so long as the cost of safety implementation = actuaried litigation payouts.
Apologies if I misread the sarcasm content...
;-) od
You have it exactly right; 'pilots' will have to be trained to pilot the vehicle for which they are to be licenced. Obviously this is a bit nonsensical; it will be computers that do the piloting, but the FAA is set up to regulate human control of aircraft and they have to develop a whole new set of rules to regulate machines, which is an even tougher call.
Secondly,
Granted with FPV this wouldn't be an issue
welcome to civil aerospace regulations. What's the failure rate of that there FPV? Oh, well, that doesn't cut it by five orders of magnitude...
All of aerospace safety is based on the probability of various outcomes and the severity of those outcomes. For example, a 'catastrophic' event is one in which all, or most occupants of the aircraft die and the hull is lost. This has to have a probablity of occurence per aircraft of one in one billion flight hours, this means it's pretty much never going to happen and why all the crashes on TV are terrorists/pilot error/bad luck but almost never failure of the machine itself. There is a sliding scale of decreasing severity and correspondingly higher probability of occurence. There is an insaneamount of work goes into making aircraft safe.
So here's the problem: Drones don't carry people. So the old ways of calculating what's acceptable don't work anymore, yet the FAA will be eviscerated if they set up a code that suddenly causes four or five deaths per year from a sky filled with, maybe a few thousand drones one year, then a million the next causes hundreds of deaths. The numbers will still show that air transport is safer than staying in bed, but the press will not see it that way.
But I'll bite. Becaiuse the kid playing in his backyard shouldn't have to expect a car driving through his sandpit, nor a 50lb machine with face-cutting rotary knives (no longer) holding it aloft dropping into it from the sky,
The FAA are actually very good at setting commercial aerospace standards (Disclaimer: I work in civil aerospace certification) which is why most of the World copies the FARs or at least standardises with them. The FAA don't yet allow drone flights like this and that pretty much means it isn't yet acceptable safe.
If this is a serious proposal it is just to scrape a few more tenths of a percent out of the delivery costs, or it's just a publicity stunt. Any drone flying in urban areas should be built and controled to military standards in order to be safe and THAT does not make it a cheap option
The days of human pilots are certainly numbered.
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.