Ban not the answer
It says much about the times we live in that one of the first incidents faced by Auckland’s emergency services in 2019 involved a drone flying too close to the police helicopter in the early hours of yesterday. It was a serious incident too, the helicopter pilot estimates the drone was just 10m away when he spotted it and had to take evasive action quickly to avoid a collision. The crew were shaken and their district commander ordered them down for the chopper to be checked and the crew interviewed by detectives.
Just two weeks ago a similar incident closed London’s Gatwick Airport, disrupting the plans of thousands of travellers in the week before Christmas. The fact that Sussex police have yet to trace the drone, or confirm there was a drone in Gatwick’s airspace at that time, does not diminish the risk these tiny aircraft present.
They are not easy to see unless they hover quite low and the fact a major airport could be shut down on unconfirmed sightings attests to the damage they could do to commercial airliners.
Technology is putting these potentially lethal toys into the hands of anybody with an interest in remote-controlled flight. Those with no such interest will be inclined to think the devices ought to be banned but that is seldom the right answer for technological advances. Drones are also serving socially useful purposes, including for policing.
Drones were helping monitor crowd behaviour on New Year’s Eve in places such as New York’s Times Square. Sussex police put their own drones over Gatwick after the shutdown to try to locate those who had caused it. Indeed, it is conceivable drones will one day replace the Auckland police helicopter.
In commercial life they will quite likely replace land transport for deliveries of many lighter items. Like them or not, drones are probably here to stay and will find increasing uses with time. The challenge now is to regulate them for everyone’s safety without unduly restricting their potential uses.
New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority has already issued a set of rules that should be known by anybody who got a $100 drone for Christmas. They can be flown only in daylight, they should be kept within eyesight, not sent so far that the operator needs binoculars or a smartphone to track them. They should not fly higher than 120m above the ground or within 4km of an aerodrome and they should not hover above a person without that person’s consent, or above a property without the owner’s or manager’s consent. Nor it is just private property. In Auckland drones are prohibited above many public places including Cornwall Park, Western Springs, the Botanic Gardens, stadiums, the Zoo and all the volcanic cones.
It is easier to write rules like that than to enforce them. Finding the operator of an offending drone will seldom be simple. The best antidote to technology is usually more technology. Perhaps one day authorised aircraft will be equipped with a means to detect and destroy drones that invade people’s privacy or threaten their safety.