In terms of popularity, drones aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, especially as they become more integrated with our other devices and companies see potential in their application in everything from home delivery to emergency search and rescue.
But unmanned aerial vehicles also seem to come with a lot of baggage these days, mainly due to a few bad apples and some misappropriation of these awesome devices.
And the solutions for reigning in this type of behaviour range from the draconian to the overly invasive, with few points of agreement between enthusiasts and government officials.
Yet there is broad-based support among the general populace for regulating these devices, especially since they’re capable of interrupting the flow of air traffic and even have the potential to cause a catastrophe in the sky.
That is why one of the few proposals that government officials and drone pilots can agree on, licensing, might be the most pragmatic route to take in addressing the issue.
One program in the United States wants to take that licensing one step further and actually put an identifier plate on your device in much the same way that automobiles have license plates to identify their owner, as well as their make and model, to authorities.
Currently, owners in the USA are required to register their craft with the Federal Aviation Administration and their unit must bear some kind of identifying marking. Now the FAA wants to formalize this process and add the plate to some external, visible portion of the drone whereas currently it can be hidden within a compartment.
Such licensing would obviate the need, in most scenarios, for the DJI AeroScope system which we reported on a few months ago. Basically, the AeroScope is used to identify drones and potentially intervene if necessary. The tech will definitely still have a use, but the FAA’s more “practical” approach will make drones identifiable with just a pair of binoculars.
No word yet on when the FAA will impose this new rule or what the exact parameters of it are but drone pilots can probably expect something soon.
