Once upon a time, in what was then modern society, there was an entire street-cleaning industry that specialized in nothing but shovelling and removing horse droppings from the pavement. Improvements in transportation technology eliminated those jobs.
Jobs, commerce, and tax revenue make the fatality rate of General Aviation acceptable? Eh, say what?
Some people today see drones as a threat to jobs, commerce, and tax revenue. But, someday soon, unmanned aviation will dominate the aviation industry. Already most commercial airliners practically fly themselves. A huge portion of every flight is controlled entirely by the auto-pilot. The human pilots are merely there to dial in changes to the auto-pilot settings whenever required. Altitude and course changes are done by turning a selector dial on the auto-pilot and pushing a button to engage those changes. The auto-pilot ensures those changes are executed more smoothly than a ham-fisted human can do it. Human crew are still there [for now] to take over manual control whenever there's an actual need for intervention.
I'm not saying drones are zero risk. But the actual risk is certainly far less than what the media makes it out to be. All of the resulting regulatory burden has been driven, not by actual data, but by the repeated hysteria of "just think of what could have happened if only...", while [so far] nothing has happened.
Canada is famous for claiming the first ever mid-air collision in the entire world between a "commercial airliner and a drone". It was a small twin engine turboprop carrying (six?) passengers on approach to Quebec City airport that reported hitting "something" which may or may not have been a drone. It caused quite an uproar in the media and immediately resulted in crazy new Interim Rules being issued practically overnight, until proper regulations could be published years later. Whatever actually was hit, the only damage to the plane was a barely visible tiny dimple and scratch in the leading edge of one wing. The plane landed safely, and after a quick look at the "damage", they boarded another load of passengers and continued normal flight operations. No big deal.
The only two actual factual totally verified and documented cases in Canada of a drone colliding with manned aircraft both occurred after new regulations were published to "prevent" such potentially catastrophic occurrences, and both incidents were caused by fully licensed yet obviously unskilled and clueless drone pilots.
And strangely enough, despite these comprehensive regulations and stringent enforcement promising to keep our skies safe from drones knocking manned aircraft out of the sky, BOTH of these collisions were caused by heavy surveillance drones flown by the police!!
One occurred over busy Hwy 404 in Toronto when a police drone struck a Cessna on final approach to Buttonville Airport. The flight instructor and student pilot managed to land safely, but the plane suffered significant damage as the whole engine cowling was caved in. The police drone was destroyed.
The second incident happened in British Columbia during the Wet'suwet'en blockade and protests against the pipeline being built across their territory. The RCMP somehow managed to destroy their own expensive FLIR SkyRanger R60 surveillance drone by crashing it into their own even more expensive Eurocopter AS 350B3 helicopter! The drone was obliterated. The helicopter pilot felt only "a vibration" and decided to do a precautionary landing to check it out. There was damage to the main rotor blades and superficial damage to tail rotor and tail boom. The police had to hire another expensive helicopter to airlift their damaged helicopter out for repairs.
It is ironic that in Canada the only two verified mid-air collisions between drone and manned aircraft were caused by the police. None have occurred due to...
