“Before any more laws are created to regulate drones, we need to step back and see if we really need them. Furthermore, they are just mere sightings which are not scrubbed for lawful flights,” Rupprecht points out. “The FAA has approved thousands and thousands of flights near airports. How many of the sightings are of lawful flights?”
“Moreover, when we compare the sightings data to the number of actual animal strikes that have happened against manned aircraft, it seems disproportionate to place so much emphasis on mitigating unmanned aircraft rather than mitigating for bird strikes and ground animal strikes. During the period of drone sightings I studied, we had 24 people injured from medium/large birds and animals hitting manned aircraft while 0 people were hurt due to a drone mid-air collision,” Rupprecht says. “I’m not discounting the bad drones, just bringing them into proportion with the rest of the risks manned aircraft face.”
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
TWITTER:@spaldingbarker
Subscribe to DroneLife here.
[…] “Drone Sightings” about airports, infrastructure, or secured regions of any style are usually documented. “While these sightings typically make headlines, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission believes there are no danger-sizeable vulnerabilities at nuclear electrical power plants that could be exploited by adversarial use of at the moment obtainable industrial drones,” suggests the memo. […]