ORIGINAL: Mike in DC
I'm not sure I'm following you. I think you are saying that rather than adopt branded's no-fault proposal, the responsible thing is for each of us to buy liability insurance to cover any mistakes we might make
Correct.
(other than the perfect humans among us who don't make mistakes).
Yeah, but my wife doesn't fly RC anyway, so leave her out of it !!
OK, we "buy" AMA insurance to cover the maimed and killed, but doesn't THAT promote risky behavior? I, like you, have my own liability coverage. Does THAT promote risky behavior?
What I'm trying to say is that having insurance protects people from responsibility for their mistakes. Are you saying that insurance is a bad thing? If not, then it seems to me that from the "encouraging people to be irresponsible" angle, it's a wash between yours and branded's proposals.
Thanks for at least thinking this through and coming up with a logical, rather than emotional argument. Such responses are much appreciated.
I do see what you are driving at, and its a really interesting point !
However, it seems to me that purchasing insurance
when you are not being forced to, is typically an acknowledgement of willingness to take responsibility for your actions and to voluntarily try to protect not just yourself, but the others whom you may hurt either physically or financially. People who are responsible enough to take such
voluntary steps are (IMO) likely to also be equally responsible in the rest of their behavior.
While there may in fact be some people who behave as you outlined (I'm insured - at least up to a certain extent, so I can now be careless), I'd imagine that such people are few and far between... much fewer than those who don't want to accept any responsibility at all. I could be wrong tho.
Furthermore, the person who assumes he doesn't have to fix what he broke, or has to pay at most some token amount, sees no real risk in having sloppy frequency control discipline. He has the idea that worst-case, he is out a token amount of money. The guy who took out the insurance knows that his insurance will cover up to a certain amount of damage, but if he
really screws the pooch in terms of damage to property or persons hit by the shot-down aircraft then he is still responsible for any amount in excess of his coverage.
I know that the insurance I have will cover the costs of any aircraft that I shoot down, plus a reasonable liability coverage for additional damage that I may cause .. but given that I live in California (aka "Lawsuit central") I still know that I could be beggared by a serious incident, and so I excercise an enormous amount of care in frequency control, as well as in the way that I maintain and operate my aircraft.
Later
Gordon