Interesting read..
Original Post
I can understand the employees concerns, these kind of things can be abused (for example, a vengeful supervisor targeting employees that he felt slighted him, using it to spy on an employee to find even minor violations to tag him with and get him fired). That said, something like this may be a good way to inspect track and equipment, it can't do away with what car knockers and inspectors do, but rather it can be used to survey an area after a bad storm quickly, or potentially to look for things like people trespassing at a yard,or up to know good. It is rather limited, if you read the rules it looks like these can only be used line of sight, so for example, they cannot launch drones and control them from a central command station miles away, so there will still be a person nearby controlling the drone (kind of like aN RC airplane enthusiast flies).
Ideally, it would be kind of neat to have eyes in the sky that for example, have constant monitoring of track and bridges, looking for problems or possible terrorist activity, but drones are not how to do that.
