Re:regulation (Score 1)

There may be a practical safeguard. ADS-B is now in pretty much every commercial plane, or should be soon. In layman's terms it's GPS on the plane feeding a broadcast between planes and also to/from ATC. Drones of any significant size are pretty much all GPS enabled these days. It might be easy to add at least a cheap version of ADS-B (input). They could be designed to land when there's anything approaching. In addition they should be able to transmit at least far enough to a jet within striking distance, warn them away. That might be impossible for small drones (you cannot add lots of toys to the busy commercial ADS-B frequency space) but if it is sizeable this could be considered. As for comments about waiting until something more significant happens, well that is what caused a commercial crash that precipitated the requirement for mode C transponders in commercial air space (mode C: think crude version of ADS-B based on airport radar not GPS). It would have been better to mandate it first. I'd be happy if the FAA paid for a statistical analysis to see what the odds are, and what the costs might be to reduce them. Maybe they already are.