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The evil effect of #TheNarrative

As regular readers will know, I fly RC model aircraft and drones -- or at least I used to, until our local council got involved in screwing with my life.

Regardless of the fact that most of my flying is now done "under the radar", I'm still very active in the community and the industry so keep a weather eye on news coverage of such things and yesterday I saw that the anti-drone narrative is alive and well within our media.

On Thursday, most publications carried the same story, albeit with slightly differnet spins but none of it was good and facts played second fiddle to speculation and hyperbole.

Apparently, if the headlines are to be believed, a drone came close to colliding with an airliner near Auckland airport. OMG!

The first report I read was from Radio NZ.

What a load of emotive garbage this was.

They clearly went out of their way to find "experts" who could pour fat on the fires that are regularly stoked by the anti-drone narrative that this media loves to drag out on a semi-regular basis.

They dragged up someone called Dr Isaac Henderson whose claim to fame is that he's apparently the NZ Chair of UAVNZ. an organisation that claims that they "seek to build the public's understanding of commercial UAV operations and the benefits that these deliver to society". You'd think, therefore, he'd be quite pro-drone... right?

Well here's what RNZ quoted him as saying about the risks of a drone colliding with an aircraft:

FFS!

Yeah, and you could also be hit by a piece of falling space junk which, as I regularly point out in this column, is becoming an actual reality of ever-increasing frequency. Yep, that's right, there's more risk of a piece of space rock or falling space hardware causing damage or injury than there is of a recreational multirotor drone killing you or breaking your stuff -- but nobody makes a big noise about that do they?

The reality is that "drones" have been in regular use for around 15 years now, by professionals and hobbyists alike. During that time there has been no significant injuries attributed to them colliding with manned aviation and indeed, the number of evidenced collisions is incredibly small. In the few proven cases, damage has been comparatively light to the aircraft and, as often as not, those operating the drones are police who, one would expect, were operating totally within the rules and regulations.

The article goes on to talk about the potential for licensing (to fly a child's toy???) and reveals that "about 1.3 percent of drone operators broke three or more civil aviation rules". How does that compare with drivers of cars on our roads... yeah... drone flyers are far less likely to break the rules than the average driver. Who hasn't (at least by accident) broken the posted speed limit on one or more occasions this year eh?

This vilification of drones and their users has to stop. It's a ridiculous misrepresentation of the facts and the truth and I've had a guts-full. I suspect that many other drone owners/users are similarly pissed off that our behaviour and the risks associated with our hobby is so massively misrepresented by "experts" and a media so eager to trot out the anti-drone narrative at every occasion.

But let's go back to that report of a drone almost colliding with an airliner near Auckland airport shall we...

Over on Stuff, their version of the story contains some slightly more objective information.

They are at least honest enough to point out that nobody's actually sure there was a drone at all and the story states:

What "appeared to be" a drone???

So there's a degree of uncertainty as to whether this actually was a drone. Funny how that never got mentioned in the RNZ story -- perhaps because the facts were overwhelmed by the anti-drone narrative that was in full swing there?

Stuff also writes:

So once again, there is an element of doubt involved. Stuff doesn't totally avoid the anti-drone narrative however because the headline on this story reads "Drone in near collision with Air NZ flight...", and it's only those who read the full story who'll be told that it might not have been a drone at all.

This is the level of garbage our news media has descended to -- clearly misleading headlines designed to simply create clicks and views on ads.

Both articles cite a general call for more and stricter regulation to control this drone menace which further exposes how stupid the people in charge of these things are. Only an idiot would believe that if it's discovered that someone has broken the rules, the solution is to create more rules or harsher rules. Do they not realise that rule-breakers, by definition, will not be affected by those harsher rules because they've proven they ignore them? Duh!

Perhaps the media would have been better to point out that NZ's drone regulations are, at least in places, no longer fit for purpose. They were created a decade ago when the technology was vastly different to that being used today and in an era when the true risk associated with their use was unknown.

Today we have over a decade of data on which to evaluate the risk and we are also dealing with craft that have vastly different capabilities plus many more safety features. Imagine if we had to drive our cars under road rules that were made for horses and carts... that's what we're facing.

I'll leave the final word up to Google's Gemini AI:

Hell, if AI can work this out, why can't our media and those who purport to be "experts" in this field?

Oh, that's right... #TheNarrative

For those who want an overview of New Zealand's decade-old drone rules then join the 37,000 others who've watched my video on the subject:

Carpe Diem folks!

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