Pity the poor drone operator!
One drunken idiot crashes his drone into the South Lawn of the White House and suddenly all droners everywhere get a bad name. It’s so unfair!
Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a drone. (Well, other than the male bees who sat around the hive eating honey for zero work, and the fictional club invented by English writer P.G. Wodehouse for the British aristocratic equivalent.)
Back in the old days, if you wanted to fly a small mechanical object by remote control, you had to go to a hobby store, plunk down a chunk of change and buy one, and probably assemble it yourself.
Then you had to find a safe, authorized place where you could learn to fly your gizmo, mastering the etiquette of sharing the airspace with your fellow hobbyists. You could make yourself quickly unpopular if you didn’t master the niceties of not destroying other people’s equally expensive equipment; but at least the potential for damage was limited to people who had some clue as to what jeopardy they were in.
Then came the drones. At first, they were purely a matter for news reports and military jargon: “There was another drone strike in the Arabian peninsula today….”
Then some genius had a bright idea: Hey! If it’s good enough for killing terrorists in the Arab world, it’s good enough for all of us here at home! Worse, some other genius sold it to him.
Worst of all, the authorities who ought to have put a stop to such a thing, sat back instead and said, essentially, “What could happen?”
Before you cite me rules and regulations, don’t bother. It is clear that nobody was thinking things through.
From the moment drones became available to any fool with a credit card, it should have been obvious that the single biggest thing drones were going to do was cause trouble.
Oh, sure, people had grand ideas: drones could deliver your pizza! Drones could deliver your newspaper!
Drones could walk your dog on a rainy day! (Actually, that one is my idea, and I’ve got it all worked out, right down to the small incendiary devices that – once the drone has moved your dog a safe distance away – target and vaporize any need for doggy bags.
“Doggie Drones, Patent pending.”) Drones could deliver your packages from Amazon containing other drones!
They could do other things too, I suppose. They could spy on your neighbors. They could hover near the runway watching planes land.
Perhaps drones could even catch a home run ball for you at the game, hovering over the bleachers.
But the trouble with the world is that other people live in it, too. And far too many of them think they have all the same rights as you.
All those spy drones could be spying on you. The drone someone else wants to fly at the airport might be in the way of your flight when it’s trying to land, as recently almost happened at LaGuardia. Oops!
Or your drone might be knocked out of the sky, at that baseball game, by somebody else’s. There could be hundreds of the things, all dipping and swooping like a flock of seagulls, each trying to snatch that game-winning ball at the World Series.
How selfish of all those other ball-snatching drones, getting in the way of yours!
If drones ever are authorized for pizza delivery, who’s going to guarantee they don’t crash into someone who’s out for a jog? (“Thirty minutes and no decapitated heads, or it’s free”?)
We can’t all be as pro-active as that kangaroo on You-Tube that noticed a drone getting too close and punched it right out of the sky, What a drone was doing flying around near kangaroos is beyond me – but that only proves my point. Who would think that’s a good idea in the first place?
It’s no use asking people to exercise a little common sense, because anybody flying one of these things has already proven, in spades, that they have none.
What I don’t understand is why these problems weren’t obvious to all the relevant authorities from the very beginning.
Anybody who ever had a 10-year-old – or who ever was a 10-year-old – should know that if a thing is idiotic, and can be done, it will be done to excess.
That goes double for drones!
