Do you remember the old cross-channel hovercraft. The pilots operating them had to have an ATPL, which is clearly ridiculous. Had they become more widespread I'm sure someone would have eventually waived the requirement. Likewise for drones. If they can be demonstrated 1) not to be habitually sharing airspace with manned aircraft and 2) to be capable of avoiding collisions on the rare occasions that they come into conflict then their utility is compelling enough that the world will adapt itself to them.
I am not sure that this is a good comparison to try to argue your case... There were a string of accidents, which was at least partly to blame for why they are no longer around. The same will apply to drones... All in good time!
I agree liability is an issue, but you could say the same about self-driving cars - which are clearly on the cards and where it's likely to be a far bigger issue: the average drone crash will squash some plants in a field; the average car-crash is much more likely to actually hurt someone. I used to work in a hospital where if you were writing a letter about patient A but then looked up blood results for patient B, it would put patient B's name on the top of the letter, then change it back to patient A when you came to print the thing out. It often seems to me that computer programmers seem to get a free-ride when it comes to liability issues!
Although progress is being made in this area - I don't think it will become a reality anytime soon. Anyone else read the crash / near misses / driver required to take actions to avoid collision, statistics of Google's driverless car? I did (I worked on this) - there were thousands more than were reported - and that makes me seriously doubt any sane insurance companies will cover them (again in the short term - 10 years down the line it will be a different story though).
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who goes to jail
no none
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who pays for damage
insurance, just like in a road accident
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who compensates families who lost loved ones
insurance, just like in a road accident
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who cleans up the mess on the streets / roofs / river / ponds / other
those whose job it is to clean up said commodities after whatever accident
I disagree - someone MUST be made accountable for the accident, otherwise nobody will require the insurance to clean up the mess. For instance, if an aeroplane engineer forgets something in the maintenance schedule and signs it off, everybody died on the first flight due to engineering faults - the blame is not with the operator, but with the engineers that maintain the aeroplane. The same will need to apply to drones.
What sane insurance company will pay for drones to fly over a city!? Damages of a 30+Kg machine crashing from say 400ft up without considering the forward momentum, the initial impact force (before bounce) will be just over 355 thousand Newtons, equivalent to just over 36 metric tons. The damage that this will cause with this small a surface area could be substantial. A single accident could cost millions of pounds of repairs, and / or damage. In central London this could be tens of millions of pounds!!! A car would need to be travelling at around 105mph to cause the same impact force. Which is still somehow unlikely to happen on a busy day in central London (where traffic is pretty standstill). However, I could see a drone be overhead! But furthermore this one crash could destroy the road causing mayhem for thousands of people!
Anyway... Dead argument... Its not going to happen anytime soon!