in order to operate one the operator must be certified by the state to be competent (driver's license). They are recognized as being dangerous enough to require special insurance, and many states require annual inspect to certify they are safe to operate. And speaking as someone who has registered a home-built car in Wyoming (which is both figuratively and literally the wild west for vehicle regulations) it isn't as easy as just rocking up to the DMV and paying for a set of plates. Before registering I was required to have the car inspected by law enforcement for both a VIN and presence of safety equipment. This is the bare minimum, some states require additional inspection for quality of construction and engineering.
None of the regulations you're talking about are designed to prevent a car from intentionally being used as a weapon, which is what the OP is arguing for. We don't have laws requiring we install security devices in our cars for instance (like some jurisdictions do with trigger locks).
Regulating drones might prevent some accidents and nuisance complaints, but it isn't going to stop people from using them for terrorist attacks.
Of course they can't. If you want to be pedantic s/prevent/make it harder/.
The point still stands. Automobile regulations weren't designed to make it harder for terrorist to use cars as intentional weapons. They do a very poor job at that, and if that were their intended purpose, they wouldn't be worth the cost.
Requiring licenses to operate drones may or may not be worth the cost. If it is, it won't be because it prevents terrorism.
Except this isn't weaseling words as much as you'd like to think. Many driving instructors use the metaphor that a car is a 2 ton bullet to their students.
Car analogies are always good. Well, cars must undergo heavy certification and testing before being allowed on public roads. Operators must undergo certified training and be certified before operating cars on public roads. Every car is registered and tracked with a visible marking. Cars are limited in how fast they can go, and how much emissions they can have and more.
I believe these kinds of measures will be put in place for drones as well: only certified drones with enforced technical limitations of speed and height, certified operators only ,and remotely visible (rfid) license plates.
This works for cars because cars are too big to be easily concealable
Most of regulations you mention also do nothing to stop cars from being used as weapons, so they are completely irrelevant to your point.
The few regulations you mentioned that do provide some deterrent to being used as weapons weren't intended for that purpose, and are easily circumvented by determined attackers anyway.
> This works for cars because cars are too big to be easily concealable
Drones in the skies aren't necessarily easily concealable either. If they are requires to have some sort of identifier (RFID), it's not too hard to check what's in the skies, or note what's lower around points of interest.
Both cars and drones are fairly easily transported by other vehicles. Cars may require a trailer, open or enclosed, but it's hardly rare to see. Drones are slightly easier to transport in that respect, but not enough that I think it makes a difference.
>Drones in the skies aren't necessarily easily concealable either
Drones can fly either high enough to not be easily seen (and they are too small to show up on most radars) Or they can be launched near a target and fly low.
>Both cars and drones are fairly easily transported by other vehicles.
But you need another licensed vehicle at that point to transport it. You can put a drone in a backpack and walk, ride a bike, take a bus etc...
>Drones are slightly easier to transport in that respect, but not enough that I think it makes a difference.
You think that a 2 pound drone is only "slightly easier" to transport surreptitiously than a 2 ton car?
> Drones can fly either high enough to not be easily seen
By eye, yes. By digital camera? That would have to be pretty high. At least on clear days. But there are days where visibility is low in general, and that goes for cars too.
> Or they can be launched near a target and fly low.
High risk targets should have additional safeguards. It's not hard for cars to get to some locations just because they aren't allowed, but because there is additional security and physical obstructions. One solution never covers all cases, and we shouldn't expect it to.
> But you need another licensed vehicle at that point to transport it.
Or you hire someone to tow it. Yes, it's harder. But also it's not like every time you get behind the wheel of a car someone checks that you're licensed. How many times have you had your license checked while driving? How many hours have you driven?
> You think that a 2 pound drone is only "slightly easier" to transport surreptitiously than a 2 ton car?
I think in the case you are planning to use it illegally, it's not really that much of a difference.
Seriously, you can probably walk into any rundown part of town, buy some older beat up car for cash for under $1000 dollars, and immediately use it for your purpose while the title change is in the mail (for states that allow that), if the person selling it really even cares.
Drones are new, so there's less infrastructure to track and manage them, but it's not really all that different IMO, it's just a matter of time.
> By eye, yes. By digital camera? That would have to be pretty high. At least on clear days.
Have you ever seen a hobby drone flown? I challenge you to see a typical model flying at 250ft feet with anything not using a telephoto lens, even on a clear day, unless you already knew where it was (aka saw it from a lower altitude and followed it up).
> I challenge you to see a typical model flying at 250ft feet with anything not using a telephoto lens, even on a clear day, unless you already knew where it was
Do you think you could identity a drone moving at 50 feet using a video camera that recorded as 640x480? Because approximately the same number of pixels would by used on a 4k capable video camera at 250 feet, and that's before any optical zoom at all. As long as you can identify something moving, it can be zoomed in on and classified (either by the same camera or a secondary one dedicated to the task), or just give the camera more pixels and use digital zoom. A few of those in a cluster would cover an area quite well I think.
For another way to think of this, an object that is 8" (assuming a 12" drone at an angle) should appear to be a quarter the size of the moon to the naked eye at 300 feet.[1] I don't think that's something a good quality camera should have trouble picking up.
1: http://www.1728.org/angsize.htm, input angle in minutes 7.5, size .666, using their example which says the moon appears to be about 40 minutes in angle size.
> For another way to think of this, an object that is 8" (assuming a 12" drone at an angle) should appear to be a quarter the size of the moon to the naked eye at 300 feet.
If a drone was a solid spherical mass like the moon, your guesstimate might have some merit, but it’s not. In reality, your 8” is already way overshooting it. Furthermore, the amount of light reflecting by the moon is significantly higher providing much higher contrast for edge detection. The matte white plastic of many common drones however easily blends into the sky.
Am I saying no camera would do it? No, that’s obviously wrong. But the post I replied to used a very vague wording which implies a majority of cameras would do it, which is definitely not the case. Happy to provide real photos to inspect this weekend (assuming it’s not still raining) at 100, 200, 300, and 350ft at whatever megapixel you’d like (up to 22mp) and focal length (from 8-1600mm, 35mm equivalent) so you can see what I mean.
> In reality, your 8” is already way overshooting it.
Given the body area of most these drones, I'm not so sure. I'd best the visible cross-section is pretty close to 64 sq. inches from most angles, if you include the small amount of area from the arms, but ignoring rotors.
> But the post I replied to used a very vague wording which implies a majority of cameras would do it
I don't read what I said that way. I said a digital camera, as in there exists a camera or type of camera that would work. I mean, there's some pretty crappy digital cameras out there, if you want to go really cheap.
> Happy to provide real photos to inspect this weekend (assuming it’s not still raining) at 100, 200, 300, and 350ft at whatever megapixel you’d like (up to 22mp) and focal length (from 8-1600mm, 35mm equivalent) so you can see what I mean.
Sure, I would be interested in see how it looks in practice. I purposefully limited myself to a little over 8 megapixels (4k) as I assumed video, and that's fairly easy to get with consumer grade hardware, which sets a nice precedent. If cheap consumer grade hardware can do it, a government solution with possibly special purpose hardware would have no problem.
Knowing how a decent still camera views it at full res with little or no zoom would be a good way to look at is, as I think that would approximate a high-end video system, or a mid-range one in a couple years.
I get emails on replies, so I shouldn't miss it even if it's a few days later.
>Should appear to be a quarter the size of the moon to the naked eye at 300
The moon is illuminated by the sun, so not really a fair comparison. Take a drone and paint it the color of the sky and it's going to be a lot more difficult than “a quarter the size of the moon” would imply. A drone can also fly much higher than 300 feet, and it's not a solid object.
But I've written a fair bit of object detection code though, and I'm certain a decent camera could do it fairly accurately.
False positives are the problem though. Birds, airplanes (farther away), insects (closer to the camera), clouds. All of those things are much more common than drones and so even a very small false positive percentage is going to cause this system to be completely unreliable.
That’s all without even mentioning licensed drones. How will the system handle not sounding the alarm when it detects a licensed drone? All drones will have transponders I assume? So now the camera needs a radio, and access to a national database of transponder codes.
Assuming drones become more popular how does the camera know which transponder code belongs to which drone? Signal strength? This will be different depending on environment. Signal direction? You need multiple receivers for this.
How do you stop a drone from emulating another drone’s transponder code? A challenge response system with a public/private key pair?
And the most important question yet. What do you do when you spot an unauthorized drone? If a cop spots a car he can chase it.
Does each camera have an interceptor drone?
How does the interceptor drone bring down the unauthorized drone without causing any collateral damage? What happens if there are multiple unauthorized drones in an area? How do you trace the unauthorized drone back to the owner? Unlike a car, the operator isn't in the vehicle.
Do you just allow the cameras to hand off monitoring to other nearby cameras until it lands and send cops to deal with it? How do you build a camera network with enough cameras to provide continuous monitoring, taking into account trees and buildings.
All of that just to say yeah it’s possible, but it’s a lot harder and a lot more expensive than it seems. Much too hard and much too expensive to feasible anytime soon. Unless drones prove to be a lot more popular and effective than truck, car, and suitcase bombs, than I think they will, no one is going to pay for all of this.
That’s not to say that we won’t have more licensing and registration for drones, but I don’t think it’s going to prove very enforceable or very effective at anything more than reducing the number of nuisance complaints. Maybe it’s worth it just to do that, but I’d need to see real data first.
That's also not to say that some kind of automated drone defense won't almost certainly become more popular in very specific high security areas like the White House.
> The moon is illuminated by the sun, so not really a fair comparison. Take a drone and paint it the color of the sky and it's going to be a lot more difficult than “a quarter the size of the moon” would imply. A drone can also fly much higher than 300 feet, and it's not a solid object.
A good point. I think flying above 400 ft is already illegal though, so dealing with that might be somewhat simplified.
> All drones will have transponders I assume?
I think that might be a fair assumption. We require license plates for vehicles on the road, requiring transponders for use in populated areas sounds like a good way to track and license (if your transponder is issued, there you go).
> So now the camera needs a radio, and access to a national database of transponder codes.
Well, yeah. If it's a system responsible for tracking and ensuring licensing compliance and flight permission, it would, just as bridge toll systems now often use license plates to track fees. It's not all that hard in this day and age.
> Assuming drones become more popular how does the camera know which transponder code belongs to which drone? Signal strength? This will be different depending on environment. Signal direction? You need multiple receivers for this.
You already likely need multiple systems to get good visual and radio coverage. But even then, it doesn't need to be a perfectly self-contained system, just a piece of the puzzle. If you see six objects and receive 5 signals, eliminate the ones you can, and send someone to investigate with directional equipment.
We don't expect red-light cameras to pull us over, but we do expect they do something. It's not crazy to expect they also might have specific circumstances that flag to additional review for possible dispatch of an officer.
> How do you stop a drone from emulating another drone’s transponder code? A challenge response system with a public/private key pair?
How do you keep one car from using another's license plate? You make the sale of fake license plates illegal, you make sure the only valid plates are issued by the government, and you make it illegal to tamper with them.
> And the most important question yet. What do you do when you spot an unauthorized drone? If a cop spots a car he can chase it.
Already covered a little above, but there's already solutions appearing to help with this. There's anti-drone ammunition[1] and trained animals[2] on the simple end, up to military grade anti-drone solutions.
> How does the interceptor drone bring down the unauthorized drone without causing any collateral damage? What happens if there are multiple unauthorized drones in an area? How do you trace the unauthorized drone back to the owner? Unlike a car, the operator isn't in the vehicle.
What do we do with vehicles or trailers without clearly defined ownership we find on the street? It's towed to an impound lot. If someone wants to claim property, they they come for it.
If downing it for legitimate reasons ensues, the owner of the drone would be responsible for damage, and if the owner can't be determined, I'm sure there's a legal precedent to fall back on. It's not that wild a situation.
> All of that just to say yeah it’s possible, but it’s a lot harder and a lot more expensive than it seems. Much too hard and much too expensive to feasible anytime soon. Unless drones prove to be a lot more popular and effective than truck, car, and suitcase bombs, than I think they will, no one is going to pay for all of this.
I don't think it's nearly that expensive, as outlined above. If there isn't something like this, I expect drone terrorism would definitely be the go-to solution. This wouldn't stop that, but it does put a hurdle in the way (in the same way that doors and locks and security systems put a hurdle in the way of a home invader, but in the end only slow and dissuade, and do not actually prevent in most cases).
> I think flying above 400 ft is already illegal though
So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this system you propose?
> I don't think it's nearly that expensive, as outlined above.
To cover what area? If you mean something like the White House, sure, the cost would very likely be justified.
If you are talking covering the entire United States, or even just everything important, you are insane (not meant to be rude, but a trillion dollars wouldn’t be unrealistic estimate there).
I think a key point you are missing is what real threat a consumer grade drone is in reality.
$500 Drone - might be able to lift a hand grenade. Keyword there might.
$1500 Drone - the hand grenade is now pretty solidly possible depending on the type of grenade (M67, doable, but anything bigger less likely). In the best case you might get up to a pound of cargo weight, but it’s significantly going to impact maneuverability and flight time.
$10k+ drone - once we get into this category, sure, we can get up to 5lbs or maybe slightly higher in cargo weight, but then we are in the category of 4ft or larger hexacopters or octocopters. They are very noticeable and very loud.
I think that’s the real reason we’ve not seen much (and likely won’t see much unless drones dramatically change in lifting capacity) terrorism from drones. To put it bluntly, there are just too many ways to deliver tiny explosives that are more practical and less likely to fail than are with drones. For the realistic payload of something like an M67 grenade, the “kill radius” is only 5 meters. If I saw a drone with something attached to it (or even if not) within 5m of me, I’m already going to be getting out of the area. Sure, you could argue someone may intend to drop it from altitude, but even then do you really think the accuracy of dropping something like that is actually going to be very precise?
The terrorism angle is in reality pure FUD and is used as an excuse to appeal to the uninformed masses.
> So is using a drone for a terrorist act, so by that logic, wouldn’t that negate the need for this system you propose?
No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply.
> To cover what area? If you mean something like the White House, sure, the cost would very likely be justified.
High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc.
> If you are talking covering the entire United States, or even just everything important, you are insane (not meant to be rude, but a trillion dollars wouldn’t be unrealistic estimate there).
Assuming 10,000 locations across the U.S., and assuming 50 $50,000 average installation cost (which might be low, but we can scale it easily for ballpark costs after), that's $500 million. If we double locations and quadruple average install cost (which is supposed to account for locations with multiple towers, etc), that's still just $8 billion. That's totally doable when it comes to stuff tagged as national defense.
> I think a key point you are missing is what real threat a consumer grade drone is in reality.
Your prices and payloads are way off. A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more.
> For the realistic payload of something like an M67 grenade, the “kill radius” is only 5 meters.
Grenades are not optimized for damage. They are a compromise that takes into account explosive power, compact size, and delivery. The fact they are meant to be hand delivered to within a few tens of feet means a large blast radius is actually detrimental to their design. 10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets, probably allows for quite a different set of compromises.
> The terrorism angle is in reality pure FUD and is used as an excuse to appeal to the uninformed masses.
There's a lot of FUD, but I don't think it's complete FUD. It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations, I think it's possible it will have the best cost to benefit ratio (since the chances of finding the perpetrator would be virtually nil, and the cost is relatively low), and that's all it takes for it to be used.
>High risk locations. Dense metro downtowns, sports stadiums, government buildings, large public utilities (nuclear power plants), etc.
You take out dense metro downtowns and I think that's perfectly sensible.
It doesn't require any kind of licensing, or national database, or wide scale distributed systems of any kind. Drones are off limits in the those areas just like aircraft are. If you have an automated defense system and you need a drone for some exceptional reason, you clear it with whoever manages the local system and they install a friend or foe transponder on the drone.
Wide scale drone licensing enforcement isn't required or effective if your goal is to protect high threat targets from drone attacks. It solves completely different problems.
>No, I'm just noting that however we deal with this for aircraft might help here, since the same rules apply.
You need a much higher density of radar installations, with an exponentially higher cost since drones are much smaller than aircraft.
>$8 billion
That's off by a few orders of magnitude if you're talking about a wide-scale system including towers, radar, personnel, drone take down capability etc...
>10+ lbs of payload for something that would want the maximum blast radius and power, or the maximum directed penetration for hard targets
You’re still talking pipe bomb levels. It’s still much more effective to leave a bag in a trashcan in a crowded space.
> A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more.
You're looking at a list of maximum payloads from the marketing department. Not maximum realistic operational loads. And the drones with 40lb payloads are huge.
>It's a real attack vector, and if there's no mitigations,
There are no feasible large scale mitigations that are effective enough to change the calculus.
Again if you’re talking local mostly automated drone defense, then sure that’s feasible and probably necessary at some point.
I'm not feeling this is a particularly constructive discussion anymore. You seem to be picking specific statements to counter, while ignoring the context of the statements and explanations that address your counterargument I've made in a prior comment or within the same comment.
For example, drone payload, where you focus on smaller sizes, and say they can't do much damage, and then either ignore larger size payloads as marketing lies (with no evidence to back it up, or to at least show actual payloads in practice), or that those drones are huge... which would make them easier to track, which was one of my earlier points that makes the system easier to develop. Feasible drones for attacks will likely be larger, and this easier to detect.
Time an again, I've tried to come up with real data or approximate numbers, with all calculations and reasons for such outlined so you or anyone else could question where you thought my assumptions were wrong, but I haven't seen that. Instead, I get blanket rejections without evidence, or even much explanation of reasoning.
I think you're conflating 2 separate people's statements. I've never had any focus on smaller sized payloads.
You could fairly easily find a drone with a 10 lbs payload. 40 pounds though isn't a realistic operational payload for those drones, which is why it says "max payload".
>Feasible drones for attacks will likely be larger, and this easier to detect
That's true, my point is that setting up a nationwide drone licensing and tracking system to track hobby drones isn't necessary when what you're really worried about is protecting high value targets from drones that are approaching the size of small helicopters.
> Instead, I get blanket rejections without evidence, or even much explanation of reasoning.
You haven't provided any evidence either, just a random assumption that such a system will cost $50k-$200k per site.
I clearly explained why that is too low. Increasing the density of radar coverage to handle drones above 400', trained personnel, towers, and drone take down systems are going to cost a lot more than you think. You can believe me or not, but I've provided at least much explanation and evidence as you have.
> I think you're conflating 2 separate people's statements. I've never had any focus on smaller sized payloads.
I know you weren't the prior commentor. This is a long discussion. I expect you're reading the prior comments in the same direct thread. When I've specifically addressed an item, in the thread, or even in the same comment, to have that ignored is... frustrating.
> You could fairly easily find a drone with a 10 lbs payload. 40 pounds though isn't a realistic operational payload for those drones, which is why it says "max payload".
I didn't pull that number out of my ass. It was actually a conservative number, based on what I saw some models as capable of (but could not find good pricing info for). For example, the VulcaUAV Airlist model advertises a payload capacity of 25kg (~55lbs).[1]
> That's true, my point is that setting up a nationwide drone licensing and tracking system to track hobby drones isn't necessary when what you're really worried about is protecting high value targets from drones that are approaching the size of small helicopters.
Not just hobby drones, all drones. I expect there to to be a lot of commercial drone usage in the future. If they are all licensed, then the costs are limited to applying towards the small hobby usage, but overall U.S. drone usage, which I expect to be substantial compared to hobby use.
I've explained this multiple times.
> You haven't provided any evidence either, just a random assumption that such a system will cost $50k-$200k per site.
I've explained what type of hardware I expect the system to require, including multiple cameras per station. I've given a guesstimate as to the number of installations required. I've guessed at a per-station cost, and thus a total system cost.
Your counter of "it's off by a few orders of magnitude" is in my opinion not sufficiently explained by personnel and countermeasures, since a few order of magnitude is at a minimum 100x off (and then if I assume you used a meaning of "few" that includes 2 as the minimum). I do not believe training existing personnel that are already stationed around every location (police!) you would want these and providing additional devices and training constitutes hundreds of billions of dollars.
> I've provided at least much explanation and evidence as you have.
No, you haven't provided any idea of what you think it would actually cost to have personnel on site and have them trained and outfitted. If you had, I might have been able to point out that we already have officials that serve a very similar purpose that could be used, the police, and that I don't think training and outfitting would be nearly as costly. I think $100 billion would be an fairly extreme upper bound of this system, but that's not a few orders of magnitude, it's one, and surmountable over time with a tiered rollout IMO, if it's event that high. For example, the FAA alone out of all the DOT agencies has a $16 billion annual budget.[2] In 2018 the U.S. spent over $90 billion on transportation in the federal budget.[3]
In the end, I doubt we're going to convince each other of anything at this point, and I've lost the desire to continue. We should just agree to disagree. :/
Feel free to address any of the points I've made here though. I'll read the response and consider the points, I just don't think I'll respond.
>I didn't pull that number out of my ass. It was actually a conservative number, based on what I saw some models as capable of
I read your earlier source. And I'm telling you that a list of drone maximum payloads pulled from the marketing websites of mostly small businesses isn't representative of the actual normal operating payloads of drones at those price points.
Most drones can technically take off with a much higher weight than is actually practical to fly with.
I'm not saying you can't find a gas powered drone with a 100 pound payload. What I am saying is that these drones aren’t remotely in the same category as consumer drones.
>Not just hobby drones, all drones. I expect there to to be a lot of commercial drone usage in the future. If they are all licensed, then the costs are limited to applying towards the small hobby usage, but overall U.S. drone usage, which I expect to be substantial compared to hobby use.
Then what is the point in regulating tiny drones with little capability to cause damage. Ultralight aircraft aren’t regulated like commercial jets.
>Your counter of "it's off by a few orders of magnitude" is in my opinion not sufficiently explained by personnel and countermeasures, since a few order of magnitude is at a minimum 100x off
This depends on what you’re trying to do. If your goal is just to make sure that commercial drones are licensed, then sure you could build a relatively cheap system. If your goal is just:
Hey we keep seeing an unlicensed drone delivering pizzas. Alert the police to go out with direction finding equipment when they get the time, and see if they can find the operator, so that we can fine him.
Then sure a few billion is doable. Red light cameras don’t deter terrorist from using truck bombs though. If we removed the requirement to have license plates tomorrow, we wouldn’t see a huge upswing in truck bombings. Stealing a license plate isn’t the bottleneck in the terrorists plan.
So if your goal is to meaningfully deter determined attackers, you’ll need a system that’s much more robust. You’ll need enough extra trained personnel to rapidly respond to a relatively large percentage of every unauthorized drone alarm. You’ll need a very dense network of anti drone countermeasures (birds, guns whatever) in order to have a chance of responding in time. You’ll need vastly expanded radar coverage to detect drones flying too high to be detected by camera. And a camera network that is dense enough so that just flying behind building and trees isn’t an easy option. All of this will need to coordinated.
>In 2018 the U.S. spent over $90 billion on transportation in the federal budget.
That's in one year, and the DOT doesn’t operate anything close to the scale of the system we’re talking about.
> You’ll need vastly expanded radar coverage to detect drones flying too high to be detected by camera.
I’d actually argue it’s not possible with current radar tech. The radar signature of most consumer drones is so small that if you had radar tuned to that size, you’d be getting false positives all the time. Even in the bigger drones, there’s still a very small radar signature too. I’ve not tested it, but even my 6’ wide dual octocopter likely wouldn’t even be identified on radar.
> Your prices and payloads are way off. A few grand ($3k-$6k) gets you 20 lbs of payload easily (and more if you need it), from multiple manufacturers.[1] $10k seems to get you like 40 lbs or more.
Actually, my numbers aren’t off (and the companies aren’t lying in their marketing directly), it’s simply a misunderstanding over the units of scale.
For purposes of discussion, I’m going to focus on the payload numbers used in the link you provided, not manufacturer spec sheets as they vary a lot in terminology. I also own three of the drones listed in that link too, so what I’m saying isn’t hypothetical assumptions, but real world experience.
Let’s also use the DJI S1000 (but I’m happy to break it down for others too) for this discussion. The article claims a payload capacity of 7kg. This is actually a bit off flat out as the max takeoff weight is 11kg and the drone in question weighs 4.4kg. So our number is actually 6.6kg for payload. The biggest disconnect though is that the 4.4kg is just the airframe / motors / props / mcu, it doesn’t include the batteries (biggest impact) or some other needed electronics. Unlike with your average consumer drone, batteries are something you have wide control over in size, weight, and capacity. That said, unless you want to only fly a very short distance (think short walking range), you are still stuck with a heavy pack. On the low end, expect about 2kg, on the high end 3kg. That puts us under 4kg of payload now. If we want to see where it’s going (allowing us to be further away from this hypothetical bomb) or have more telemetry, we are going to be getting closer to the 3kg payload mark. Now let’s talk about price. These big drones are money pits. Sure, you see those $3-6k price tags advertised, but the part you don’t realize until you get into the field is that’s not a “flight ready” price. You are going to need batteries, radios, battery chargers, etc etc to actually be able to fly. For these big drones, you’ll spend >$500 just for one flight’s worth of batteries if done right. Shockingly, for a good battery charger, you’ll spend nearly a grand. For an appropriate radio, $500. You want remote video too? That’s another $1-2k, not including a gyro or camera. Heck, I spent pretty close to $1000 just on the carrying case for my S1000. Yes, a terrorist would likely cut a lot of corners, but it’s still going to be a lot more than the base sticker price you see advertised and my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones. Could you do it cheaper, yes, but my numbers are still in the right ballpark.
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I agree with your later point to another person, I don’t think this venue is encouraging a healthy discussion. You come off as someone intelligent, just not personally experienced in this field. As such, I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline. Shoot me an email if interested, info in my profile.
> it doesn’t include the batteries (biggest impact)
I suspected this (it wasn't spelled out, but became likely as I was researching). That said, I think it's somewhat mitigated by the fact long flights wouldn't really be necessary. Enough battery to fly the route and perform the end action, with some sufficient overhead (an additional 50-100% capacity?) would possibly be sufficient. A few minutes of flight time likely gets you quite far.
That said, it also works towards my point of specific areas that are tracked may be sufficient. If it's hard to fly a drone from miles away to avoid launch site detection and still have a delivery payload large enough to be useful, that's beneficial in itself.
> my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones.
Fair enough. I agree that actual deployment is probably either an additional $5k-$10 or some multiple of the base price, depending on how some items scale.
It leaves the question open as to whether the larger drones could still be useful though. Being able to fly a bomb up to a corner office in some building and detonate it, or quickly drop down to a motorcade someone has entered, might be a good return on investment even at $30 or more, depending on the target.
> just not personally experienced in this field
That's correct, and it's why I value your input on this, since you seem to have a lot of experience with the actual drone portion.
I don't mind being proven wrong, or shown evidence I'm wrong or off in calculations. I do mind just being told in wrong without new number or without specific objections provided as to my methodology, since I went through the effort to provide them in the first place. As such, I appreciate you providing some real numbers to specific models for this discussion.
> I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline.
I appreciate the offer (I really do!), but I'm worn out by this discussion at this point.
Additionally, I doubt we'll make much headway on the actual tracking system part of the discussion, there's too many variables, and too much variation in our different ideas of what those variables entail. As those variables stack and the differences multiply, the expected end values diverge too wildly.
Since I think neither of us have enough hard data to reduce enough of those variables to fairly static values without quite a bit of research on each (such as how many priority targets are there, how the military treats this topic, current state of the art video tracking techniques, the effect of weather on video tracking, etc, and truthfully that's a lot to invest in an internet discussion), it seems unlikely to be all that fruitful. :/
You want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a national system to counteract the threat of determined attackers that is ineffective against determined attackers?
Building an effective IED that can be transported by a drone is already much harder than bypassing any realistic national anti drone defense. Who is this system mean to stop?
>A good point. I think flying above 400 ft is already illegal though, so dealing with that might be somewhat simplified.
We are talking about determined attackers, so it being illegal isn't really relevant. Unless you want to cover the country in radar that can track anything the size of a drone that’s above 400’, so the camera system on has to handle below 400’. That’s possible, but now we’re adding hundreds of billions more to the system.
>just as bridge toll systems now often use license plates to track fees. It's not all that hard in this day and age.
Bridge toll systems are nothing like the proposed system. There is a huge difference between building a camera that takes pictures of license plate that sends a ticket in the mail weeks later, and a distributed system with hundreds of thousands of access points that each need to access a national database to make decisions in real time.
>We don't expect red-light cameras to pull us over, but we do expect they do something. It's not crazy to expect they also might have specific circumstances that flag to additional review for possible dispatch of an officer.
Red light cameras don’t do anything like this at all. The amount of false positives is far too high. There is a reason you get a ticket in the mail weeks later.
> If you see six objects and receive 5 signals, eliminate the ones you can, and send someone to investigate with directional equipment.
Drone flight times are usually under 20 min. Even in the future with battery technology, it’s unlikely someone is still going to be operating by the time you get someone out there with directional equipment. And now we have a to train a nationwide drone force capable of operating directional equipment.
>You make the sale of fake license plates illegal, you make sure the only valid plates are issued by the government, and you make it illegal to tamper with them.
None of these will dissuade a determined attacker. Just like license plates don’t stop terrorists. They aren’t designed to do that.
>Already covered a little above, but there's already solutions appearing to help with this. There's anti-drone ammunition[1] and trained animals[2] on the simple end, up to military grade anti-drone solutions.
So anytime a transponder malfunctions you want to shoot at a drone over a populated area? You want to want to add gun turrets to the cameras covering the country? Or do you want a nationwide system of trained attack birds stationed every mile or so?
You are massively underestimating the difficulty to accomplish what you are proposing.
The amount of explosives a drone can carry mean that for the foreseeable future they aren’t going to be particularly effective weapons for terrorists. Certainly not effective enough for us to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a system that can be easily bypassed by flying below the tree line.
Yes, I agree automobile regulations won't stop a determined terrorist from using a car to commit a crime.
I think you've done a great job illustrating why similar laws requiring licensing and registration will be completely ineffective at stopping terrorist from using drones, which is the context of this whole discussion.
You need zero of those things to own or drive a vehicle on private property. It has merit for flying in public parks and the like, but flying around some private property would be comparable to driving around your house/field/private track.
> Unfortunately, this means [thing] will need to be regulated like they are weapons, because they are used as weapons.
What a ridiculous statement. You can use this wording to justify the regulation of almost anything since almost anything can be used as a weapon if the user is determined enough.
This is bureaucratic nonsense. For 50 years, RC planes have been fine. This is a knee-jerk overreaction to take out their frustrations on convenient bystanders, eg hobbyists, when they can't defend against terrorists with flying bombs whom aren't going to register anything. Plus, how will it be enforced? Going to put FAA goons in park trees to catch those felonious dads shooting Estees model rockets and buzzing RC planes (aka "drones") around?
