There are fewer obstacles. That's the main reason it works, if you tried flying at 1 m above the ground it would become a lot more like driving, but without the benefit of friction. Flying requires less strict constraints on latency because it happens in straight line segments that are rather longer than the segments that you use when controlling a vehicle.
Flying a drone with e.g 1000ms RTT latency is not exactly the same as driving a car on a highway. There are typically less collisions in airspace.. :)
There are fewer obstacles. That's the main reason it works, if you tried flying at 1 m above the ground it would become a lot more like driving, but without the benefit of friction. Flying requires less strict constraints on latency because it happens in straight line segments that are rather longer than the segments that you use when controlling a vehicle.
Not too many trees or pedestrians at 25,000ft, and I haven't seen a stop sign above 14,000ft or so.
There sure are a lot of those at ground level though.
The drones mostly fly themselves, the operators are just telling them the path, what to look at, and what to shoot at.