>> The guy flying the R/C plane so close to an airport is an idiot.

<VBG> Family friends, when I was a small child, had a 'beach house' near a 
small provincial airport that had very little activity. During the summer 
holidays they would stay at the beach house, and one of the activities they 
got up to was to fly a box kite on from the sand dunes at the end of the 
airport. If they got it too high, or some airport activity was about to 
happen, then someone on the airport staff would come driving around the 
perimeter to tell them off. AIUI they got to a point where they scampered 
promptly when they saw the airport vehicle move ...

...
>Being that Australia has banned guns and lasers, I guess model airplanes 
>are next.

One of my recent colleagues here in the UK is a paraglider. Apparently the 
UK was attempting to enforce some sort of rule whereby every paraglider, 
along with every other form of flying object (not sure that it extended to 
model RC aircraft) had to have some sort of position and IFF beacon on it. 
The extra weight that they would have needed to carry on a paraglider would 
have made it prohibitive, apart from the cost.

The way he explained the proposed regulation to me suggested that there were 
moves afoot to have unmanned autonomous drones flying wherever they wanted 
...

I got the impression that the relevant authorities were told to 'go get 
stuffed' by the combined paraglider/microlight/etc organisations as what 
they were proposing was impractical, and why they wanted to do it was 
unrealistic. I think some of these clubs also had a bunch of guys who were 
able to tear to shreds the figures that were being given as requirements - 
it seemed that whoever thought the scheme up had no real experience of what 
was required. 

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