What has caused all this is the idiot that has never flown anything, goes out, buys a Phantom or some other such "easy to fly" quad and then gets himself into trouble because either he didn't calibrate it correctly, didn't give it time to set up gps coordinates, flies it like a moron trying to "cloud surf" or thinks he's the next Chuck Yeager and starts flying it way beyond it's design limits or beyond his ability to see it and ends up getting into the news.
All you have to do is a little search on youtube and it would be easy to see, that to the uninitiated, we all look like a bunch of wild law breakers with no self control and no real common sense. Flying above the clouds over congested cities, over national monuments during peak times, over crowds at public events, and chasing cars on the highway only gives the FAA, the Park Service and basically any police department with a helicopter a real and perceived sense of public danger.
Just do a quick search on youtube using "drone nearly collides with" and you will soon see what the public perception of this part of the hobby is. Let's say that you had an aunt on a jet airliner that was brought down by some idiot with a Blade 350 and you tell me, would you care that 10,000 people flew safely that day or would you want the whole damned lot stopped cold?
Listen carefully to the words this FAA official uses at :30 and beyond and you can easily see where the fear comes fom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxInDycb5fY
And read the comments at the bottom of this story and you can see what the public thinks, or at least what comments were made before it was disabled.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/p...ational-parks/
The fact is that morons are killing this hobby and turning the public at large against us with the help of the FAA and the media.