If you're a C-SPAN junkie like me you look forward with christmas-morning glee to the call-in episodes about drone laws.
There is exactly one type of person who wakes up at 5am to hold the line for 30 minutes to ask a question about drones, and it is (you guessed it) local yokels who are planning to shoot a drone down and looking for permission.
The anti-vaxxers know more science words but the anti-drone crowd is much more entertaining.
Please don't associate anti-vaxxers with the anti-drone crowd. People have actually gotten sick and died from preventable diseases caught from unvaccinated children.
And I can't imagine many people are suggesting drones be banned. But many including myself believe they do need to be regulated and situations like this are why.
A canada goose can weigh from 7-14 lbs, ducks are much smaller (3.5lbs). We test planes against bird strike. However, birds don't have screws and batteries. Even with that, they bring down planes (AWE1549)
There is a reason why airports are very, very careful about the vehicles that drive onto runways - FOD (foreign object damage) is a very real thing with very severe consequences when a plane is on approach and take-off.
Even if the fear of bringing down a plane and killing everyone on board is overblown, what about doing thousands of dollars worth of damage and delaying a whole bunch of people in their travel plans? And what's tradeoff to this risk? A bunch of hobbiests who want no regulation of thier hobby? Who's going to compensate the airlines and the delayed passengers?
Really hard to tell as we don't know enough about the incident.
We don't know how large the drone was or what part of the aircraft it hit, for example what happens if one of the larger commercial drones gets ingested into the engine.
I suppose intent matters too. A drone hitting a plane by mistake is apparently not unlike a bird strike, but how do you tell if a given drone has an explosive payload and is being aimed intentionally at an engine intake? It's only a matter of time. It makes sense to keep drones out of airport flightpaths. More sense than most of the post-911 security theatre, at least.
Surely aviation safety is based on trying to eliminate or mitigate low probability threats. It may be irrational to worry about drone hits for a single flight, but across all flights everywhere it could contribute to a crash. This is well understood in areas like radio transmission where you need a licence to use frequencies. It would be nice if everyone could transmit at high power on any frequency, but we don't have the systems to deal with that safely so their has to be enforced regulation.
From the sounds of it they just don't know and need to fund some research.
"And pilots have also called for the DoT to fund tests into what would happen if a drone got sucked into an engine or crashed into a plane's windscreen."
"Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association noted that while the threat of bird strikes had been well researched there was little data about how much damage a drone could cause a plane."
I wonder if any other organisations have conducted any rigorous testing?
Given that the plane didn't have any trouble landing, and they hit birds all the time, I think that this might show that it's fine to hit a drone so long as it isn't sucked into the engine ;)
A large drone hitting the engine of a jumbojet during takeoff or landing would be very bad news. Not only would it cost maybe millions of dollars of damage it might down the plane.
It used to be that incidents like these would be reported as UFOs. I wonder if someone had advanced drone technology 50 (ish) years ago? Or are some of the current "sightings" UFOs but there's now a plausible explanation (drones). The most curious report is the drone with the "balloon-like center" - might this have been reported as a weather balloon in the past?
Note: I'm using the term UFO as it's original acronym and don't mean to imply they're flown by the proverbial little green men.
EDIT: I'm using the term "little green men" in the gender neutral form and am not intentionally impuning the flying capabilities of little green women.
I think its more interesting that UFO reports from 50 yrs ago never included drone size deployments, therefore the reports from 50 yrs ago are quite likely inaccurate, unless the visitors to Earth were somehow limited to pre-2010-ish era technology.
Why don't they just shoot them down when they approach airports? Seems like a much more measured and appropriate response than "no drones anywhere without documents".
Shoot them down as a backup but if you legislate it a lot of amateur morons will think twice before flying near an airport. There's no way to know if this was malicious. It was probably just an idiot who wouldn't do it if he knew it was illegal.
People live near airports. You can't simply vaporize a drone; whatever you do to arrest it in the sky is going to cause drone pieces to hurtle towards the earth.
Taking LAX for an example... It has a perimeter of 4ish miles. Assume one sentry with a shotgun, loaded with birdshot every 300ft to give decent coverage of the perimeter, that gives us about 60 sentries. At 15 $/hr, 24/7, that gives a minimum cost of about $7M/year, ignoring any overhead for management, training, firearms, secure storage, etc.
All that achieves is to secure the airport, poorly, against a very unlikely threat, and one that is unlikely to down a plane even if an intrusion occurs.
Nobody needs to be flying drones near airports. Seriously.
I'm certainly not interested in pulling this off.. but how hard would it be to just simultaneously launch a swarm into a busy airport while planes are landing?
I think we can safely assume that British Airways pilots/officials have not fabricated this report and genuinely believe a drone has struck the aircraft. And why would you think it would have come from a terrorist. Far more likely to be some kid who got a drone for Christmas and interested in visiting an airport.
[+] [-] awinter-py|10 years ago|reply
There is exactly one type of person who wakes up at 5am to hold the line for 30 minutes to ask a question about drones, and it is (you guessed it) local yokels who are planning to shoot a drone down and looking for permission.
The anti-vaxxers know more science words but the anti-drone crowd is much more entertaining.
[+] [-] threeseed|10 years ago|reply
And I can't imagine many people are suggesting drones be banned. But many including myself believe they do need to be regulated and situations like this are why.
[+] [-] fapjacks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chinathrow|10 years ago|reply
https://www.aeroinside.com/item/7392/british-airways-a320-at...
[+] [-] clavalle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpollock|10 years ago|reply
There is a reason why airports are very, very careful about the vehicles that drive onto runways - FOD (foreign object damage) is a very real thing with very severe consequences when a plane is on approach and take-off.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youngtaff|10 years ago|reply
We don't know how large the drone was or what part of the aircraft it hit, for example what happens if one of the larger commercial drones gets ingested into the engine.
If you want to an example of what even a bird can do to a plane see this picture - http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/03/13/12/3226FEF60000057...
[+] [-] robert_tweed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7952|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benhue|10 years ago|reply
"And pilots have also called for the DoT to fund tests into what would happen if a drone got sucked into an engine or crashed into a plane's windscreen."
"Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association noted that while the threat of bird strikes had been well researched there was little data about how much damage a drone could cause a plane."
I wonder if any other organisations have conducted any rigorous testing?
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timthelion|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
Seriously, you're talking about hundreds of lives and a few hundred million dollars of equipment. Why do you want to take the one in a million chance?
[+] [-] basicplus2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Piskvorrr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beedogs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|10 years ago|reply
Note: I'm using the term UFO as it's original acronym and don't mean to imply they're flown by the proverbial little green men.
EDIT: I'm using the term "little green men" in the gender neutral form and am not intentionally impuning the flying capabilities of little green women.
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transman|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tn13|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] microcolonel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nmrm2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|10 years ago|reply
Same goes for jamming them.
[+] [-] Pinckney|10 years ago|reply
All that achieves is to secure the airport, poorly, against a very unlikely threat, and one that is unlikely to down a plane even if an intrusion occurs.
[+] [-] codecamper|10 years ago|reply
Nobody needs to be flying drones near airports. Seriously.
I'm certainly not interested in pulling this off.. but how hard would it be to just simultaneously launch a swarm into a busy airport while planes are landing?
[+] [-] adam12|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|10 years ago|reply
How could a pilot even tell? There was no damage. Did they hear it hit over the engine? Ha.
The first time a drone hits a plane it's going to be from terrorist activity.
They don't accidentally hit planes as we see from the 1000s of 'near misses' but not a single hit.
[+] [-] threeseed|10 years ago|reply
I think we can safely assume that British Airways pilots/officials have not fabricated this report and genuinely believe a drone has struck the aircraft. And why would you think it would have come from a terrorist. Far more likely to be some kid who got a drone for Christmas and interested in visiting an airport.