Standards harmonization in the West for "safe NAS integration" includes decades of data collection and expensive taxpayer-funded junkets. Meanwhile, China has a robust low-altitude economy, delivering kilos of cargo over distances that make RMB and cents. Please don’t think I am discounting the cultural and humanitarian significance, or the profit potential, of toothpaste and potato chip delivery. Follow the gourde!
Part 108 favors those mega-corporations who can afford to control the process through lobbying and influencing said CON-sensus standards. Chipping away at your airspace will keep happening until this industry is viable enough to afford an advocacy-group CEO salary north of say $750K a year.
Who remembers the education-instead-of-enforcement campaign? Huerta and Foxx assured the public that registration would usher in compliance, and the rest was half-baked clap-trap the Chinese toy company helped usher in. My point is proven in almost every instance drones are in the news. The federal government has itself twisted in knots trying to slap Band-Aids on fundamental droneflaws directly attributable to shiftless bureaucrats who only understand the politics of the DC differential and a public pension.
The flawed studies, haphazard data gathering, and harmonization ultimately lead to decades of on-the-job fuster-clucking, laying the groundwork for lucrative off-ramp opportunities. If I had a dollar for every rich and smart drone startup CEO who told me he was going to end run the FAA, I'd be rich and smart too. The common outcome is folks calling a few months before they are ready to fold. They tell me I was right, ask for Hail Mary advice, and have little or no money left to fund a miracle that would take a full crew of paid drone Messiahs to conjure up.
I wonder if the CNN folks still have their BVLOS waiver flight jackets? @TheDroneDealer on X