This is the script of my national radio report yesterday on the topic
of "drone" panic in New Jersey, and the DJI drone ban. As always there
may have been minor wording variations from this script as I presented
the report live on air.
- - -
Indeed, drones and/or at least what are being called drones are
certainly in the news right now. And of course the situation in New
Jersey is of particular note. I've been following this from a
technical standpoint and while everyone can of course have their own
opinions, I tend to agree with the aviation and photography experts
who aren't finding anything significant to be concerned about.
Most people don't pay a lot of attention to air traffic at night most
of the time. And when you start concentrating on something where you
don't ordinarily do so, it's easy to start misinterpreting things and
for panic to spread. This has happened in the past not only with
flying objects but there's a case from 1954, where people were
convinced that their vehicle windshields were being pitted by a
dangerous force, and nuclear experts and equipment were brought to
check for h-bomb radiation and there actually was nothing wrong with
these windshields. It's just that most people hadn't noticed the
routine manufacturing defects in the glass before then.
Anyway, the videos and photos I've seen from New Jersey seem pretty
innocuous. Many are obviously blurry, shaky images of aircraft, you
can see the red and green wing lights and the white strobes all per
FAA regulations. There probably are some drones there too; there are
over a million hobby and commercial drones registered and with various
kinds of lights on them, and they can in many cases be legal to fly at
night.
A lot of the images appear to be blurry, out-of-focus captures of
ordinary fixed point light sources shot with shaky cameras -- some
have already been identified as stars. And there's actually a name for
those blurry roundish images, they're called bokeh - B-O-K-E-H. And
they're all over the place when you really start looking. Another
factor that complicates this is that our depth perception basically
only works well out to about 10 feet or so. Past that, especially at
night, it's very difficult to know if you're looking at something
small close by or something large much further away.
Anyway, we do know there apparently haven't been any collisions
related to all this. We also know that people have been doing things
like shining lasers at these objects, which not only is illegal if
they turn out to be planes for example, but also puts pilots and
passengers at risk, because those can blind pilots' vision. And calls
for quickly passing new drone laws based on this situation are a
really bad idea, and calls for shooting at this stuff also seem
notably misguided under the circumstances.
Clearly government agencies were slow to realize that people were
really concerned about the situation and so were slow explaining these
kinds of facts, and now the FAA has implemented some temporary drone
bans to make people feel better, but the expert consensus seems to be
that there never was any danger or even anything actually mysterious
going on. Again, others may have different opinions.
But I also wanted to mention that in the area of for sure real drones,
the irresponsible bipartisan efforts to ban DJI drones based on
supposed security concerns, for which evidence has never been
presented, did result in the passage of a ban of new DJI drones, and
perhaps, but less likely, banning use of current DJI drones and
cameras and more, but the implementation has been put off a year, to
give DJI the opportunity to prove to an appropriate government agency
that they are not a security risk.
What's so twisted about this -- Kafka would love it -- the law doesn't
specify which agency and doesn't require an agency to even do this, as
if proving a negative wasn't difficult enough. So these crucial DJI
drones that are so critical to public safety, agriculture, utilities,
search and rescue and so much more, with these organizations saying
that they can't find equivalent quality substitutes, are still at
great risk of an implemented ban that could literally put lives at
risk.
And that's probably the drone story that we really should be most
concerned about right now.
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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