A Life Aloft
Well-Known Member
I don't think that YOU have a clue here. No one here has mentioned size either, yet you assume that everyone is thinking is very small UAVs which is not the case at all, as far as I am concerned. No one here had even mentioned size. You are demanding space and demanding it now. You believe that all survey flying and other types of flying will all be accomplished with drones. What year/time frame do you see this happening exactly?
LEOs are Law Enforcement. You have medical, law enforcement, search and rescue, firefighting, Fish and Game, Forestry Department and more different entities, aircraft and choppers all flying out of the normal "areas" of airspace. That is they may be flying very low to the ground, flying at night or in the daytime, flying the quickest route possible, flying different patterns depending on what their current operation is at the time, etc. So your idea of classes of airspace for drones goes to crap entirely in these scenarios since these aircraft will not be flying in normal flight paths to begin with.
How do you explain the drone that nearly hit the medevac chopper last month (post 213) up by Fresno and came within twenty feet of it, and the chopper had to maneuver to avoid it. That drone was 4 to 5 feet wide according to the pilot of the chopper. Where was your "see and avoid" scenario there? How well were all the drone's marvelous cameras working in that situation? You keep harping on commercial flights yet you are clueless as to all the flights that go on daily by the entities which I listed that are not commercial flights.
You think that see and avoid is going to work with drones sharing the same airspace with the choppers and planes flown by the entities that I am talking about? Good luck with that. Cameras or any high-tech sensors on a drone cannot fully replace a pilot’s eyes and ears and nose in the cockpit, no matter what your personal opinion might be. Are hobby remotely controlled planes or drones equipped with radar or anti-collision systems? Not so much.
And what sort of real training do hobby drone flyers get no matter how large their drones are? Oh yeah..........that would be none.
Are you working on that air space proposal in L.A. County that I asked you about, btw?
Would you care to respond to post 226 and your ridiculous idea of a flyer btw?
Let's talk about the "failsafe that you mentioned, while we are at it. Isn't that technology used to land the drone when your GPS signal goes to crap and has nothing whatsoever to do with avoiding another aircraft? "A failsafe is a pre-programmed behavior designed to prevent a crash in the event of an unsafe situation. All ArduCopter for example vehicles include a GPS failsafe activated by default. 3DR RTF copters are also preset with radio control (RC) and low battery failsafe behaviors. If the drone looses GPS signal in a flight mode that requires GPS (loiter, auto, return-to-launch, guided), it will land automatically, indicated by a blinking blue and yellow status LED and a high-high-high-low tone". So what does this matter in avoiding a plane or chopper exactly? Because that is the issue here, not that fact that your damn drone can find it's way back to you.
And when you say "That's safer than most pilots", this again reeks of your envy of actual pilots much like your "big boys with their big toys think that all the sky belongs to them", ridiculous comment.
And RTH technology? Return To Home, as the name implies, the feature allows for your drone to automatically return to the point from which it took off in emergency situations like loss of signal from the controller or battery level dropping too low. How does that help you avoid aircraft? I mean you mentioned these two features and said they were safer than human pilots. WTH??? Seriously? What sort of analogy is that?
Interesting that you mentioned the Military and their drones. You do realize that 47 military drones crashed in the United States between 2001 and 2013 in what the military categorized as Class A accidents, the most severe category. And that more than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001. Military drones have slammed into homes, farms, runways, highways, waterways and, in one case, an Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane in midair. One barely missed an elementary school here when it crashed in the school yard. Several military drones have simply disappeared while at cruising altitudes, never to be seen again. Dozens of drones have been destroyed in the United States during test and training flights that have gone awry. In Upstate New York, the Air Force still cannot find a Reaper that has been missing since 2014, when it plunged into Lake Ontario. In June 2012, a Navy RQ-4 surveillance drone with a wingspan as wide as a Boeing 757’s nose-dived into Maryland’s Eastern Shore, igniting a wildfire.
Then you said (which really makes no sense, not surprisingly enough, however)
That statement alone, tells me you have never been a pilot flying anything except for RC hobby planes and hobby drones.
People fly LSA (and not just LSA) for the actual joy of flying. You have absolutely no experience or feel of flight when you are standing on the damn ground. You might as well be at home playing some SIM game on your computer. The ethereal feeling of flight comes from actual flying. It's not only the physical aspect, it's the spiritual aspect. It is the freedom from gravity, it is the leaving of the earth and it's boundaries. It is the views.......the views of the multitudes of different clouds, passing through those clouds, seeing the incoming storms, the sunrises and sunsets, the mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, the dark inky sky lit up with millions of stars........ all seen from aloft that only a small percent of the entire population of the world will ever get to see and experience on their own terms, while they themselves are at the helm. It is liberty from the ordinary. It's where your soul yearns to go. Flying is a passion. It is extraordinarily unique amongst all of the pleasures that a human being can possibly partake of. It is an activity which is both pure and beautiful. Had you ever been a pilot, you would understand this. I feel sorry for you that you can't imagine the enormous value of actual flight. If you think that looking through some camera can even begin to compare, then you are even more clueless than I had originally thought.
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