Agreed, sorry for my off the wall comment. WJK, my comment was inappropriate and I do apologize.
I thought your original post made a valid point. WJK threw a cheap shot out of nowhere. There are a number of things that I scratch my head over with the current part 107 approach. Visual observers are one of those things that sound better on paper than they usually work out in real life.
I know from personal experience that when a piper cub comes bombing in over the tree line at 125' AGL at my AMA sanctioned RC club field ... I don't even hear them coming until they are right over me. (Normally you hear aircraft miles before you can see them.) When it happened to me, I had about 0.75 seconds to react. When I'm flying fixed wing aircraft I can quickly cut throttle and dive and get into the safe zone below the tree line -- which is what I did. I've also had mosquito patrol helicopters come out of no where at our sanctioned RC club field.
But if I was flying a fully autonomous survey mission with a dji quad, what are you gong to do? It moves so slow even under manual control, it has to descend very slowly to stay out of it's own ring vortices. It's almost not worth disrupting the mission, and you just have to go on hope? I haven't seen a mission planning app for DJI that has an emergency avoid button, and lately (with drone deploy) I've even been struggling with lost connections during the flight (the hand controller is fine.) I've never seen anyone address this issue to any level of personal satisfaction/logic. If you add in a VO that is beyond the pilot's line of site communicating via radio or cell phone, just how do you execute an emergency "avoid" maneuver then? I am suggesting this all sounds way better on paper than it actually works in real life. Am I missing something? I don't hear these things talked about very much?
We purchased a mavic recently and I discovered if it's 100' away and I take my eyes off it for a second, I have a terrible time finding it again in the sky. It's crazy. I can pick out our phantom 4 way easier from a much further distance. How many people actually keep eyes on their drone 100% of the entire flight? I see youtube videos where people are sitting in their car talking the camera while the drone is in the air outside up there somewhere. I see maps people have made where they were obviously sitting inside the car while the drone was flying. I get it, it's boring, I live in MN and it can be brutally cold, but personally I stand outside and at least make the attempt to keep my drone in sight. I do have issues finding it again when I take my eyes off it for a second to check status on my ground station (especially the mavic.)
The FAA's breakdown between commercial and hobby makes perfect sense for full size airplanes. When you are carrying trusting passengers you have an extra level of responsibility, but makes no sense for drones when you aren't carrying people.
I can pass the FAA part 107 test with 70%. If I pass my private pilot written with 70%, I go on to be trained by a real instructor and all those mistakes get corrected. Then I need a check ride from an examiner who probably sees the things I missed on the written and pays special attention to my weak areas. But with part #107, I trot off with my 70% score to fly commercially ... so does that mean if I do something wrong (which I missed on the test) that I'm ok, because that was something I missed on the test (but I still got 70%?) I know that's not true, but I also know there are a lot of people (including myself) that bring a lot of confusion and misinterpretation of the rules to their work. I scored 100% on my most recent recertification test, but I know that I immediately started forgetting things, and I see issues come up online and other places that have me scratching my head.
Now we have RID coming down the pipeline which doesn't seem to do anything to enhance the safety of full size aircraft (where real lives are at risk.) The RID system lives in it's own sandbox completely separate from ATC and full size airplanes. I can build and fly a part 103 ultralight with zero tests, zero certification, zero tracking, pretty much zero rules. But 3 years from now, I won't be able to fly a paper airplane off my back deck without it being a felony.
I think we all want to do the right things and follow the regs down to the letter, but it doesn't always make sense to me or fit my practical observations. My brain has this desire to sort things out and make some sense of the chaos, but it struggles sometimes.