[Encosia]

Drones are the new UFO.

If a pilot or passenger sees a bird, balloon, or odd reflection these days, it's a "drone". Be skeptical about the recent uptick in fear mongering about the number of drone sightings in the vicinity of airports and airplanes.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in small, four-seater airplanes and also owns a popular quadcopter model, I always feel compelled to add some color to these threads about drones.

When I'm flying my quadcopter, it's extremely difficult to spot once I've lost continuous sight of it. Look away for a second, and you're staring at an empty sky. Even when it's just a couple hundred feet away and you know exactly where to look, the thing is nearly invisible in the air.

Sitting in the passenger seat of a Cirrus or Cessna, I've always been surprised by how difficult it is to spot nearby aircraft. Whole planes, orders of magnitude larger than a consumer drone, are much harder to spot than you'd expect. Even when ATC alerts us where the traffic is, you rarely pick it up visually until much later than you'd anticipate.

Maybe more importantly, many modern drones have geofencing that prevents them from flying into the restricted airspace around airports.

Combining my experience in both situations with the geofencing around restricted airspace, I find it incredibly hard to believe that folks are honestly spotting consumer quadcopters from airplanes in this quantity. It's just not credible at all if you've spent much time around either or both hobbies.

[omegant]

Well think again, as a commercial pilot with 16 years of experience I can tell you that sometimes you can even see what type of bird you crossed. And it has to be quite close to be a problem to you, so pilots are reporting drones that could be ingested in to the engine and create a fire in short final. Not all reports are accurate, that's true. But most of us don't go reporting ufos these days...

[Encosia]

With all due respect to your experience, digging into the details of the FAA's data on these supposed drone encounters is telling: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/drones-are-the-new-ufos

For example, this is a report from this year that the FAA categorized as a drone encounter here in my hometown of Atlanta:

> A VFR aircraft receiving ATC service reported passing an object approx 500ft below him at 095. The pilot described the object as round circular, red in color, and reported it could have been a drone or a balloon. A80 ATC did not observe any targets on radar in the vicinity of N7745.

A drone or a balloon? Might as well just chalk it up to swamp gas at that point.

Having been in aircraft looking out and having watched from the ground as my own quadcopter disappeared into the sky significantly closer than 500ft away, I find it extremely challenging to see most reports like that as credible. Yet, the FAA has no qualms with aggregating this junk data into a scary story to sway public opinion. Disappointing.

I'm curious. Have you personally, definitively witnessed a consumer drone in restricted airspace during approach?