I could not possibly be more opposed to this for several reasons.
- There are a lot more legal ways to fly below 500 feet AGL than you seem to realize, maybe you live in the middle of a city and just don’t see all the space that some of us have to fly in.
- You are dumping an expensive requirement on the least well financed of all our operators to allow them to not get killed by robots.
- You are giving unmanned aircraft right-of-way over manned aircraft. This should NEVER EVER happen unless it is inside a TFR and that needs to be rare, something like a rocket launch or forest fire.
- For YEARS I have been reading about how much better drones and automated aircraft will be at see-and-avoid than a manned aircraft and now all of a sudden that isn’t doable, too bad, out of our way.
- You are not realizing the extent of the problem. $1,000 more or less will get you a drone that might get 5-10 miles or more from the operator and a few have 5G modules that will get them as far as the batteries last. These are flying right now BVLOS all over the place and this is only going to get worse.Many of the “pilots” of these things have no idea at all about anything to do with rules and FARs of any kind and the rest don’t care, it is all for the clicks and subscriptions to their social media.