Originally Posted by
abelenky
I am concerned that an unintended consequence of formal training and licensing of drones would be that serious, real pilots would avoid drones. Who would want to fly a drone and in doing so, endanger their commercial license? The Commercial License is much more important and valuable, so few pilots would put their license at risk while flying small scale commercial drones.
The result would be that lots of drones would be flown by less skilled amateurs.
While I don't disagree with the idea of training and licensing for drone pilots, I think it should also be "firewalled" from traditional pilot cerificates. Enforcement action because of a drone-incident should have no bearing on your rights as a commercial pilot.
Yes. They should get their own certs and training. Real pilots already avoid drones, and real pilot training doesn't automatically translate to drone ops anyway. I think the licensing would...
1) Ensure they have the knowledge/skills to stay out of trouble.
2) Enable the feds to nail unlicensed operators.
Drones are coming, but no need to just give up on controlled airspace. The drone crowd generally trivializes the rules (the ones they're even aware of), but that can be fixed systemically and the cowboys booted out of the NAS.
Or we can wait till we have a few fatal midairs. Or maybe just one big fatal midair.
I doubt the feds would go for a certificate firewall though, they like to throw the entire book at you whenever the opportunity arises.