Recreational drones are tragedy waiting to happen

There’s something very wrong with recreational drones.

You can see the attraction. They can be extremely easy to fly, and they take cool pictures. The Consumer Electronics Association forecasts about 700,000 will be sold this year, up from 430,000 in 2014. Some are tiny flying toys, weighing less than an ounce. Some weigh more than 50 pounds and still count as “recreational.”

I think I speak for all of us when I say that we do not want to get in between a child and his toy drone. But it’s crazy that the bigger ones — the ones capable of flying in the same airspace as a helicopter or dropping a mystery package on a nuclear power plant — aren’t being licensed and regulated.

Every day there seems to be a new story. A drone flew over the Oklahoma State Penitentiary recently, carrying a bundle of drugs and hacksaw blades. Fortunately, it crashed before any inmates could grab the loot. Meanwhile, a drone flew into power lines in West Hollywood, leaving about 700 customers without electricity.

Now it’s true that squirrels knock out power lines and nobody’s talking about regulating them. But squirrels don’t get in the way of passenger planes. The Federal Aviation Administration is getting about 100 reports of close encounters every month.

How can something terrible not happen sooner or later? “From the California point of view it’s only a matter of time,” said U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the sponsor of the Consumer Drone Safety Act, which is at this point still just a proposal, not a law. The many near-disasters Feinstein’s office has chronicled include cases in which planes and helicopters attempting to put out wildfires were forced to pull back because of drones in the airspace.

When recreational drones came on the market, Congress regarded them as another version of model airplanes and basically told the FAA to keep its hands off. Model airplanes do have a long and relatively problem-free history. This is possibly because they’re kind of difficult to master. But some drones don’t require much more skill than opening a box.

The FAA has some authority over commercial drones, but on the recreational front there’s not much it can do unless Congress gets its act together. This is the same Congress that nearly collapsed from exhaustion after it called on the government to keep paying its bills, but hope springs eternal.

Right now, the FAA and the Transportation Department are working on a drone registration program. Ideally, the registration system would make owners aware there are rules governing where they can fly, though there’d apparently be no way to guarantee they had actually read them.

It’s already illegal to fly a drone near an airport, but almost none of the violators have ever been caught. It’s also against the law to send one over a sports stadium on game day, but it still happens.

These things need to be identifiable, even when they’re in the air. And their owners ought to be required to take a safety course and get a license before they fly. You shouldn’t be able to buy — with no training whatsoever — a product that could threaten public safety. That’s only true for drones. And of course, in some states, handguns.