The BadEcon in question:

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Dourado-Wildlife-Strikes-MOP-v1.pdf

Background:

Last December, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) announced that all drones/UAVs weighing more than 250g must be registered. Announcement here. From the report, during the year 2015, and not including December, there were 1133 reports of unsafe operation of drones, including several that risked airport operations and firefighting operations. Drone operation is expected to increase dramatically, from 200 thousand drones in 2014, 1.6 million expected to be sold in 2015, to 2.5 million sold in 2016 with year on year sale of recreational drones expected to grow 23% for 5 years.

A bird strike is when a bird hits a flying airplane. It’s not a good thing for either party, although the planes generally win.

The Mercatus report:

Last month, the Mercatus Center at George Mason released the report linked above. In it, they used bird strike data to determine the likelihood of drone strike damage and fatalities. The main quantitative argument that they use is that there are 10 billion birds in the US, only 13,414 of which successfully rammed a flying plane in 2014. For every 100,000 bird flight hours, assuming birds spend half their lives in flight, there are thus only 3.06 x 10^-5 bird strikes. From there, they say that sub 2kg drones pose no risk, and that because reasons (they don’t explain themselves) the drone strike rate for 2kg+ drones is a fifth that.

This is a pretty egregious analysis for a number of reasons.

First, the distribution of birds and drones is going to be radically different. Given that the vast majority of bird strikes (90+%) occur during takeoff and landing, when birds and planes are likely to be at similar altitudes and where planes are particularly vulnerable, one would need to look at populations of birds near airports. Incidentally, that’s where effort goes into when trying to prevent bird strikes. Geese in national parks aren’t the problem as much as geese resting between runways. However, when looking at populations of people 98% live near a public airport. While clearly not all of these people are going to have drones and live close enough to an airport to interfere with traffic (not counting the plentiful amount of helicopters over various urban areas), the concentration of people with drones is going to be tilted towards being in areas where taking off and landing planes are more plentiful.

Second, birds are better suited to avoiding planes and other obstacles than most drones. They aren’t subject to certain distractions and have better sensory input such as a wider field of view (they aren’t staring at a screen some distance away).

Third, they aren’t accounting for purposeful human action of the malicious or colossally stupid variety, and allowing the current record of that to influence their cost estimates. As stated earlier, there is expected to be a drastic increase in drone ownership over the next few years. Already, drone operators have caused various amounts of property damage and externalities including the aforementioned firefighting interruptions and causing power outages. These would only be expected to increase as more and more people get drones and start doing stupid things with them. This isn’t even counting intentional misuse, which while not likely to be deterred by registration and a $5 fee, having registration would deter certain types of misuse assuming the authorities can retrieve the intact drone or otherwise identify it.

I would also like to add that setting safety regulations before enough damaging incidents can occur would likely help new drone pilots adjust better to them rather than having them imposed after significant problems arrive.