The reason the FAA is so nervous about commercial operations in general is because in aviation there's nothing more dangerous than saying, "we'll be there by 2:30." It's why the rules for Part 135 (charter) operators are much stricter than for Part 91 (personal) operators, and go through the roof for Part 121 (scheduled airline) operators. The commercial aspect adds a potentially major consideration other than safety and so the FAA has a whole separate way of thinking about it. The spirit of these concerns is probably as true for drones as it is for manned aircraft, though the concrete instantiations of it will obviously be different.

You seem to be coming at this from a traditional aviation viewpoint (which is valid). I'm coming at it from a modeling viewpoint. And I think that's where a large part of the disconnect comes into play. From the traditional point of view, you'd like to bring these drones into the normal aviation regulatory framework. From the model point of view, large regulations are overkill and are severely limiting the development of this industry.

I think that there are a couple of obvious rules that could be applied to speed things along: 1) limit location and altitude of flying, 2) require hands-on control (or take over), 3) require line of sight, 4) enforce some reasonable weight restrictions (for cameras). If you could meet those four things, then I don't see why you'd need to have a commercial restriction. You might have other issues to deal with for insurance, but I don't see why the FAA should care about commercial/non-commercial with such small craft.

Now, when you get into autonomous flight and real payloads, then that's a whole other ballgame, where I think the FAA will have some real work to do. In particular though, I'd hate to see them limit the hobbyist segment too much. I think it would be a lot of fun to build a small, autonomous drone that could fly using GPS waypoints with a camera. I just don't want to have to go through 2 years of certification to be able to fly it!

> limit location and altitude of flying

Sure - this might be a good example here because any rules the FAA will come out with in this regard will probably require you to be able to read a sectional chart unless you're really in the middle of nowhere. The DJI drones are all easily capable of altitudes that could interfere with VFR traffic and in places like the Bay Area the ceilings people are flying under are often quite low to avoid, for example, the SFO airspace. Drones are way more maneuverable than airplanes, so the realistic burden will be on the drone operators to avoid rather than the other way around.

Definitely shouldn't be a two-years-of-flight-school thing, but there probably is a written test at the DMV somewhere in here.

You are missing important part: find a way to punish violators of these (and other) rules. This is critical for safety.

Typically, if you violate FARs, you'll lose a huge pilot's license investment (private, ifr, commercial can total in the tens of thousands of dollars).

It doesn't hurt to lose a $300-$1000 quadrotor pilot license.

Correct. The question is - how to identify the drone pilot? With planes you have N-number, transponders, FBOs, etc.

Require user registration by serial number on the drone possible? Or perhaps require commercial drones use ADS-B?

Registering individual airframes doesn't make much sense - it's not unusual for a single quadcopter to go through many design iterations over the course of a few months.

It might start out as a 10" wide quadcopter, until the first major crash. Instead of ordering a new arm, it can be reconfigured as a tricopter with the addition of a servo. After a while, the tricopter might become a V-Tail if the user likes the flight characteristics.

Then FPV kit might get added, or a GPS reciever. Now it's flying semi-autonomously and the user wants better quality video, so it's transplanted onto a 18" frame, fitted with a gimbal and nicer camera.

At what point does the multicopter need to change registration numbers?

A simple "You must have your name and contact info on it" rule would be more than sufficient - and in fact is already the case for 90% of the aircraft out there. I even have my contact info taped to the body of my little 4" Hubsan quadcopter; I'll probably never need it, but why throw away expensive hardware if you don't have to?

It's not clear how one can get the serial number from the drone. ADS-B might be an option not only for tracking violators but also to solve "see-and-avoid" problem too.

> * in aviation there's nothing more dangerous than saying, "we'll be there by 2:30."*

Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand.

It changes risk decisions: instead of worrying only about safety the pilots/operators start to also worry about making the schedule. In the history of aviation, it led to numerous accidents and incidents of pilots flying into bad weather, pilots flying un-airworthy aircrafts, etc. only because they've had schedule to meet.

Safety loses out when you're on a deadline.

I flew private with someone when I was a student pilot; we were on a deadline, so instead of waiting for the weather to let up, we were scud running about 300 miles back to our home airport (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud_running). This is inadvisable; you're throwing minimum ceilings out the window, and hoping you don't run into obstacles on the ground (wind towers, cell towers, antenna guy wires).

It's not just dangerous, but illegal if you get caught. (Note: I was not PIC, and did not make the call). Do not do this.

EDIT: /u/lsh123 said it better.

Obviously we don't want drones traversing glide paths for major airports, but besides obvious stuff like that how are safety concerns for drones in any way comparable to those for aircraft that carry humans?

The most basic concern is that dron operators need to know these "dangerous" areas. The approach paths is only one of many other potentially dangerous places in the skies. There are also low-level military operation areas, low-level VFR corridors, etc. More importantly, the skies are not empty and the VFR flights are based on see-and-avoid concept. With drones, it is hard to see the drones from planes and drones can't see planes either.

Not to mention the enforcement part. All planes today have a call sign and FAA/NTSB can easily go after pilots when rules are broken. This is an important part of the overall safety architecture. FAA would need to come up with a way to enforce rules on drones pilots and operators to ensure that unsafe behavior is punished.