Many conceptions of the future of drones hinge on the idea of nearly autonomous UAVs flying through the sky, doing everything from maintaining public safety to delivering products to your home. There are many obstacles — some legal and some practical — standing between our current status and the reality of this. One of the most difficult to overcome is the FAA’s line-of-sight requirements. In both its current formulation and its proposed regulations, the FAA requires that drone pilots maintain line-of-sight with the drone they are piloting at all times. This limits the way drones can be used in ways that effect both municipalities and the marketplace.

One cutting edge example of this issue is the startup Matternet, which delivers medicine by drone in rural areas of developing countries, and will be conducting real-world tests of a delivery drone in Switzerland starting this summer. The current pilot project centers on Matternet One, a drone that can deliver a two pound package at a distance of six miles in 15 minutes. The company intends to eventually lease its drones to other businesses for the purposes of making deliveries, using routing software that automatically routes around no-fly zones, buildings and other objects that may obstruct the drone’s path. The Swiss government is allowing tests to proceed on the condition that the drones have on-board parachutes to deploy if they suddenly lose control.

Delivery drones may capture the imagination most easily, but there are plenty of situations where line-of-sight requirements may also foil municipal and public safety applications of drones. One of the most intriguing possibilities this technology represents is the decrease in risk to human life that is inherent in allowing a drone to do dangerous things that previously required a person to accomplish. In some cases, line-of-sight requirements don’t get in the way of uses that increase the safety of a task, but situations exist where the advantage of a drone being able to go where a person cannot may be lost. For example, rescue services could use drones to locate survivors without putting personnel at risk, but their efforts to do so may be limited if the drone has to stay within the line-of-sight of an operator. Similarly, many surveying or observational tasks may involve using a drone to explore areas it would be risky to send a human being — many of which would be, by necessity, out of the view of any human operator.

The line-of-sight requirements have obvious benefits from a public safety perspective. They ensure that pilots are carefully monitoring their drones while also guaranteeing that drone operators are nearby in the event of a crash or a collision. They also make sense in an era where drone technology is still new, and domestic uses relatively untested. Yet line-of-sight requirements also place limits on the potential uses of the technology, and these limits may make increasingly less sense as drones are incorporated into domestic airspace. As the FAA considers its regulations, and local agencies make plans to utilize drones, alternatives to the line-of-sight requirement should become a part of the conversation to ensure that the ultimate regulations do not limit the possibilities inherent in domestic use of drones.