Narrator said:Realistically, Phantoms fall into the middle ground. They're more than just a "little plastic flying toy" but less than a 3/4 tonne Cessna 152. Little plastic toys don't cause damage when they crash. Little plastic toys don't overfly prime Turkish airspace. Little plastic toys won't attract this kind of liability from third parties. So let's not play down what they are. They are aircraft, not groundcraft or watercraft, and that gives them greater potential to crash and cause harm.
You're doing a huge disservice to our hobby when you spread hypothetical fear about Phantoms like they're a rapidly escalating ominous threat to public safety. You act as if the FAA hasn't been monitoring the potential danger of model aircraft for DECADES. They'd be a lot more adamant about shutting us all down if anyone had already been seriously hurt or killed in the U.S. by a consumer drone, and the facts say that nobody has. The worst anyone has seen is a few stitches from a prop cut. That's a pretty **** good track record for a device you seem to think it going to rain down terror on the general populace.
The only difference in recent years compared to the past is that R/C flying was previously a small niche hobby practiced by persons willing to put in the hours to become proficient at operating the craft and understanding all safety concerns. Now the hobby is becoming very popular with the multi-rotors being sold in the tens of thousands every month and consumers aren't putting in the same dedication to fly their machines responsibly in all situations.
You need to shift your focus away from all the hypothetical damage these little 2-pound plastic toys can inflict on people and instead focus on how the FAA and the industry can insure consumers are meeting some minimum level of competence to fly any type of UAV they're legally able to buy. I predict some kind of state licensing will eventually be required, since UAVs will only get bigger, faster, more powerful and sharing the national airspace with manned aircraft in some capacity.
I can start spewing a lot of hypothetical fear about how much brain damage a baseball bat could inflict on people if not used properly, but the empirical data over the last 100 years shows that they are very safe with only very few isolated cases of being misused and causing serious injury. You need to start looking at UAVs the same way.