He's saying that the definition of "aircraft for hire" is too broad, and if that broad of a definition were ever applied outside of aviation many things that we just do in normal life would become illegal. That's not a straw man. It's an analogy.
Analogy implies a mapping of one topic onto another, that's sort of what he's doing, but it's a bad mapping, and he's only doing it so that he can shoot down the argument. First off, lending money to your friends
is legal. There's nothing illegal about lending money to your friends without a lenders license unless everyone in America is your friend and you charge all of them interest. As for driving your friends around, I'm not even sure that's illegal in all states because taxi/cab/driving laws very wildly between cities and states. And even
if it could be said that driving your friends around on Saturday night is illegal, it's not a very good analogy or appropriate analogy because it's an apples and oranges comparison. For one, almost every adult is a licensed driver, driving is ubiquitous and we use it to travel pretty much exclusively so everyone knows the "rules of the road" (more or less) and roads don't typically involve being above peoples' houses and so on. The same cannot be said for aviation. Two, driving around your drunk friends helps prevent drunk driving, making it a net social good. Driving around a quad-copter without any sort of training or experience could cause some serious problems.
These reasons make it a fundamentally bad comparison with aviation - we have videos
right now of people driving their FPV airplanes around through the clouds, this is evidence right there that people have no idea what the rules are. What the guy is say is in effect: "Because no one gets their taxi license before being the DD we shouldn't require people to have a commercial to operate a quad-copter." That whole argument is a straw man, it's fundamentally easier to knock down the idea of regulating drones when you can argue that no one gets a taxi license to carry their buddies around, that's a straw man argument.
Is it flying in the air? Is it being done for money. Ok, commercial pilots need to be in command of it - I don't care if they're physically operating the damn thing, or if they're simply responsible for it while it does something automated - but there
must be some structure to prevent these things from flying around wildly. Now personally, I would support a lower bar to entry for UAS operations than a full "fixed wing commercial pilot's license," - as in, after your private and instrument rating (should you intend to operate any of these things in the clouds) you can get a UAS Category rating added on with minimal training and checking - but you
need to have
some regulatory structure. Eventually, after things have hashed out a bit better, and where UAS sit in the economy is better known, then I would even support a way to obtain UAS Private that would require some groundschool and some training with the vehicle you want to operate but no actual flight time in manned airplanes for the hobbyist crowd - but for now, I think a more prudent course of action would be to revise and reissue the AC that applies to hobbyists It's better to have a little structure right now, than have the FAA put the hammer down on them after someone gets killed and it gets blasted all over CNN for 3 days.
Transport Canada just released an AC specifying the rules for operating a commercial UAV in
Class G only. Not only that but they specify that even people operating the things away from every
one and every
thing else in Class G airspace below 300' need training, need to notify TC in
writing, need to conduct a site survey, and so on. Canada has a "metric tonne" of class G airspace, and a substantial amount of operations where survey in this manner would be useful, so I imagine this regulation may work for them, but I don't see that working as readily for us down here.
