The drone community is going to kill drone use

Darren Levine

Darren Levine

Veteran
I'm only a few flights in on my phantom 3, and loving every second of it. Being the diligent fellow that i am, i read over the manual several times, looked at all the tutorials, advice, suggestions, etc.. of the phantom/drone community to get my novice flying self ready to fly

In doing so, i joined the DJI forum.

Wow.

The FAA regulations cannot, i repeat CANNOT come soon enough. Granted there are many well minded flyers who fly responsibly and within the rules, but it's the wingnuts showing off their illegal, unsafe shots which will lead to harsher regulations or even the end of public drone use.

Excuses, entitlement, justifications(but it's pretty!), etc.. etc... Some of these folks seem decent enough, but tell them that they were irresponsible/illegal/ignorant and they just flip the 'i have the right to do what i want with my drone' switch.


Good lord i just needed to get that off my chest in here, the sane forum
 
Absolutely!

With the new cheaper than ever drones hitting the market this year will come even more madness.
especially with products like LILY.
Its all great engineering to be sure...but people and flying machines can be a dangerous combo.
 
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it boggles the mind. people justifying their actions within their own set of standards and not general safety and dare it be mentioned... legality!

had a nice flight today though, a group of kids went bonkers over it, i showed them the gimbal, some video, etc... parents for the most part seemed to like the entertainment, one did ask the loaded question "why does it have a camera". but a simple reply that im a professional videographer and i plan to eventually use it for professional reasons, suited her just fine.

meanwhile, here in NYC theres an investigation of someone flying a drone right next to an apartment building, and just this morning over in DC, some guy flew one over or darn close to the white house.

too many memes will come of this
 
I recently watched footage of an quadcopter flying over L.A. and New York, lovely footage as the drone flew over busy streets but I kept thinking if the quad has a malfunction and does fall out of the sky.

There will be an incident, in the US, someone ill be injured then the legal circus will kick off, eye watering compensation claims and mammoth legal fees. They may even try to sue the drone manufacturer.
 
To be technical the correct nomenclature is multirotor, the word drone is what scares people. They're called multirotors because a pilot controls the craft, drones fly completely autonomous. At least in the film industry they call them that. I'm sure rules will be in place someday but so far they've been kind to the film/entertainment industry. Let's hope it stays that way, happy flying
 
There's no such thing as a purely autonomous drone. That would be like saying Skynet is here. Even military drones need a remote operator and the only thing that 's autonmous is the gps waypoint system that can autopilot it to fly a pre-designed route that's inputted by a human. It would be a scary day when drones have the AI to be purely autonomous.
The term multicopter is what the hobbyist like but its too much of a mouthful for the media when the word drone can pretty much cover anything that is unmanned and remote controlled.
 
They're gonna have different laws for those vehicles that fly out of site, certain altitudes, payload etc. For the multicopter crowd they'll be completely different set of guidelines. Line of site, altitude and location will all have limits, probably even built into the flight controller eventually. But for now enjoy!
 
Darren Levine said:
I'm only a few flights in on my phantom 3, and loving every second of it. Being the diligent fellow that i am, i read over the manual several times, looked at all the tutorials, advice, suggestions, etc.. of the phantom/drone community to get my novice flying self ready to fly

In doing so, i joined the DJI forum.

Wow.

The FAA regulations cannot, i repeat CANNOT come soon enough. Granted there are many well minded flyers who fly responsibly and within the rules, but it's the wingnuts showing off their illegal, unsafe shots which will lead to harsher regulations or even the end of public drone use.

Excuses, entitlement, justifications(but it's pretty!), etc.. etc... Some of these folks seem decent enough, but tell them that they were irresponsible/illegal/ignorant and they just flip the 'i have the right to do what i want with my drone' switch.


Good lord i just needed to get that off my chest in here, the sane forum
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They already came here in Denmark... basically means you have to pay around 5000 dollars to have the operators manual written for you as well as pay for the approval of said manual.
Write it yourself? It's next to impossible due to all the technicallities surrounding aerial operation.

So a lot of people over here in Denmark got bittersweet and the few lucky / hardworking ones are skimming the milk.

That said, I'm all for hard rules around drones. Too many idiots toying around, crashing their cheap vehicles.
 
Imagine if everyone said the same things about riding a horse. Or driving a car. Or using a gun. Or chewing gum with fluoride in it. Or walking down the street. All of these things can kill you or kill someone else.

Life is full of risk. It's not guaranteed. But there is this thing called "personal responsibility" and "the civil society". To me the UVA (its not a drone) is no different than the gun. You simply can't and won't be able to categorize the majority of users based on the actions of a few.

Sure, give us a basic set of rules (there already are by the way for the US) then step out of the way. Fly responsibly just as you drive responsibly.

I crashed my phantom at least 8 times. At best I hurt a tree. I think the tree got over it.

Wanna see the percentages? Youtube, "Drone flight" and watch the millions of videos. Then youtube, "Drone kills bystander". There ya go.

Relax and fly. There are a billion birds flying over our heads. I've never been hit by one.
 
dustylense said:
Imagine if everyone said the same things about riding a horse. Or driving a car. Or using a gun. Or chewing gum with fluoride in it. Or walking down the street. All of these things can kill you or kill someone else.

Life is full of risk. It's not guaranteed. But there is this thing called "personal responsibility" and "the civil society". To me the UVA (its not a drone) is no different than the gun. You simply can't and won't be able to categorize the majority of users based on the actions of a few.

Sure, give us a basic set of rules (there already are by the way for the US) then step out of the way. Fly responsibly just as you drive responsibly.

I crashed my phantom at least 8 times. At best I hurt a tree. I think the tree got over it.

Wanna see the percentages? Youtube, "Drone flight" and watch the millions of videos. Then youtube, "Drone kills bystander". There ya go.

Relax and fly. There are a billion birds flying over our heads. I've never been hit by one.
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I agree. Given the number of Phantoms now flying (and crashing) I have yet to see a single video where any disaster occured because of any bad flying. But the press just love stories hinting at all kinds of death & destruction just waiting around the corner. I fly my Phantom carefully and responsibly and will carry on in the same manner. What does make me smile is that most of the rules about not flying within 150 metres of a congested area is more to do with privacy than safety.
 
First off... the whole "It's not a drone, it's a multirotor/UAS/UAV/RC toy/whatever" war is lost. Continuing to correct people when they say "drone" just makes you look like a pedant and makes them roll their eyes and ignore the rest of the stuff you say. It's the equivalent of correcting spelling on Facebook comment threads.

Second, I wholeheartedly agree with the OP. As someone who flew multirotors before they were the "cool thing" for video people to buy, the number of people buying them for the singular reason of having a "camera in the sky" is disturbing. The biggest problem is we're making this stuff too easy. When I bought my first multirotor, it was still a pretty fiddly hobby that required a lot of soldering and assembly to get right. Then you had to program it. It made you VERY aware of what's going on behind the scenes to get one of these things up in the air... and gives you a pretty serious awareness of how fragile flight with a rotary-wing aircraft really is.

Now I own a number of Phantoms and an S900 (big hex) that are incredibly easy to fly... but I still have a lot of respect for what even a Phantom can do if you drop it out of the sky onto someone. I also know how to bring it home if the GPS or compass goes haywire and it tries to fly home to China. I know that any multirotor is only one malfunction away from falling out of the sky.

Someone coming into the hobby right now with the idea that they just want a camera in the sky to follow them around is likely to lack a lot of that healthy respect (and fear) that makes people careful with these things. That's why you see the idiots buzzing airports and crash-landing on the White House lawn.

The barrier to entry has gotten too low. These things ARE dangerous to bystanders and they should probably be regulated tighter than they are. The biggest problem is we have a flood of idiots coming into this hobby who'll just move on to something else when they get it regulated out of existence... leaving those of us who enjoy it stuck with crappy, overbearing regulations on a hobby that we enjoyed and did safely for years before it became "a thing."

The number of people I've had ask me things like "which (first) drone should I get to fly a GH4" is scary. Until you have a LOT of hours on multirotors, you have no business flying anything that's big enough to safely lift a GH4. Start with a Blade Nano QX, then move to a Phantom, then when you have a shitload of Phantom time then MAYBE move on to a big hex or octo.

Like I said when my buddy showed me "Lilly"... a cheap, autonomous drone with no failsafes or collision avoidance system and no way to control it manually... what could possibly go wrong?
 
Over 700 people a year get killed using toasters, there's not been a single multicopter death, even if there were for argument sake, even 10 deaths, it's still less people killed, than get killed by marbles or trampolines in the US alone in a year.
 
We need to put regulations on those damn marbles. They are deadly killers in the hands of the inexperienced. Who knows, maybe with some regulations and a marble user license, we can generate some revenue to pay for some pensions.
 
P13 said:
Over 700 people a year get killed using toasters, there's not been a single multicopter death, even if there were for argument sake, even 10 deaths, it's still less people killed, than get killed by marbles or trampolines in the US alone in a year.
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Those are incredibly poor analogies.

How many marble, trampoline or toaster accidents cause injury or death to someone OTHER than the one operating the item in question?

Cars, for example, kill a lot of people. Many of them NOT the ones who cause the accident. We have regulations and licensing for cars.

Listen, I think it's incredibly silly that the media acts like drones are going to kill us all and spy on our daughters sunbathing in the back yard... but to act like these things aren't dangerous at all because they haven't killed anyone yet is pretty naive. I've seen some pretty serious injuries from multirotors (mostly the bigger ones).

Also, part of the reason there are so few multirotor accidents resulting in injury is there are still so few multirotors. That's going to change if everyone and their cousin can buy a $500 drone that (supposedly) flies itself but lacks any kind of collision avoidance or failsafes.

Hopefully most people who buy these things act responsibly and fly with a healthy respect for what they can do (and not do). The problem is, as the price goes down and the "ease of use" goes up, more of the idiots invariably show up on the scene to screw it up for everyone.
 
jbregar said:
Those are incredibly poor analogies.

How many marble, trampoline or toaster accidents cause injury or death to someone OTHER than the one operating the item in question?

Cars, for example, kill a lot of people. Many of them NOT the ones who cause the accident. We have regulations and licensing for cars.

Listen, I think it's incredibly silly that the media acts like drones are going to kill us all and spy on our daughters sunbathing in the back yard... but to act like these things aren't dangerous at all because they haven't killed anyone yet is pretty naive. I've seen some pretty serious injuries from multirotors (mostly the bigger ones).

Also, part of the reason there are so few multirotor accidents resulting in injury is there are still so few multirotors. That's going to change if everyone and their cousin can buy a $500 drone that (supposedly) flies itself but lacks any kind of collision avoidance or failsafes.

Hopefully most people who buy these things act responsibly and fly with a healthy respect for what they can do (and not do). The problem is, as the price goes down and the "ease of use" goes up, more of the idiots invariably show up on the scene to screw it up for everyone.
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So few multi rotors? LOL! Dude, wake up. There have been 3 versions of the Phantom alone. LOL. I just googled "DJI Phantom flight" and clicked on the video tab. 1,730,000 results. The Phantom 1 was released in January 2013. DJI sold $500,000,000 in 2014 alone. Thats just DJI and for 2014.

In fact, the analogies P13 used are right on spot. The only drone flight I can research up that in fact involved someone dying is a guy that killed himself flying a stunt helicopter (not even a multi rotor) into himself. Looks like he shouldn't have been playing with marbles.
http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2013/09/05/remote-control-helicopter-kills-man-in-brooklyn/

The only other story I can find of a multi rotor incident was the one with the guy covering the winter olympics. Guess what? It was one of those so called "big shots" flying a larger UAV. The guy like YOU. Who thinks his experience comes with safety.

Who is most likely to cause a crash or incident on a forklift? The guy that has a weeks experience on one? Or the guy that has years experience on one? Correct answer. The guy with years of experience. See, the guy will little experience on the forklift is going to approach things more carefully. Whereas the guy with years on one thinks "I'm a pro" I can go fast and get this done. I know, because I'm a licensed forklift operator.

I remember my first lift off of my UAV or "multi rotor". I was super careful. I didn't just zip up up and away. Even to this day with at least 500 hours flight time, I'm very careful when flying. I won't fly over large crowds. I won't fly were signals can get interrupted. I tell bystanders to step back when coming in for landing. I choose the flight paths before taking off. Every time.

You said it yourself man. "Ive seen some serious injuries from multi rotors (****mostly the bigger ones****)". Yeah, from those so-called experts! But yet in your post there is a common theme I noticed. You keep referring to the new comers as "idiots". When did you lose your idiot status? Or are you some how above that for some reason. What separates you from being in the idiot category?

See, by reading your post and taking the sentence "As someone who flew multirotors before they were the "cool thing" for video people to buy" you somehow think you are special. Entitled to more of an opinion and input than others. Calling everyone else who would like to enjoy what you enjoy "idiots". Hard to take somebody like that serious.

$500,000,000 in 2014 for DJI sales. Go out today to common areas and see if you can find a phantom flying. I haven't seen a phantom in the air in over a month. And there are LOTS of Phantom units out there. All in the hands of so called "idiots"....

I think you're just upset that the hobby isn't inclusive to just you anymore.
 
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