Domesticating Drones: The Technology, Law, and Economics of Unmanned Aircraft / Edition 1

However, their proliferation in response to these demands will present substantial risks to aviation safety. How to ensure the safety of drone operations perplexes aviation regulators around the world. They are inexpensive consumer products, unsuited for traditional requirements for manned aircraft costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and flown only by licensed pilots who have dedicated significant parts of their lives and their wealth to obtaining licenses. Regulatory agencies in Europe and Asia are ahead of US regulators in creating spaces for commercial use. Over the next several years, legal requirements must be crystallized, existing operators of helicopter and airplanes must refine their policy positions and their business plans to take the new technologies into account, and all businesses from the smallest entrepreneur to large conglomerates must decide whether and how to use them. Domesticating Drones offers rigorous engineering, economics, legal and policy theory and doctrine on this important and far-reaching development within aviation.