I get it, most of you don't like the idea of registering your drone.
Except...what happens without that registration?
I'm a professional helicopter pilot. My job is to bring a helicopter to the accident scene and then take the victim to the nearest trauma center.
There have already been cases in which someone doing my job has had to swerve to avoid the drone of some jerk who thought it would be fun to see how close he could get to the medical helicopter. Google it.
Let me be clear: people likely would have died if that drone had hit that helicopter. And if you're going to say, "my lightweight drone would just bounce off your heavy helicopter," tell me how many pilot-in-command hours you have of a real takes-you-with-it aircraft? Anything that makes pieces near a helicopter is going to send those pieces into the tail rotor - that's aerodynamics. Many helicopters, when they lose tail rotor parts, go unbalanced and rip the rest of the tail rotor drive system out. The loss of those parts messes up the balance of the helicopter, which sends it into the ground like a lawn dart.
I'm all about a reasonable degree of liberty. But when your having fun gets my nurse, my medic and my patient killed and turns my wife into a widow, then that's too much liberty.
Now you can say, "registration won't keep me from hitting your helicopter with my drone," and that's true. But the knowledge that you can't run away far enough fast enough from the FBI who will be on the way to your house as soon as any of the drone parts are recovered, might.
Register the damn drone. What are you, stupid?
Belittling or insulting other forum users is a violation of our guidelines and will result in moderation of your posts and/or accounts if it is seen to continue. Keep it civil.
>> let me be clear: people likely would have died if that drone had hit that helicopter.
Can this be true? How big and how fast would a remotely operated aircraft need be to have a measurable affect on the smallest aircraft capable of carrying a human?
Also, none these are drones, these are all remotely piloted. Only the military has autonomous robotic aircraft, but most of the military craft are also remotely piloted.
To my knowledge, the largest hex- and octo- copters are the ones that carry the profession movie cameras, where the copter cost $3000 and the camera costs $80,000.
Nobody is going to play chicken with a medivac copter and risk an $80,000 camera, unless its scripted in a movie. Even so, would it be possible for one of these to sneak up on a helicopter and crash into it? To do significant damage, wouldn't have to hit directly head one at full speed? Is this even possible? How likely is it?
Is there any recorded case of a quadcopter or larger bringing down or even damaging a piloted aircraft?
There was a big stink about the "danger of laser pointers" versus aircraft. Yet, in Egypt, we see footage of the government helicopter BATHED in GREEN (the brightest) laser pointers, yet none of these were brought down, at MOST they flew away in embarrassment.
I gotten call BS on all these unless there is some kind of evidence of actual danger.
I saw a sheet of paper about 2 foot by 3 foot, it was covering a tray of food, take down a UH-1. The paper was blown up and went into the tail rotor as the UH-1 was taking off. The UH-1 landed and sat there until another UH-1 brought a couple of mechanics with parts to repair the tail rotor.
>> Many helicopters, when they lose tail rotor parts, go unbalanced and rip the rest of the tail rotor drive system out. The loss of those parts messes up the balance of the helicopter, which sends it into the ground like a lawn dart.
Which kinds would those be? I always heard the tail is only for steering, the craft would rotate until the wind caught it, and any pilot would would easily land safely. Have the helicopter pilots been lying all these years? As in the next example:
> The paper was blown up and went into the tail rotor as the UH-1 was taking off. The UH-1 landed and sat there until another UH-1 brought a couple of mechanics with parts to repair the tail rotor.
So the the tail got broke, and the pilot landed. How many pilots and mechanics died in this incident? Of embarrassment?
> mind if I shined a green laser pointer in your eyes?
Have you even looked into a green traffic light up close, like at the first car at the intersection? Isn't this the same as looking into a green laser on the ground from ANY aircraft in flight? (I might have calculated wrong, math was not my best subject). And if you are close enough where the laser would be significantly bright to cause discomfort, I imagine your target would take it from you and shine it on your large intestine.
I still gotta call BS. If we look at ALL the cases where quadcopter and laser pointer COMBINED brought down ANY aircraft and count the injuries AND fatalities, the number appears to remain zero. Unless there is a big pile of data I missed, the data might be trying to tell us something.
The UH-1 was able to land because he was only a few feet off the ground when the tail rotor was damaged and the pilot quickly took appropriate action. The main purpose of the tail rotor is to counteract the torque of the main rotor. Tail rotor failure is a very, very dangerous fault. It often results in a crash. I am a retired Army aviator and was qualified to fly Cobras, Hueys, and OH-58s. What experience or information leads you to call BS? Do we have to wait until there is a fatal crash? I think there is a problem. We can discuss what is a reasonable, effective solution.
As to lasers and pilots, I don't have any personal experience. I am an old retired aviator and lasers were not in common use while I was flying. I can tell one story that happened to me. I was flying at night, low level at Fort Sill, OK. This was before pilots used night vision devices. We would turn the instrument lighting to very low so we could see outside the aircraft. A search light flipped on and hit my aircraft for just a second. I could not see the ground outside or see my instruments inside to maintain proper attitude. I pulled the stick back to gain altitude and had a good copilot. He turned the instrument lighting full on and I was able to use the artificial horizon to maintain proper attitude.
This is off track. I think it's true that an ordinary, low power pointer is likely to not do harm at the distances being discussed here. I also think it's true that higher powered pointers would absolutely do harm at the distances being discussed here, given the right alignment. (which is arguably, difficult)
I've got one of those. It's a "safety glasses" only device frankly, and it's sold for $5 on ebay all the time. People don't evaluate this stuff well, making the hazard real enough for the pilots and people on the plane.
More fundamentally, safety systems, training, and other means and methods intended to avoid harm are there to mitigate risks. Nobody involved in aviation would tell you that it's OK to depend on those. They aren't there as primary means and methods. They are there so people survive risk inherent in flight.
The primary goal in all of these things is to have a safe, successful flight. It's never acceptable to increase risk for shallow reasons and flying a drone is a shallow reason relative to the lives and expense involved in any meaningful flight.
Here: "
If we look at ALL the cases where quadcopter and laser pointer COMBINED brought down ANY aircraft and count the injuries AND fatalities, the number appears to remain zero. Unless there is a big pile of data I missed, the data might be trying to tell us something.
"
YES! That data tells us that our engineering, training and risk management is doing it's job. The people involved in those incidents had options they needed to navigate unplanned flight dynamics successfully enough to tell others what happened.
It does not tell us that continuing to take those risks makes any sense at all.
One could live their life in this reckless way, say by jumping across tracks just in front of trains. One could also say, of the successful attempts, "If we look at ALL the cases where the train was close, and the jump performed..." and reach the same conclusion.
Really, that kind of thing works, until it doesn't. That's what a risk is.
Crashes with drones do not result in death or damage, UNTIL THEY DO.
Again, that is what a risk is.
That person is successful jumping train tracks, UNTIL THEY AREN'T.
Aviation is all about doing what it takes to avoid scenarios like that. Everyone in flight wants options and they want the safety checks, they want the engineering, they want the risk management, and all of the regulation we have related to these things serves those ends.
Every single flight is good, until it isn't. That threat is present anytime a person pilots an aircraft. That we do it commercially and for the military at all depends on our risk management, engineering and training intended to give the people involved the options they need to survive the activity.
The message here is we just don't add risks we don't have to. Doing so kills people, plain and simple. Might not kill 'em today, but it eventually does, and that's why pointing pointers at planes and the current conflict over drones is seeing regulation.
Doing that saves lives, and we value that over personal freedom when it comes to aviation. The whole field isn't viable, unless we assert that to be true. And we have, make no mistake.
Really, nobody cares that someone can't point their pointer, or fly their drone, or do any number of other things in proximity to aircraft, because the lives of the people on that aircraft are more important than whatever activity is involved with the hazards.
Right now, he's got a post up on lasers. It's rational, and accurate in the physics. Really, it's hard to shine a light into a cockpit in a way to do very serious harm. It's a distraction.
If you read more, distractions are risks, and those are discouraged for obvious reasons. His commentary is related to how the public should perceive their risk in flight due to laser pointers. He's saying, non issue, and he's right. You won't read him saying it's OK to do, only that the risks inherent in doing it are minor and should not be a scare, merely a common sense, don't do it activity.
Our regulation is aimed at the few of us who just don't get it. And it's aimed at avoiding risks and being prudent in all things related to flight.
Anyway, lots of great commentary on that blog. If you want to get into a pilots head and understand how they think and why they do what they do, I recommend Jethead highly.
I'm astounded. Simple high school science class tells us a few things:
1) Newton: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Ergo, a helicopter pushing it's rotor around will suffer a reaction pushing it round in the opposite direction. The tail rotors primary purpose is to provide a thrust to counter that reaction. Without it you have a seriously out of control machine. Steering is a secondary effect.
I believe it is possible that when a tail rotor fails one can cut the power to the main rotor and "autogyro" down at a survivable rate. Perhaps John could say more about that. I have have seen auto-gyros do that without any worry but I think if you were riding a "proper" helicopter when that happens you would be wishing you wore your brown trousers.
2) The Inverse Square Law: Radiated power from a point source falling on a target diminishes in intensity with the square of the distance from source to target.
That's fine for traffic lights and such which are basically radiating all their power in all directions.
You cannot compare a traffic light to a coherent parallel beam coming out of a laser. I'm willing to bet that if I managed to hit your eyeball with a commonly available 5 watt green laser pointer from a kilometer away that eye would not be working anymore. Want to take me up on that bet?
I think though that there may be some safety in that "if I managed part". Given a hand held pointer that is shaking around and a moving target there may be a fairly low probability of hitting an eyeball from one kilometer away. Further the amount of time we get an "eyeball strike" as the beam sweeps around may be low enough that not enough energy is delivered to do any damage. I would not want to risk it.
There is a lot of discussion on Drones and how the government wants to regulate them but I fly RC aircraft and have a governing body that I am certified with and I'm covered for $500K as long as I obey the rules. Check out the Academy Of Model Aeronautics. I fly electric.
I'm not a helicopter pilot, but I am an ex-helicopter mechanic. The tail rotor is the most vulnerable part of any helicopter (that has one, a few don't), and it doesn't take much to damage it. Do a quick search on YouTube for "tail rotor failure" to get an idea what happens next. It usually isn't pretty. I'm actually a bit surprised that a sheet of paper was enough to take down a Huey, but here's an example of an OH-58 (Bell JetRanger) tail rotor being hit by a warmup jacket that apparently was blown out of an open fuselage door http://blog.aopa.org/helicopter/?p=737 (about halfway down the page) resulting in a fatal crash. If a light jacket can do it, a decent-sized quad certainly can too.
There are a lot of issues related to drone operations where there is plenty of room for discussion and disagreement, but helicopter tail rotor strikes aren't among them. A tail rotor strike in a hover is bad enough (this fatal accident happened on Wednesday in southern California, and it should make the physics pretty clear): https://t.co/vz1XcWNhGE). In flight pretty much anything that gets into a tail rotor is very, very bad.
@jones I was at KCRQ for the accident and yesterdays cleanup.
I was on final approach for runway 24 at that airport and had a green laser relentlessly pointing at me. First landing attempt resulted in a go-around. I was flying the instruments less than 200' AGL which is more than most IFR pilots have to deal with. Then I did a reciprocal landing with the wind on runway 6, the tower was closed and there was other traffic on a 5 mile final for 24 getting beamed. My passenger said "never again" as I was tying down.
Yesterday a good friend in LA was told he can't fly a foam airplane on the beach regardless of how safe he is. Retired guy who lives to fly RC and wouldn't ever do anything stupid.
This whole thing is a mess and I hope that an outcome that can make everyone happy is reached. In the meantime it's important to not dismiss the facts. There have been over 600 drone sightings by aircraft in the vicinity of an airport in 9 months. Laser pointer incidents are actually going down because of the FAA/FBI involvement. That may or may not happen with drones, I guess we will find out.
For those interested, the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Registration Task Force Aviation Rulemaking Committee ("task force") released their recommendations this past Saturday. The full, report can be found here:
"The FAA and DOT will take the report and more than 4,500 public comments and draft a proposed rule. Both chairs emphasized that their is no finalized decision on the rule’s requirements." - Forbes
Those glasses may clash with both cockpit and airport indicators. That wavelength of green appears in both cases. Maybe it's purity is low enough to be a non issue.
Well yeah there are two issues though. One is eye damage, the other is being partially or fully blinded temporarily. There are a lot of anti-laser glasses in the pilot shops, etc. LAPD carry them in their flight bags. My airport started carrying them at the helicopter flight school.
You still wouldn't want the laser in your eye, even with proper protection it's blinding. 30 seconds of flying blind is a long time when you're low. Besides a direct hit to the eye, the laser scatters when it hits the windows, it's bright. It leaves streaks and messes with your night vision. I find a cell phone in the backseat too distracting around an airport at night. You can't always rely on runway lights and landing lights to work either. Anything that takes away from your night vision can be deadly.
Personally I don't think the laser would ever hit me directly in the eye, that would be very hard in the aircraft I fly.
FWIW...once registered you will be linked to that drone forever...and if something bad happens connected to it, you will be the first person the government looks up.
Keeping the database updated is going to be a massive hassle.
FWIW...once registered you will be linked to that drone forever...and if something bad happens connected to it, you will be the first person the government looks up.
Keeping the database updated is going to be a massive hassle.
Registration of the drones is to protect us. Yes You and Me.
Examples:
Someone 2 miles a way buys a drone and directs it to your house to take pictures of you.
Some idiot controls a drone and brings down a Helicopter or Airplane Killing XXX number of people.
Pick your battles people... Privacy or Security. You cannot have both.
Registration of the drones is to protect us. Yes You and Me.
Examples:
Someone 2 miles a way buys a drone and directs it to your house to take pictures of you.
Some idiot controls a drone and brings down a Helicopter or Airplane Killing XXX number of people.
Pick your battles people... Privacy or Security. You cannot have both.
I kinda doubt anyone doing things you mentioned would put their registration number on their "drone".
Comments
Except...what happens without that registration?
I'm a professional helicopter pilot. My job is to bring a helicopter to the accident scene and then take the victim to the nearest trauma center.
There have already been cases in which someone doing my job has had to swerve to avoid the drone of some jerk who thought it would be fun to see how close he could get to the medical helicopter. Google it.
Let me be clear: people likely would have died if that drone had hit that helicopter. And if you're going to say, "my lightweight drone would just bounce off your heavy helicopter," tell me how many pilot-in-command hours you have of a real takes-you-with-it aircraft? Anything that makes pieces near a helicopter is going to send those pieces into the tail rotor - that's aerodynamics. Many helicopters, when they lose tail rotor parts, go unbalanced and rip the rest of the tail rotor drive system out. The loss of those parts messes up the balance of the helicopter, which sends it into the ground like a lawn dart.
I'm all about a reasonable degree of liberty. But when your having fun gets my nurse, my medic and my patient killed and turns my wife into a widow, then that's too much liberty.
Now you can say, "registration won't keep me from hitting your helicopter with my drone," and that's true. But the knowledge that you can't run away far enough fast enough from the FBI who will be on the way to your house as soon as any of the drone parts are recovered, might.
Register the damn drone. What are you, stupid?
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http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=FAA-2015-4378-0022
On rcgroups.com:
We are all aware of the DOT's intentions to have a drone registration system in place by the end of the year. You may agree or disagree and there have been some great discussions about it on RCGroups.
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2532513&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Click%20here%20to%20learn%20more.&utm_campaign=rcg%20mass%20halloween
Can this be true? How big and how fast would a remotely operated aircraft need be to have a measurable affect on the smallest aircraft capable of carrying a human?
Also, none these are drones, these are all remotely piloted. Only the military has autonomous robotic aircraft, but most of the military craft are also remotely piloted.
To my knowledge, the largest hex- and octo- copters are the ones that carry the profession movie cameras, where the copter cost $3000 and the camera costs $80,000.
Nobody is going to play chicken with a medivac copter and risk an $80,000 camera, unless its scripted in a movie. Even so, would it be possible for one of these to sneak up on a helicopter and crash into it? To do significant damage, wouldn't have to hit directly head one at full speed? Is this even possible? How likely is it?
Is there any recorded case of a quadcopter or larger bringing down or even damaging a piloted aircraft?
There was a big stink about the "danger of laser pointers" versus aircraft. Yet, in Egypt, we see footage of the government helicopter BATHED in GREEN (the brightest) laser pointers, yet none of these were brought down, at MOST they flew away in embarrassment.
I gotten call BS on all these unless there is some kind of evidence of actual danger.
John Abshier
A drone sucked into air intakes, or colliding with rotors is also reason enough.
@redline The FAA knows that drone registration won't change much, I think you know that too.
Which kinds would those be? I always heard the tail is only for steering, the craft would rotate until the wind caught it, and any pilot would would easily land safely. Have the helicopter pilots been lying all these years? As in the next example:
> The paper was blown up and went into the tail rotor as the UH-1 was taking off. The UH-1 landed and sat there until another UH-1 brought a couple of mechanics with parts to repair the tail rotor.
So the the tail got broke, and the pilot landed. How many pilots and mechanics died in this incident? Of embarrassment?
> mind if I shined a green laser pointer in your eyes?
Have you even looked into a green traffic light up close, like at the first car at the intersection? Isn't this the same as looking into a green laser on the ground from ANY aircraft in flight? (I might have calculated wrong, math was not my best subject). And if you are close enough where the laser would be significantly bright to cause discomfort, I imagine your target would take it from you and shine it on your large intestine.
I still gotta call BS. If we look at ALL the cases where quadcopter and laser pointer COMBINED brought down ANY aircraft and count the injuries AND fatalities, the number appears to remain zero. Unless there is a big pile of data I missed, the data might be trying to tell us something.
As to lasers and pilots, I don't have any personal experience. I am an old retired aviator and lasers were not in common use while I was flying. I can tell one story that happened to me. I was flying at night, low level at Fort Sill, OK. This was before pilots used night vision devices. We would turn the instrument lighting to very low so we could see outside the aircraft. A search light flipped on and hit my aircraft for just a second. I could not see the ground outside or see my instruments inside to maintain proper attitude. I pulled the stick back to gain altitude and had a good copilot. He turned the instrument lighting full on and I was able to use the artificial horizon to maintain proper attitude.
John Abshier
I've got one of those. It's a "safety glasses" only device frankly, and it's sold for $5 on ebay all the time. People don't evaluate this stuff well, making the hazard real enough for the pilots and people on the plane.
More fundamentally, safety systems, training, and other means and methods intended to avoid harm are there to mitigate risks. Nobody involved in aviation would tell you that it's OK to depend on those. They aren't there as primary means and methods. They are there so people survive risk inherent in flight.
The primary goal in all of these things is to have a safe, successful flight. It's never acceptable to increase risk for shallow reasons and flying a drone is a shallow reason relative to the lives and expense involved in any meaningful flight.
Here: " "
YES! That data tells us that our engineering, training and risk management is doing it's job. The people involved in those incidents had options they needed to navigate unplanned flight dynamics successfully enough to tell others what happened.
It does not tell us that continuing to take those risks makes any sense at all.
One could live their life in this reckless way, say by jumping across tracks just in front of trains. One could also say, of the successful attempts, "If we look at ALL the cases where the train was close, and the jump performed..." and reach the same conclusion.
Really, that kind of thing works, until it doesn't. That's what a risk is.
Crashes with drones do not result in death or damage, UNTIL THEY DO.
Again, that is what a risk is.
That person is successful jumping train tracks, UNTIL THEY AREN'T.
Aviation is all about doing what it takes to avoid scenarios like that. Everyone in flight wants options and they want the safety checks, they want the engineering, they want the risk management, and all of the regulation we have related to these things serves those ends.
Every single flight is good, until it isn't. That threat is present anytime a person pilots an aircraft. That we do it commercially and for the military at all depends on our risk management, engineering and training intended to give the people involved the options they need to survive the activity.
The message here is we just don't add risks we don't have to. Doing so kills people, plain and simple. Might not kill 'em today, but it eventually does, and that's why pointing pointers at planes and the current conflict over drones is seeing regulation.
Doing that saves lives, and we value that over personal freedom when it comes to aviation. The whole field isn't viable, unless we assert that to be true. And we have, make no mistake.
Really, nobody cares that someone can't point their pointer, or fly their drone, or do any number of other things in proximity to aircraft, because the lives of the people on that aircraft are more important than whatever activity is involved with the hazards.
Right now, he's got a post up on lasers. It's rational, and accurate in the physics. Really, it's hard to shine a light into a cockpit in a way to do very serious harm. It's a distraction.
If you read more, distractions are risks, and those are discouraged for obvious reasons. His commentary is related to how the public should perceive their risk in flight due to laser pointers. He's saying, non issue, and he's right. You won't read him saying it's OK to do, only that the risks inherent in doing it are minor and should not be a scare, merely a common sense, don't do it activity.
Our regulation is aimed at the few of us who just don't get it. And it's aimed at avoiding risks and being prudent in all things related to flight.
Anyway, lots of great commentary on that blog. If you want to get into a pilots head and understand how they think and why they do what they do, I recommend Jethead highly.
I'm astounded. Simple high school science class tells us a few things:
1) Newton: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Ergo, a helicopter pushing it's rotor around will suffer a reaction pushing it round in the opposite direction. The tail rotors primary purpose is to provide a thrust to counter that reaction. Without it you have a seriously out of control machine. Steering is a secondary effect.
I believe it is possible that when a tail rotor fails one can cut the power to the main rotor and "autogyro" down at a survivable rate. Perhaps John could say more about that. I have have seen auto-gyros do that without any worry but I think if you were riding a "proper" helicopter when that happens you would be wishing you wore your brown trousers.
2) The Inverse Square Law: Radiated power from a point source falling on a target diminishes in intensity with the square of the distance from source to target.
That's fine for traffic lights and such which are basically radiating all their power in all directions.
You cannot compare a traffic light to a coherent parallel beam coming out of a laser. I'm willing to bet that if I managed to hit your eyeball with a commonly available 5 watt green laser pointer from a kilometer away that eye would not be working anymore. Want to take me up on that bet?
I think though that there may be some safety in that "if I managed part". Given a hand held pointer that is shaking around and a moving target there may be a fairly low probability of hitting an eyeball from one kilometer away. Further the amount of time we get an "eyeball strike" as the beam sweeps around may be low enough that not enough energy is delivered to do any damage. I would not want to risk it.
http://www.modelaircraft.org/documents.aspx
Kilowatt
There are a lot of issues related to drone operations where there is plenty of room for discussion and disagreement, but helicopter tail rotor strikes aren't among them. A tail rotor strike in a hover is bad enough (this fatal accident happened on Wednesday in southern California, and it should make the physics pretty clear): https://t.co/vz1XcWNhGE). In flight pretty much anything that gets into a tail rotor is very, very bad.
I was on final approach for runway 24 at that airport and had a green laser relentlessly pointing at me. First landing attempt resulted in a go-around. I was flying the instruments less than 200' AGL which is more than most IFR pilots have to deal with. Then I did a reciprocal landing with the wind on runway 6, the tower was closed and there was other traffic on a 5 mile final for 24 getting beamed. My passenger said "never again" as I was tying down.
Yesterday a good friend in LA was told he can't fly a foam airplane on the beach regardless of how safe he is. Retired guy who lives to fly RC and wouldn't ever do anything stupid.
This whole thing is a mess and I hope that an outcome that can make everyone happy is reached. In the meantime it's important to not dismiss the facts. There have been over 600 drone sightings by aircraft in the vicinity of an airport in 9 months. Laser pointer incidents are actually going down because of the FAA/FBI involvement. That may or may not happen with drones, I guess we will find out.
http://www.faa.gov/uas/publications/media/RTFARCFinalReport_11-21-15.pdf
"The FAA and DOT will take the report and more than 4,500 public comments and draft a proposed rule. Both chairs emphasized that their is no finalized decision on the rule’s requirements." - Forbes
What this mean are these robot used for commercial purposes?
This discussion has progressed to another thread, a how to and when.
http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/163054/unmanned-aircraft-systems-uas-registration#latest
http://www.certified-laser-eyewear.com/green-laser-safety-glasses-od-4
or something like them, just in case ...
-Phil
Agree, should be standard issue upon landing.
A pilot needs to try it and see.
You still wouldn't want the laser in your eye, even with proper protection it's blinding. 30 seconds of flying blind is a long time when you're low. Besides a direct hit to the eye, the laser scatters when it hits the windows, it's bright. It leaves streaks and messes with your night vision. I find a cell phone in the backseat too distracting around an airport at night. You can't always rely on runway lights and landing lights to work either. Anything that takes away from your night vision can be deadly.
Personally I don't think the laser would ever hit me directly in the eye, that would be very hard in the aircraft I fly.
http://olympics.nbcsports.com/2015/12/22/marcel-hirscher-drone-video-camera-slalom-alpine-skiing-world-cup/?cid=eref:nbcnews:text
Keeping the database updated is going to be a massive hassle.
When a group will not self regulate, the government is forced to do it for you.
As a pilot, RC flyer, amateur rocketry buff and a drone owner, the drone community brought this on themselves.
And when a drone brings down a plane (which will happen), registration means a trail back to the fool who caused it to happen.
But... people not, "drones" are registered.
Examples:
Someone 2 miles a way buys a drone and directs it to your house to take pictures of you.
Some idiot controls a drone and brings down a Helicopter or Airplane Killing XXX number of people.
Pick your battles people... Privacy or Security. You cannot have both.
I kinda doubt anyone doing things you mentioned would put their registration number on their "drone".
http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/23/faa-drone-registrations-strong/