In the wake of the multiplication of near-miss incidents which could potentially kill people in airline plane collisions with drones caused by hobbyists, amateurs and wheeler-dealers, the governments have no choice to apply strict operational restrictions. We all understand that companies accept to hire certified and checked pilots when they fly helicopters or everyone knows that they have to hire a certified captain when the ships reach a certain size, they should accept to hire trained experts to fly/program UAVs for the sake of population safety and material integrity.
By the present time there is a lot of speculative information and sounds like governments are now taking the subject into a serious discussion. Drones are becoming accessible and the relation cost-availability is decreasing so that anyone can have one regardless of flight regulatory criteria. However, most of countries are still dealing with the issue from the start. For example, US FAA agency started conversations around the subject only 5 years ago. Countries like Australia may be considered as exception. Aussie airspace agency has established serious regulations for the use of drones, as for hobbyists and for commercial use as well. In Australia there have defined segregated airspace into where drones may be evaluated. You can keep updated from the link http://www.auvsi.org/ .
Hi Luc,
Drones and UAV's safe? Not really! Especially when they are equipped with rockets and stuff like that. But when used for remote sensing,... OK, ...though. We are pretty far from unlimited use of drones or UAV's in European civilian airspace for civilian remote sensing applications. These observation and intelligence platforms normally should have a beacon as a payload, so that they can be detected and monitored by civilian air traffic controllers when UAV's would happen to be deployed in civilian air space for real-time traffic monitoring for example.
The problem is that these beacons have to be pretty lightweight to avoid an overweight in payload. An UAV with a beacon but no load capacity left for a camera as principal payload makes no sense. That's one of the reasons why Australia and many other nations - playing around with drones and UAV's - defined seperate airspace where an air traffic control beacon is not needed (no-fly zones for civilian airplanes). So still some bottlenecks to be passed before an UAV can be safely take of from a civilian airport on the way to its scientific mission,... unnoticed !!!.
For the military those limitations do not matter,... maybe evident ? Snipers don't carry a beacon for other parties in battle to know their position either ;-)
Cheers,
Frank
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