Can we start a petition to bring back frequent contributions from any Bennett Haseltons? For one day in the year it would be preferable to this drivel...

Stop already. In the UK the joke doesn't count if it's after mid-day anyway.

Apologies if I misread the sarcasm content...

;-) od

No. It may be #2 as a result of the fact that PROFIT is #1. Safety is the job of the FAA, and the fact that they do not yet feel comfortable to publish a code of regulations for such things means that they do not yet think there is a safe way for it to be done.

Two issues:

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,

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...

So build them to FAR23.

yes, exactly

Just to elaborate. By the current rules, if you choose to fly, you should be able to fly for 1000 lifetimes to have a chance of dying due to a problem with the design of the aircraft. Johnny in his sandpit didn't choose to fly and the FAA has to protect him.

I can tell you the fundamental problem.

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.

Troll

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,

Well, you are arguing my point. Build the drones to FAA civil aerospace standards and maintain them to keep them in flying condition, then get people to fly them who have gone through the same checks and training as FAA certified pilots and you have a safe system. Guess what: costs more than a truck with a driver.

Good point. Military standards are appropriate for military use, whereas civil standards are appropriate for a very litigious civil environment. I should have been clearer: If we are going to have drones routinely flying at 50mph 200 ft above heavily populated areas then they need to have at least the kind of reliability you get from a military drone (you don't throw away $4M Predators if you don't have to) if they want to avoid the lawsuits.

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.

55lbs at 50mph will kill a child or pet quite comfortably, and seriously injure an adult. There are places for autonomous drones: battlefields and the outback, delivering either information or medecine in places you couldn't otherwise get to.

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

eh?

I doubt it worked flawlessly, but certainly to get back to Earth in a servicable state has to be a major part of its success criteria. It is an amazing machine, just sad that we can't get a 'Popular Mechanics' cutaway to drool over.

The days of human pilots are certainly numbered.