Originally Posted by
tmulligan
This issue does not seem to be the fault of the FAA, they are responsible for insuring the safety of commercial and general aviation. Nor does it seem to be the fault of the AMA, they have been obviously trying to negotiate this issue for a long time. However, it does seem to be the fault of pilots (fixed wing, rotary, quad, etc) who have flown their models in ways that seem obviously dangerous (eg, flying near airports, in the flight paths of commercial or general aviation planes, copters, etc). They likely make the situation worse when they advertise their risky behavior by posting it on the web. I bet that if all of us flew safely and conscientiously avoided risk, there would be no need for FAA licensing.
The trouble making drone flyers are [from our vantage point] an unstoppable force that could only do us harm by association. The only control we could have exercised was to completely distance ourselves from them. We needed to make it abundantly clear to the FAA that what we do as traditional RC Flyers has nothing at all to do with models that are equipped to be flown beyond our unassisted view.