To: City of Berkeley and Planning and Justice Commission
Say NO to Commercial Drones in the City of Berkeley!
We residents of Berkeley, CA and the East Bay are alarmed at the possibility that the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) will approve the use of commercial drones (such as Package Delivery Drones) in the US skies by June 2016. We are writing to request that the City of Berkeley ban commercial drones in Berkeley.
We agree with the safety concerns expressed by the Peace and Justice Commission of the City of Berkeley in their April 29, 2014 Report, "Drone Policy for the City of Berkeley" in the section "Safety Issues" on Page 3, namely:
1) Drones are largely unproven in American civilian airspace, and have only seen widespread use in combat theaters, where large drones are the least safe class of aircraft currently in operation.
2) They are known to go off course, disappear, and crash into other objects. They can be easily hacked and manipulated off course and used in ways not intended by their operators.
3) An FAA official testified to Congress that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported 52.7 drone accidents per 100,000 hours of flight time, seven times the civil aviation rate of 7.11 accidents per 100,000 hours.
4) According to a 2005 Department of Defense report, every 100,000 flight hours saw 191 AAI Shadow UAVs destroyed or in need of drastic repairs, compared to just four manned F-16s4.
http://tinyurl.com/qynup6q
We agree with the safety concerns expressed by the Peace and Justice Commission of the City of Berkeley in their April 29, 2014 Report, "Drone Policy for the City of Berkeley" in the section "Safety Issues" on Page 3, namely:
1) Drones are largely unproven in American civilian airspace, and have only seen widespread use in combat theaters, where large drones are the least safe class of aircraft currently in operation.
2) They are known to go off course, disappear, and crash into other objects. They can be easily hacked and manipulated off course and used in ways not intended by their operators.
3) An FAA official testified to Congress that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported 52.7 drone accidents per 100,000 hours of flight time, seven times the civil aviation rate of 7.11 accidents per 100,000 hours.
4) According to a 2005 Department of Defense report, every 100,000 flight hours saw 191 AAI Shadow UAVs destroyed or in need of drastic repairs, compared to just four manned F-16s4.
http://tinyurl.com/qynup6q
Why is this important?
We do not want commercial drones in Berkeley due to safety concerns.