Comment Re:kinda illegal already, by a rule referring to a (Score 2) 165
To expand on the other post I just made, it's quite interesting the dangers that the R/C hobby has encountered lately.
A few decades ago, young people stopped getting into the hobby largely due to video games and so the average modeller was getting older and older.
R/C sites have always been at risk from encroachment by new neighbors who don't like the noise. This effect has nearly decimated general avaition airports over the last many decades and it continues.
But then electric planes came, greatly improving the noise situation. Still, fields are always being lost and created.
Then the park flier came
But now it's the rise of the FPV plane (well, they're still relatively rare) and especially the semi-autonomous (sometimes, usually not) quadcopters with cameras. These things are bringing all sorts of people to the hobby, interested in flying and photography, but people are all riled up by the idea of these being used to take pictures of them, and so the models are being banned all over the place, laws enacted, etc.
And people fly them in places where models generally weren't normally flown in the past (to take pictures) and then something happens and it's all over the news and lawmakers have knee jerk reactions and ban things.
It's a good time for the hobby -- lots of new things to do, new technologies to play with -- but it's a bad time for the hobby, with the hammer coming down and lots of new regulations appearing. The AMA is fighting the good fight, but I think they're going to ultimately lose, and the FAA and local governments will continue to greatly restrict the hobby -- it'll be done in the name of safety, but the reality is that it'll mostly be about preventing photography.
On the bright side, they will probably open some ways for commercial use of unmanned aircraft with lots of red tape associated with that -- so that's good that they allow that, as it wasn't allowed at all before, but the red tape is likely to be as heavy or even heavier than that associated with full scale manned aircraft.