"Regulation" is the key factor here however. And you can have best regulation in the world along with the best safety procedures in a test environment.
But as we have witnessed with self-drive cars, they're not infallible, and accidents and fatalities have happened in the real domain.
Admittedly any new technology will always have its setbacks, otherwise we would have never landed men on the Moon. But the use of drones both in the public and private domains worry me, despite tight regulation
Cars are safer today than ever. If you read a local newspaper from the 1920's or 1930's it is astounding the sheer number of serious car accidents reported with pedestrian casualties that we allowed and found completely acceptable. I'd say that driver-less cars with their anti-crash technology has the potential to make the roads safer still. I really don't see the safety aspect of the number of drones being a problem if they are properly regulated. Of course there are problems to overcome - people flying them at aircraft, people flying them too low - but people in cars speed and drive the wrong way up streets too. Let's face it, anything can become a danger if it is misused. They certainly need regulating, maybe even licensing.
The current claim from Tesla is that despite the one fatal crash the statistics actually show their automatic drive cars to be much safer with a much reduced number of accidents per mile driven. Of course any accidents that happen whilst driving in the automatic mode will, at least for the time being, get so much press coverage that you could be forgiven for thinking that stepping into one is stepping into a death trap. However the statistics do seem to show that already the number of accidents per mile (including fatal ones) is way lower than manually driven cars.
Also, yes, the drones are not infallible but neither are the pilots of aircraft, or the aircraft themselves; they still regularly suffer from crashes. That's why I say we need to keep a little perspective on this.
And by the way I struggle to keep that perspective myself. I am very disturbed by the huge increase in the unregulated use of drones. This is a technology that is so open to abuse it is really quite staggering how long it seems to be taking some governments to bring regulation in. There are all sorts of issues:
- privacy; they have already been used and involved in court cases for snooping and outright voyeurism.
- safety; numerous close calls with other aircraft including passenger aircraft. A TV drone crashed and almost took out a skier in a downhill competition (no injuries).
- security; numerous documented cases of using them for smuggling across borders as well as into prisons.
- terrorism; they can easily be modified to carry and fire guns as well as bombs.
I think this Pandora's box is well and truly opened, but we must have regulation of something so open to misuse. However it's worth remembering the other side to this particular coin; there are an enormous number of beneficial possible uses of this technology beyond just the obvious military and delivery opportunities.
