I'm on mobile and didn't watch the video, but a commercial airliner travels something like 500mph, 8 lbs of drone is pretty damaging at that speed. I know they take significant precautions against eg birds.
They do abuse engines a lot for testing (http://www.gereports.com/post/101784637445/where-jet-engines...) and the golf ball hail seems pretty challenging. I doubt an R/C drone is going to give the engine much trouble. Not that it couldn't damage the engine, just that it wouldn't take out the airplane.
Personally I think the drone discussion is more about the safety concerns they aren't talking about rather than what they do talk about. A lot of security scenarios are compromised if you can accurately deliver a small amount of payload from the air into an arbitrary space.
I think the FAA would do well to allow property owners, or their designated agents, a free hand to do what ever they want to drones over their property at altitudes below 400'. Whether it is shoot them out of the sky, or capture them with nets and resell them on the used drone market. Drone pilots would self limit their flying activities at that point I suspect.
Frozen turkeys almost completely disintegrate, they're mostly water. Drones have components that won't completely disintegrate, and those pieces can cause significant nozzle or turbine blade damage. An engine loss in turbine powered aircraft isn't exactly routine, but shouldn't result in the loss of the aircraft. It's still considered an emergency though. And a huge amount of air traffic isn't turbine powered, it's smaller general aviation aircraft with normally aspirated engines.
The major danger of birds is that they travel in flocks, which greatly increases the probability of multiple-ingestion events taking out all engines.
I agree that a drone hitting an airplane could be awful, but the linked video shows a ~8ft across multicopter shearing the winglet off of an airliner, which is a comically implausible bit of scare-mongering.
ChuckMcM|10 years ago
Personally I think the drone discussion is more about the safety concerns they aren't talking about rather than what they do talk about. A lot of security scenarios are compromised if you can accurately deliver a small amount of payload from the air into an arbitrary space.
I think the FAA would do well to allow property owners, or their designated agents, a free hand to do what ever they want to drones over their property at altitudes below 400'. Whether it is shoot them out of the sky, or capture them with nets and resell them on the used drone market. Drone pilots would self limit their flying activities at that point I suspect.
cmurf|10 years ago
digikata|10 years ago
Air safety is a set of overlapping precautionary approaches, just like different layers of computer security.
bri3d|10 years ago
I agree that a drone hitting an airplane could be awful, but the linked video shows a ~8ft across multicopter shearing the winglet off of an airliner, which is a comically implausible bit of scare-mongering.