Well... I never thought that a drone being in an area would force fire fighters out of the area. It makes sense that it is dangerous to fly in the same area, it's just something that would never have crossed my mind.
How hard do you think they are going to lay down the law with drones since insedences are become more and more common?
People who do this give all UAV operators a bad name. That said, from a purely technical standpoint 11,000 feet is seriously impressive for a hobbyist pilot. These kinds of near misses are disappointingly common, but sooner or later there will be an incident where the human pilot doesn't spot the UAV and it isn't a miss. When that happens, I expect the FAA will come down hard on UAV operators who don't follow the rules.
Heh. Maybe "hobbyist" wasn't the best word; working at NASA sets the "hobbyist" bar pretty high. Regardless, there aren't many groups here that can keep a telemetry lock on a UAV at 11,000 feet without either satellite links or very expensive dedicated radio assets. I wonder if you can buy a sat-com equipped UAV off the shelf these days.
I honestly don't know. The ones I'm used to seeing around here are octocopter camera platforms that run in the 20-30lb range and are designed to lift a DSLR. There's exactly zero reason for them to ever operate outside of line-of-sight. A fixed-wing anything is pretty unusual amongst the FPV crew; a fixed-wing capable of capturing imagery 10kft above a forest fire is the sort of thing that prolly oughtta have a tail number.
I'll agree with your very first statement. Sadly that reflects to any subject we are talking about. For example, my lifted diesel truck that I now receive crap for since people purposely tune their chips to "roll coal". I wish they would become a tad more strict as of now instead of waiting for the accidents. It's bound to happen, I agree, yet very sad that an accident is what it takes to change things. It's the exact same way for my job. Everything is fine until someone gets hurt, then all hell breaks loose and shit gets blown out of proportion.