Back on January 26 (I think) a small recreational drone crashed on the White House grounds. It was an accident — an employee of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency had been drinking at a nearby apartment and was “demonstrating” the drone to friend(s).
According to the President, this crash on the White House grounds shows that the U.S. must take steps to ensure commercial and consumer drones are used safely. Obama indicated that the drone that crashed was one much like those that could be bought at Radio Shack, that sell for $50 to $500. So, it’s a toy.
Congress wants rules in place to regulate these drones. If past experience is any indication, even after such rules are proposed, it’ll probably take years before the regulations become final — and worse yet, knowing our government, we’ll probably wind up with a Federal Drone Assessment Agency that will probably fall under Homeland Security or one of the Intelligence Agencies that will argue over interpretation and enforcement of the rules/regulations. I think I said this before — some of the things to be regulated are toys.
Rules already exist for Radio Controlled (RC) model aircraft and that essentially is what these devices are. Leave it to Congress to come up with an entirely new set of rules. I agree that the current rules might need to be modified to address the use of cameras and microphones, but a whole new set? If that happens, the odds are they’ll be messed up and we’ll spend millions rewriting, correcting, revising and updating to make them useable. Of course if Congress does make new rules to protect us, criminals and terrorists will be out of luck not being able to use these things.
When I was younger, junior high into high school, one of my hobbies was building model airplanes. I knew enough about electronics to build a radio system to control the model. It didn’t do much, but I could control the altitude and direction and bring it back to land without wires. Who would have thought that I had stumbled on one of the hottest technical and controversial areas today — drones. One definition of a drone is any unmanned aircraft or ship that is guided remotely. So I was building drones — who knew?
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