Washington, DC- -it's a painfully slow process for politicians and FAA bureaucrats to accept the need, legitimacy and relative safety of those little civilian drones.   There was the initial hysteria of passenger jets crashing, mass privacy invasion because of those little drones.     The panic reaction was bolstered with thousands mistaken or deliberately false reports of sightings claiming drone misbehavior.     Thankfully as the number of drones in civilian hands increased by leaps and bounds, the bogus reports quietly subsided considerably.  Very recently progress has been made in allowing the commercial use of drones under a somewhat loosened set of rules and guidelines.    Along with the more realistic drone rules the FAA created the Part 107 licensing exemption with a written test for commercial drone pilots.   They have allowed for considerable expansion of drone use in urban areas for news gathering, filmmakin...

Los Angeles, CA —When the topics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones are brought up so are the issues of fear, loathing and regulation.  Ignorance of the unknown is always a source of difficulty.  However take a look at the issues with an open mind.  Aerial photography is not new, but until now it was just expensive.  We’ve co-existed with fixed wing airplanes and helicopters, all of our lives.  It’s settled law that we have no reasonable expiation of privacy outside of our homes and the other shelters we inhabit. For nearly two decades we’ve been under observation from high-resolution cameras mounted on satellites.  We’ve all seen those incredible Google Earth views .  All of those privacy issues have been addressed and settled in the courts redundantly. Suddenly we have great diminutive cameras and UAV’s to take them to the skies.  The privacy laws remain exactly the same. There are huge advantages for these new UAV’s such a...