I can't, but here's the kicker...neither can you. In this business, you're not allowed to presume safety. Unless you've been trained to understand the ramifications on airspace, you really don't know. That's not how a safety first culture works. You don't make a change to a business critical production system without going through change control...why is it so absurd to consider registering your activity in airspace before you do it? The only reason I can think of is that it's inconvenient for you, which sucks but that's not good enough.
Stats is on his side. He CAN assume it is safe, since given how many are in the air, and how few problems we have, in his scenario we can assume it is safe unless shown otherwise.
I am for the regulation, but, I am also against people not using basic stats.
Riding a pair of rollerskates can be dangerous to the people around you, but, you wouldn't force people to licence to do that right?
You can hurt someone if they get a paper aircraft in the eye, but you don't licence them either.
It has to be on the basis of how likely you are to get problems, and how dangerous those problems are going to be. Saying "I can (or can't in this case) conceive of a situation where this could be a problem" isn't a high enough bar.
For larger drones, hell yeah you will need licencing, and flying near aircraft, then again, yes.
But this case? In this case, he has stats on his side.
As luck would have it, I have a degree in statistics and I'm a trained statistician! So let's talk about stats.
Let's assume he's 99.99%[0] safe to fly his drone in this situation. That means 1 in 10,000 drone flights are not. That's actually not a great safety margin when you consider how often this is done a day. There are 2.5 million drones in operation at the moment.
You're overemphasizing the individual case here and not the population at large. There's actually a formal name for this type of statistical fallacy, though I've forgotten it. There's TED talks about it and everything.
But you can probably get better than 99.99% assurance of safety here...and you do that by registering your intent with people who assess safety for a living.
[0] this is, of course, a ludicrous statistic. It's illustrating the absurdity of thinking that just because something is unlikely doesn't mean it won't happen. In this case, when it happens people can get seriously or fatally hurt.
I'm curious where you are getting your 99.99% figure, and why you thought that is a would be a safe assumption to make your point out of. Do "trained statisticians" frequently assume with data?
If you can provide evidence that drones are 99.99% safe in the aforementioned "this situation", I will be happy to recant my retort. Otherwise, please avoid strawman arguments.
As for @myrryrs argument. I believe the sentiment is along the lines of "don't let perfect be the enemy of good" - which I am in favor of. Blanket rules that disallow amateur drone usage in relatively safe situations are overkill. General safety rules that urge drone users to stay away from airports - probably a good idea. If my intent is to fly my drone around in the woods while I go mountain biking, why should I be required to tell anyone?
Let us add regulation where regulation is needed - not throw it around like a panacea whenever something unpleasant happens.
And yet, you eat food prepared by others, take buses, play sports, swim, step foot on a boat, cross streets.
(I am only guessing you do these things, most people do)
ALL of these are where people die if mistakes happen.
It just comes down to risks.
Again, I actually think that a licencing situation for larger drones would be a good idea, I think bans near airports is good. I just hate some of the arguments people use to get there.
I'm curious if you've flown a modern consumer drone recently? Something like a Phantom or a Mavic.
I have and I would trust a reasonably intelligent person who is into the hobby to handle them with care and educate themselves on the proper regulation and procedures (and other details like caring for LiPO batteries). I don't know if I'd trust the average person with the hobby.
I'm not claiming that we need extremely strict regulation, but I can see why people would want to over-index on more regulation.
I've seen people here compare drones to boats, cars, etc. I feel like that's a bit of a false equivalency.
Mistakes happen all the time with drones yet no one has died. RC helicopters? They have definitely killed people, but no one is concerned about those...
The FAA is interested because the MSM news published so many salacious articles about how big bad and scary drones were and those stories got clicks.
Drones were/are new and budding technology and they can be somewhat autonomous which scares the public. People’s lack of understanding about the programming and the sensors used coupled with the addition of a camera made this yet another very a un-newsworthy clickbait scandal.
I used to build program and fly high powered drones but the media made the political environment nearly intolerable. Between the public’s reaction and the politician’s growing interest, I stopped building and flying.
As a sidenote, when I was a kid I flew “large” 5’ rockets. They used slow burn explosives to produce fire. Now there is the potential for some real damage. No one cared
the FAA has been intensely interested and collaborative with the drone industry for YEARS. since 2015 at least when I saw people from the FAA at commercial drone conferences talking about the importance of how drones would be operated safely. They first had commercial exemptions in section 333 and then formally passed Part 107 in order to address the needs of commercial operators in 2016. To say that the FAA is "only interested because of the mainstream media" is pretty inaccurate. they've been interested for YEARS.
You tell me this like it’s news. I had individual FAA drone permits in 2016. I was following developments closely it was a little before then that the public started to freak out with all the news coverage of mostly a few phantom owners doing stupid things. Yes this was a MSM created event starting back in 2014 and FAAs concern grew from that. There were loud public demands for the FAA to regulate drones based on fears one would collide with a plane. Those fears were created and nurtured by the MSM
Lets look at the 825,000 drones sold in one year, and estimate it from the number of problems that they had with those.
We don't just pick a number when we have a perfectly good sample to work with.
I AM looking at the population at large.
If there are There are 2.5 million drones in operation at the moment, which I am happy to agree to, and we are not seeing many problems, how much of a sample do you need?
99.99% is a wild assumption merely to illustrate a fallacy. If you want better probabilities, I have none, since so much is dependent on external factors. Applying a blanket probability to "how safe is it to fly a drone" is meaningless.
But almost 2000 drone incidents were reported in 2017 alone. For airplanes in that same time, unless I'm wildly misreading the FAA website, is...7. That's isn't quite apples to apples since the criteria for inclusion in each as an incident is different, but this is HN and not an FAA study. Point still being that even considering how unlikely something seems you need to compare it to the base rate.
There is no regulation requiring private pilots obtain insurance. Such a requirement comes from the bank whose loan made it possible to acquire said plane; and most any airport with hangars will require evidence of it. I'm not sure what buying insurance does. It certainly provides no standardization of rules or training.
Have you read any FARs? There are FARs for flying kites and ultralights. What about any of that do you think is so complicated? Feel free to use a regulation in FAR 91 as an example for something onerous that insurance can obviate. One of my favorite regulations in these UAV conversations is:
§ 91.119 Minimum safe altitudes: General.
Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes:
(a)Anywhere. An altitude allowing, if a power unit fails, an emergency landing without undue hazard to persons or property on the surface.
There is no reason at all why a drone should ever hurt someone, other than sheer incompetency and lack of imagination. Now where are you going to get that imagination? And how are you going to obtain competency? Insurance doesn't get you either of those things.
Are you assuming that the insurance industry will sufficiently regulate safety to achieve a safe overall outcome? (Note that this is in significant parts true today in the manned, piston-engine aircraft world.)
Or just suggesting insurance so that the injured get paid?
I’m suggesting it’s a very lightweight regulation. We are in this weird time, where actual safety is hard to ascertain.
The safest solution is to simply ban drones. But, there might be some utility there. Building up a history of risk would be super helpful. Some things are obvious. A six ounce toy is less dangerous than a 12 rotor monster. But that toy can still cause problems when it’s floating over the freeway.
I think insurance would create a data collection environment that could drive more realistic, useful regulations.
FWIW, movie studios generally require 5 million liability for drone shots. It’s pretty cheap to purchase, but those pilots are professional. Expanding to amateurs is complicated. Insurance gives some visibility into that complexity.
And you are using the internet statistics fallacy in an argument (did you know that 42.42% of statistics are made up on the spot?).
Considering the # of drones in operation at the moment, we can assume a MUCH lower risk to manned aviation assets than .01%. I'm sure that regulations aren't being driven by statistics (unfortunately, with things that get lots of attention, they rarely are).
As a pilot of both full-sized aircraft and quadcopters, I think I can explain how 100 feet could potentially be a danger. Directly underneath the approach path of a runway that is less than a few hundred feet away might be bad.
Otherwise, there isn't a material impact. Noone should be flying their airplane within 100 feet of his house (by regulation).
I don't mean to call you out specifically, but this is really the problem with our regulatory environment. Lots of people involved with regulation actually have remarkably little understanding of the cost and benefits associated with the regulations that they advocate. I wish that I could go into more detail, but I've seen some truly crazy things being decided by people who literally had no idea of the consequences of their actions or how people in their field actually behaved.
