"A man who was found guilty of reckless endangerment after his drone injured two people during Seattle’s 2015 Pride Parade, including a woman knocked unconscious, was sentenced Friday to 30 days in jail."
He knocked a woman unconscious!! 30 days in jail seems a little bit off to me but he could've injured someone badly...
As we're starting to learn from pro sports, concussions are serious injuries that can have lifelong effects on cognitive function. He did injure someone badly.
To get hit in the head hard enough to lose consciousness is not a minor incident.
I think you mean that two people's lives have seen significant setback here. Brain injuries in general and concussions specifically are not minor injuries: their effects can last from months to lifetimes, impacting work and private lives.
I had a friend who "hit his head" and went unconscious; he died. We were warned that even if he lived, he would likely be a different person. If all the woman suffers is a few months of impaired cognitive functionality, she will be lucky.
What do you think you're adding to the conversation by saying "Anything can be dangerous in the hands of an imbecile?"
40,000 people died in automobile accidents last year. We had several million other accidents with cars. You don't need to be an imbecile to have an accident. Objects controlled by humans moving at a high rate of speed turn out to be dangerous, and great care is required.
How much karma do I have to waste explaining such a simple idea to people? I'm done.
What am I adding to the conversation? I thought your question was fucking stupid and typical of people that want to put safety rails on everything, child proof everything, and legislate everything to the point you cant do anything fun. Im not saying you're that person, but I am saying that your question sure makes it sound like you are. I felt my response was a common sense response to your silly, perhaps hyperbolic, question and needed to be said. What exactly did your question add to the conversation? Nothing.
[Edit]
Also, in response to your car analogy, how many of those accidents were caused by people operating a motor vehicle while on a phone, texting, being intoxicated, being on drugs prescribed or illegal, being too exhausted to drive, driving too fast in hazardous conditions such as rain, snow, and ice, driving recklessly or at a high rate of speed through construction zones, etc.? Are you telling me these people were able to get a license without being aware of the dangers? Hell, there are even laws to prevent most of the stuff I listed yet people do them anyhow. People are reckless, only are concerned with themselves, and many can't seem make the connection that actions have consequences, or they just don't care. That makes them what? Say it with me... Imbeciles!
[Edit 2]
> How much karma do I have to waste explaining such a simple idea to people? I'm done.
I especially enjoyed your last line. Thank you for that :-)
There's a general lack of awareness of how dangerous an impact from a falling drone can be, especially with drones so easily obtained (and so easily disabled).
These are 4-5lb objects moving at terminal velocity (or faster) hitting people. That's not just dangerous, and I would hesitate to call your average drone owner an "imbecile".
How is someone not an imbecile if they are old enough to own and operate a device that weighs 4 or 5 lbs, moves at a high rate of speed, and has sharp blades that spin at a high rate of speed as well and doesn't make the connection that they are dangerous? If your "average" drone owner doesn't understand that, your average drone owner is an idiot. Since you asked!
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, spends a lot of time thinking about all of the possible failure modes until they're made aware of them (either by actively watching them fail or being told how they can fail). I say this from the point of view of a programmer, multirotor pilot, general aviation pilot, and uncle.
For example, what failure modes should you prepare for when flying a multirotor? A few I've personally run into:
- Battery exhaustion (slow descent, loss of power, potential for battery fire)
- Gyro failure (chaotic and unpredictable behavior; uncontrollable)
- Battery Fire (unpredictable loss of power, flying incendiary bomb)
- Running outside of receiver range (behavior depends on the multirotor's autopilot, and the range differs based on your environment; also caused by jamming equipment)
- Flying in a different mode than you're expecting (usually an immediate and violent crash after getting a bit of altitude)
- Prop/motor failure (immediate and complete loss of control, unpredictable flight path to inevitable crash)
- Loss of POV stream (probably a crash, depends on the autopilot and pilot's reflexes at hitting the "oh, shit" button or reorientating to external visual mode)
- Bird/drone strike: Any and all of the above
Each of these scenarios requires a different response and preparation; you may realize your drone is dangerous, but did you realize it's also an incendiary device in potentia?
I dont disagree with you. What I am saying is some people can look at a device, in the simplest of ways, and think to themselves... hmmm, perhaps I shouldnt fly this directly over people, or in the path of aircraft, etc. Perhaps I should be careful, take precautions, maybe have some training. And then there are others, that don't. Theyre fucking idiots. They could be told not do shit. They could be trained to properly operate the equipment. There could be laws against certain behavior, and quess what... theyll still act like idiots, b/c that is exactly what they are. And that is point... put anything into the hands of an idiot and it becomes dangerous, a spoon, a rubber band, a piece of toilet paper, a gun, a car, anything.
I can't even work out if you think it's too high or too low.
You say that the woman was knocked unconscious with lots of exclamation marks as if you think that's really serious, but then you say he could have injured her badly, as if you think being knocked unconscious isn't a bad injury.
>but then you say he could have injured her badly, as if you think being knocked unconscious isn't a bad injury.
I blame TV and Movies for this, we see people get knocked unconscious all the time and it's always treated as this minor thing, like we just have an off button that takes a good hard knock. In real life of course, any blow that knocks you unconscious has a very real risk of killing you.
This case seems similar to me to, for example, a flower pot falling off a balcony [1]. Does anyone know what the sentence would be for something like that?
There's a difference between accidents and recklessness (similar situations arise in driving). This was charged as reckless. The flower pot is different in that regard.
The problem here is IMO the search for someone responsible to punish at any cost.
I'm not saying the guy shouldn't be punished, but like the flower pot example... what if I put a table tennis ball in a similar place and it falls hitting someones nose? The ball is totally innocuous but the surprise makes the poor chap fall and get a fatal injury on the head. Would a court send me to jail for murder?
Probably not, because you could not reasonably expect the table tennis ball to lead to injury. But if we change it to a basketball ball, I would again expect you would be punished, though not with jailtime. And of course things depend on the height of balcony, whether the accused seems regretful or thinks he did nothing wrong, etc. And being held responsible for the medical costs is probably enough of a punishment.
Except you don't intentionally fly a flower pot above peoples' heads, then hit a building and disable it because you have no idea what you're doing.
Had the woman's boyfriend not caught her she could have been hurt much worse or even killed depending on how she landed. I'm not sure how I feel about the jail sentence, but the $500 fine and 100% restitution for medical bills (percentage hasn't been determined yet) seems on the lower end of appropriate.
> Except you don't intentionally fly a flower pot above peoples' heads, then hit a building and disable it because you have no idea what you're doing.
They did intentionally place a planter in a dangerous spot. They obviously made a mistake so it fell. Or you could say "they had no idea what they were doing" so it fell. The drone pilot made a mistake and hit a building and made his drone fall. How is this any different?
Whats the name for someone thats walks across subway tracks? I don't think the car industry is to blame, it's the city planner that put streets right next to sidewalks with no physical barriers and now also puts bike paths weaving throughout the streets and sidewalks.
This breaks down, because there have been plenty of uses for streets without cars, but there aren't a lot of uses for tracks without railcars.
If you understand that the streets and roads have always been used for many kinds of traffic, and that limiting these areas to automobile traffic was not initially considered the only natural response to the advent of cars, the OP's point makes more sense.
Yeah, we took some minor capabilities away from pedestrians:
1) Ability to enter the roadway at any time, rather than after checking that it's clear.
2) Ability to walk down the middle of the roadway instead of the sidewalk.
And in exchange, we vastly expanded the amount of commutable land per travel minute, resulting in more space for most people. Also affordable inter-city travel and the National Parks. I'd do it again.
Just as suburbia is seen by some contemporary progressives as a great social evil, the crowded conditions of urban tenements were the great problem of our time to progressive visionaries back then [0]. Walking as a primary form of transportation, and the extreme density it required of the working class, was not a scalable, long-term, or humane solution. We should have leaned into streetcars instead of personal cars in order to spread out, sure, but then it'd just be some other kind of vehicle making the streets dangerous for pedestrians.
No great social problem is solved by drones being welcome at low altitude over crowds. News and public safety organizations already knows how to use real helicopters in that context. There isn't some latent use case for aerial photography that we're all suffering without, it's a nice-to-have, and the decision that it isn't worth the tradeoffs is much more clear-cut.
> Ability to enter the roadway at any time, rather than after checking that it's clear.
Jaywalking doesn't depend on whether the road is clear or not. Try crossing an 8-lane stroad sometime even when it's "clear" for the moment. A car doing 50mph can get to that far lane way faster than I can, let alone someone who isn't young and in reasonable physical shape.
What we've really done is taken half of all land in every city and made it deadly to set foot on. A city that is supposedly built for people, but will kill you if you walk about 10 feet in most directions.
Your example is absurd. Where do you live that you ever have to cross an 8 lane highway on foot? City streets have crosswalks and stop lights. When used properly it's perfectly safe for everyone.
Yeah. 5000 pedestrians dead every year, just in the US, and another 25000 drivers. Perfectly safe for everyone.
And I didn't say highway. But that's a very good point. Stroads are difficult to cross, but highways carve a city up and are mostly impossible to cross except for a few places per mile.
8 lanes may be a bit rare, but it's easy to find 7. 2 travel lanes in each direction, a turn median, and a parking lane on each side. I was just in SoCal and saw plenty of examples with three travel lanes in each direction, making 9+ lanes in many places!
> Walking as a primary form of transportation, and the extreme density it required of the working class, was not a scalable, long-term, or humane solution.
What are you talking about? Walking is awesome, it's incredibly healthy and in the long term, as our cities reorganize around us better, walking will be the default. As a human being, you need to walk to be healthy anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone? We'll use cars only for long distance travel, but food, work, and other basic daily necessities will all be within easy walking distance of your house. Surburbia is a horrible system because it guarantees density is so low that walking by default is impossible.
I would describe any system where it's difficult to choose walking alternatives for your various errands as a form of slow torture which turns peoples bodies into useless sacks.
The average human walks about 3mph. Let's say you should be able to cross the city in an hour, so we want a radius of 1.5mi, which yields an area of 7.1 square miles.
Manhattan's daytime population is 3.9 million. Let's put them all in those 7.1 square miles: 549,000 people per square mile [0].
The densest city in the world is Manilla, at 107,562 per square mile [1]. You're asking for more than 5x the highest density level we've ever attempted.
Walking doesn't scale. To congregate in large population centers effectively, we need fast(er) transportation methods. Granted, personal cars don't scale too well either, which is why the correct solution probably involves trains, buses, two-wheeled vehicles with varying degrees of power (bicycles, e-bikes, electric scooters, etc), and traditional cars/trucks which are too expensive for mainstream daily use but still available when needed. All dangerous for pedestrians.
Trains are extremely dangerous for pedestrians, and they create spaces (train tracks) cutting up the city where pedestrians are unwelcome. We regularly and unabashedly victim-blame pedestrians who die after getting in the way of trains. We even do it in TV commercials set to catchy music. [0].
I agree that trains are a better idea than personal cars in general, and that cities should be designed for as much walkability as possible.
But walking alone doesn't cut it, and once you introduce trains, you have the same problem foxop pointed out: spaces that vehicles own and pedestrians must tread carefully in, where pedestrians will be blamed for their own deaths when killed by those vehicles. They are unavoidable. We just get to choose which kind of vehicle goes in them.
I assume it's easier to think this kind of sentence is okay when you don't own a drone nor want to own one; it's why taxing cigarettes is the go-to funding tool for increases in education spending. I don't smoke, so who cares? So, I'm assuming this is why the judge and attorney were so aggressive with the sentencing, but 30 days in jail is beyond the realm of reasonableness. I'm all for having the defendant pay restitution, but jail does no one any amount of good.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK it is illegal for a pilot of a manned aircraft to overfly a crowd below the height above which gliding clear is possible after an engine failure. In any case, the pilot needs a license to fly the aircraft at all, and getting one needs extensive training and demonstration of competence. Helicopters are "aircraft". Exceptions exist for medevac and police.
This rule comes from a consideration of crowd safety.
I'm not suggesting that exactly the same rigor must be applied so drones. After all they're smaller and likely to kill far fewer people after an accident involving a crowd. However, I think 30 days is entirely appropriate for someone who was reckless with people's lives under the circumstances. This assumes he was reckless; the article doesn't say if the court decided that.
Flight student here - the US is 500' above "non-congested areas" and 1000' above "congested areas," however neither are strictly defined. As my instructor put it, "if you could land on someone's head, consider it congested."
The except is air shows, where there is no minimum, and some special use areas such as Military Operations Areas.
If you're operating a drone for commercial purposes you need a Private Pilot's License and UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) certificate. This guy owns an aerial photography company but it's not clear if the drone use was hobbyist in nature or if he was getting footage of the event for commercial purposes. Regardless, if he's found criminally liable due to how he operated the drone, it's almost a certainty that the FAA will be coming after every license he has.
> This assumes he was reckless; the article doesn't say if the court decided that.
The first sentence of the article says exactly that: "A man who was found guilty of reckless endangerment after his drone injured two people during Seattle’s 2015 Pride Parade, including a woman knocked unconscious, was sentenced Friday to 30 days in jail."
Deterrence and retribution are typically seen as the purpose of incarceration. Presumably the threat of a month in prison might deter other drone operators from behaving recklessly and seriously injuring others.
There are 2.2 million prisoners in the US. I don't know that the plight of the reckless rich endangering people with their $2000 toys is at the top of anyone's concern for sentencing reform, when people are being sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting under three strikes laws.
I do own and build drones, and intend to use and sell them for commercial purposes.
I totally support this severity of sentence, and would support an even harsher one.
This guy was a complete idiot, flying with zero regard for any potential consequences. Not only could someone get hurt, they did. Could just as easily have been killed, just for this bad operator's amusement.
Multirotor drones are inherently unstable. They cannot fly without a computer actively controlling every rotor on millisecond time scales. There are literally hundreds of items that can fail on the device that will instantly turn it into a falling brick with sharp edges (yes, I've counted them in a spreadsheet, and was astonished at the high number of potential failure points, an order of magnitude more than we expected).
Once one of those items fails, it will accelerate downwards at 9.8 meters per second per second. Physics does not care about our intentions or sentiments. From 120 feet up it will land at 60 miles/hr, from 335 feet it'll hit at over 100 mph. Even a lightweight 2-3 Lb drone would kill at those speeds.
The penalties for me driving by you at 60mph and tossing out a hard 2Lb object that happened to hit your head would be much more severe.
Just because it is sold in the toy aisle does not mean that casual or stupid operation should be tolerated. This 'operator' was an idiot, hurt somebody, deserved all he got, and he's making it much more difficult for responsible people to use these devices.
If you intend to operate these things, please be very aware of where it is going and all potential flight paths and potential falling paths. It isn't that difficult to simply do full pre-flight system checks, not fly over people or other valuable things, and take other safety measures.
(also, re. your point about restitution, he might prefer 30 days in jail to paying the hospital bills, lost pay, lost time, etc. as restitution, tho I'd argue for both)
Slightly off-topic question but is a 2 pound drone capable of traveling 100mph in freefall? What determines/is its terminal velocity?
As for the medical bills there is another hearing to determine how much he will need to pay the victim. I'd certainly argue for 100% of everything such that financially it's like it never happened.
My <.5 lb drone certainly has a terminal velocity that is well below 100mph. I've seen videos of similar ones free falling and crashing with virtually no damage to the drone itself, because the terminal velocity is relatively low.
OTOH, the parent post appears to be someone who builds his own. Some race drones would likely have fairly impressive terminal velocities due to their compact, dense frames.
I'm not sure what a common commercial one would fall like (Phantom, Mavic Pro, etc).
A baseball is about a third of pound and relatively compact. This drone weighs something like 6-7x as much and has a lot more surface area and very different drag coefficients. I'm not sure there's really any comparison to be made.
Why is it relevant that it happened on a Pride Parade, as the headline suggest? "Pilot of drone that struck woman at parade gets 30 days in jail" is perfectly fine.
Now the current headline suggests it could have been a hate crime (it's not), or that a pride parade is something particular (it's not).
It's like "Black man robs woman" instead of "Man robs woman": a little bit too specific and suggestive.
> Why is it relevant that it happened on a Pride Parade, as the headline suggest?
Because people familiar with the initial incident will more readily connect this story of the legal outcome with the incident with that context. The story isn't just a standalone item, it's part of a series of articles stretching back to the initial incident. [0]
53 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadHe knocked a woman unconscious!! 30 days in jail seems a little bit off to me but he could've injured someone badly...
To get hit in the head hard enough to lose consciousness is not a minor incident.
I had a friend who "hit his head" and went unconscious; he died. We were warned that even if he lived, he would likely be a different person. If all the woman suffers is a few months of impaired cognitive functionality, she will be lucky.
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-dai...
Do you really need someone to explain why a flying remotely controlled device, with a large mass, and high rate of speed is dangerous?
And yes, if you throw a boomerang into a crowd and knock someone out, shouldn't there be some form of punishment?
40,000 people died in automobile accidents last year. We had several million other accidents with cars. You don't need to be an imbecile to have an accident. Objects controlled by humans moving at a high rate of speed turn out to be dangerous, and great care is required.
How much karma do I have to waste explaining such a simple idea to people? I'm done.
Driving is really quite simple.
[Edit]
Also, in response to your car analogy, how many of those accidents were caused by people operating a motor vehicle while on a phone, texting, being intoxicated, being on drugs prescribed or illegal, being too exhausted to drive, driving too fast in hazardous conditions such as rain, snow, and ice, driving recklessly or at a high rate of speed through construction zones, etc.? Are you telling me these people were able to get a license without being aware of the dangers? Hell, there are even laws to prevent most of the stuff I listed yet people do them anyhow. People are reckless, only are concerned with themselves, and many can't seem make the connection that actions have consequences, or they just don't care. That makes them what? Say it with me... Imbeciles!
[Edit 2]
> How much karma do I have to waste explaining such a simple idea to people? I'm done.
I especially enjoyed your last line. Thank you for that :-)
These are 4-5lb objects moving at terminal velocity (or faster) hitting people. That's not just dangerous, and I would hesitate to call your average drone owner an "imbecile".
For example, what failure modes should you prepare for when flying a multirotor? A few I've personally run into:
- Battery exhaustion (slow descent, loss of power, potential for battery fire)
- Gyro failure (chaotic and unpredictable behavior; uncontrollable)
- Battery Fire (unpredictable loss of power, flying incendiary bomb)
- Running outside of receiver range (behavior depends on the multirotor's autopilot, and the range differs based on your environment; also caused by jamming equipment)
- Flying in a different mode than you're expecting (usually an immediate and violent crash after getting a bit of altitude)
- Prop/motor failure (immediate and complete loss of control, unpredictable flight path to inevitable crash)
- Loss of POV stream (probably a crash, depends on the autopilot and pilot's reflexes at hitting the "oh, shit" button or reorientating to external visual mode)
- Bird/drone strike: Any and all of the above
Each of these scenarios requires a different response and preparation; you may realize your drone is dangerous, but did you realize it's also an incendiary device in potentia?
I can't even work out if you think it's too high or too low.
You say that the woman was knocked unconscious with lots of exclamation marks as if you think that's really serious, but then you say he could have injured her badly, as if you think being knocked unconscious isn't a bad injury.
I blame TV and Movies for this, we see people get knocked unconscious all the time and it's always treated as this minor thing, like we just have an off button that takes a good hard knock. In real life of course, any blow that knocks you unconscious has a very real risk of killing you.
[1]: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/woman-fights-for-life-after-p...
Had the woman's boyfriend not caught her she could have been hurt much worse or even killed depending on how she landed. I'm not sure how I feel about the jail sentence, but the $500 fine and 100% restitution for medical bills (percentage hasn't been determined yet) seems on the lower end of appropriate.
They did intentionally place a planter in a dangerous spot. They obviously made a mistake so it fell. Or you could say "they had no idea what they were doing" so it fell. The drone pilot made a mistake and hit a building and made his drone fall. How is this any different?
The car industry had a history of blaming the victim as a "jay-walker" and even lobbying for laws against them.
In another universe we have a name for somebody that gets in the way of a drone, and the victim is punished for not wearing a helmet.
If you understand that the streets and roads have always been used for many kinds of traffic, and that limiting these areas to automobile traffic was not initially considered the only natural response to the advent of cars, the OP's point makes more sense.
1) Ability to enter the roadway at any time, rather than after checking that it's clear.
2) Ability to walk down the middle of the roadway instead of the sidewalk.
And in exchange, we vastly expanded the amount of commutable land per travel minute, resulting in more space for most people. Also affordable inter-city travel and the National Parks. I'd do it again.
Just as suburbia is seen by some contemporary progressives as a great social evil, the crowded conditions of urban tenements were the great problem of our time to progressive visionaries back then [0]. Walking as a primary form of transportation, and the extreme density it required of the working class, was not a scalable, long-term, or humane solution. We should have leaned into streetcars instead of personal cars in order to spread out, sure, but then it'd just be some other kind of vehicle making the streets dangerous for pedestrians.
No great social problem is solved by drones being welcome at low altitude over crowds. News and public safety organizations already knows how to use real helicopters in that context. There isn't some latent use case for aerial photography that we're all suffering without, it's a nice-to-have, and the decision that it isn't worth the tradeoffs is much more clear-cut.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Tenement_House_...
Jaywalking doesn't depend on whether the road is clear or not. Try crossing an 8-lane stroad sometime even when it's "clear" for the moment. A car doing 50mph can get to that far lane way faster than I can, let alone someone who isn't young and in reasonable physical shape.
What we've really done is taken half of all land in every city and made it deadly to set foot on. A city that is supposedly built for people, but will kill you if you walk about 10 feet in most directions.
And I didn't say highway. But that's a very good point. Stroads are difficult to cross, but highways carve a city up and are mostly impossible to cross except for a few places per mile.
8 lanes may be a bit rare, but it's easy to find 7. 2 travel lanes in each direction, a turn median, and a parking lane on each side. I was just in SoCal and saw plenty of examples with three travel lanes in each direction, making 9+ lanes in many places!
What are you talking about? Walking is awesome, it's incredibly healthy and in the long term, as our cities reorganize around us better, walking will be the default. As a human being, you need to walk to be healthy anyway, so why not kill two birds with one stone? We'll use cars only for long distance travel, but food, work, and other basic daily necessities will all be within easy walking distance of your house. Surburbia is a horrible system because it guarantees density is so low that walking by default is impossible.
I would describe any system where it's difficult to choose walking alternatives for your various errands as a form of slow torture which turns peoples bodies into useless sacks.
The average human walks about 3mph. Let's say you should be able to cross the city in an hour, so we want a radius of 1.5mi, which yields an area of 7.1 square miles.
Manhattan's daytime population is 3.9 million. Let's put them all in those 7.1 square miles: 549,000 people per square mile [0].
The densest city in the world is Manilla, at 107,562 per square mile [1]. You're asking for more than 5x the highest density level we've ever attempted.
Walking doesn't scale. To congregate in large population centers effectively, we need fast(er) transportation methods. Granted, personal cars don't scale too well either, which is why the correct solution probably involves trains, buses, two-wheeled vehicles with varying degrees of power (bicycles, e-bikes, electric scooters, etc), and traditional cars/trucks which are too expensive for mainstream daily use but still available when needed. All dangerous for pedestrians.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.9+million+people+%2F+...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...
Yes, we need better public transit. But the cheapest, most ecological transit is the distance you just don't travel.
There is no reason, even at Manila densities, you can't have a green grocer within a few blocks of every city resident.
I agree that trains are a better idea than personal cars in general, and that cities should be designed for as much walkability as possible.
But walking alone doesn't cut it, and once you introduce trains, you have the same problem foxop pointed out: spaces that vehicles own and pedestrians must tread carefully in, where pedestrians will be blamed for their own deaths when killed by those vehicles. They are unavoidable. We just get to choose which kind of vehicle goes in them.
[0] http://www.dumbwaystodie.com/
This rule comes from a consideration of crowd safety.
I'm not suggesting that exactly the same rigor must be applied so drones. After all they're smaller and likely to kill far fewer people after an accident involving a crowd. However, I think 30 days is entirely appropriate for someone who was reckless with people's lives under the circumstances. This assumes he was reckless; the article doesn't say if the court decided that.
The except is air shows, where there is no minimum, and some special use areas such as Military Operations Areas.
If you're operating a drone for commercial purposes you need a Private Pilot's License and UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) certificate. This guy owns an aerial photography company but it's not clear if the drone use was hobbyist in nature or if he was getting footage of the event for commercial purposes. Regardless, if he's found criminally liable due to how he operated the drone, it's almost a certainty that the FAA will be coming after every license he has.
The first sentence of the article says exactly that: "A man who was found guilty of reckless endangerment after his drone injured two people during Seattle’s 2015 Pride Parade, including a woman knocked unconscious, was sentenced Friday to 30 days in jail."
There are 2.2 million prisoners in the US. I don't know that the plight of the reckless rich endangering people with their $2000 toys is at the top of anyone's concern for sentencing reform, when people are being sentenced to life in prison for shoplifting under three strikes laws.
I totally support this severity of sentence, and would support an even harsher one.
This guy was a complete idiot, flying with zero regard for any potential consequences. Not only could someone get hurt, they did. Could just as easily have been killed, just for this bad operator's amusement.
Multirotor drones are inherently unstable. They cannot fly without a computer actively controlling every rotor on millisecond time scales. There are literally hundreds of items that can fail on the device that will instantly turn it into a falling brick with sharp edges (yes, I've counted them in a spreadsheet, and was astonished at the high number of potential failure points, an order of magnitude more than we expected).
Once one of those items fails, it will accelerate downwards at 9.8 meters per second per second. Physics does not care about our intentions or sentiments. From 120 feet up it will land at 60 miles/hr, from 335 feet it'll hit at over 100 mph. Even a lightweight 2-3 Lb drone would kill at those speeds.
The penalties for me driving by you at 60mph and tossing out a hard 2Lb object that happened to hit your head would be much more severe.
Just because it is sold in the toy aisle does not mean that casual or stupid operation should be tolerated. This 'operator' was an idiot, hurt somebody, deserved all he got, and he's making it much more difficult for responsible people to use these devices.
If you intend to operate these things, please be very aware of where it is going and all potential flight paths and potential falling paths. It isn't that difficult to simply do full pre-flight system checks, not fly over people or other valuable things, and take other safety measures.
(also, re. your point about restitution, he might prefer 30 days in jail to paying the hospital bills, lost pay, lost time, etc. as restitution, tho I'd argue for both)
edit: clarity, typos
As for the medical bills there is another hearing to determine how much he will need to pay the victim. I'd certainly argue for 100% of everything such that financially it's like it never happened.
OTOH, the parent post appears to be someone who builds his own. Some race drones would likely have fairly impressive terminal velocities due to their compact, dense frames.
I'm not sure what a common commercial one would fall like (Phantom, Mavic Pro, etc).
Now the current headline suggests it could have been a hate crime (it's not), or that a pride parade is something particular (it's not).
It's like "Black man robs woman" instead of "Man robs woman": a little bit too specific and suggestive.
Because people familiar with the initial incident will more readily connect this story of the legal outcome with the incident with that context. The story isn't just a standalone item, it's part of a series of articles stretching back to the initial incident. [0]
[0] You can follow the whole thing back with hyperlinks from the latest article to each previous story, back to: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/woman-knocked...