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Drone Comes Within 200 Feet of Airliner Over New York
New submitter FoolishBluntman sends this quote from CNN:
"An unmanned drone came within 200 feet of a commercial jet over New York, triggering an FBI appeal to the public for any information about the unusual and potentially dangerous incident. The crew of Alitalia Flight 608 approaching John F. Kennedy airport on Monday reported the sighting. 'We saw a drone, a drone aircraft,' the pilot can be heard telling air traffic controllers on radio calls captured by the website LiveATC.net. ... The unmanned aircraft, described by the FBI as black and no more than three feet wide with four propellers, came within 200 feet of the Boeing jetliner. The FBI said it was looking to identify and locate the aircraft and its operator. A source with knowledge of the incident says investigators interviewed the pilot and others on the Alitalia plane."
It's a UFO until classified as otherwise.
who said anything about it being in control... once out of range of the transmitter it'll keep on flying (especially if a self stabilised quad copter type). Most hobby/toy ones don't have auto gps return to base capability.
An object that is unidentified, and flying, is a UFO.
Regardless of whether this is an RC model or not, if this got sucked into an engine we'd have a repeat of the Hudson river landing (best case scenario).
Can you explain how ingestion of an R/C aircraft can cause the failure of two engines, and subsequently result in a "best case scenario" equivalent to striking a flock of Canada Geese?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
OK, so possibly it takes fewer R/C aircraft than geese to take out an engine. Then you wave a magic wand and say maybe the other engine will stop too. Losing one engine does not cause the other to fail, despite your appeal to 'additional stress'. Twin jets are able to fly with one engine. To be certified, they must demonstrate they can safely fly on one engine during the most stressful period of flight (a single engine failure late in the take-off roll.) They can also fly safely for a long time on a single engine. With appropriate safeguards, they are certified to do so for up to three hours (ETOPS-180) and coming soon, for over five hours.
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How long before all RC helicopters (and all hobby RC planes for that matter) will be banned ?
They are already trying in Texas and in New Hampshire. Notice the inclusion of drones by name in the legislation, and the lack of differentiation between government use and private use.
This article from a few weeks ago shows that two other state legislatures, specifically Florida and Virginia, are attempting a legislative fix to drone use, though those attempts are targeted specifically at government use of drones. The mayor of Seattle cancelled the Seattle PD's drone program and ordered the chief of police to return the ones they'd already bought to the manufacturer for a refund.
With that said, attempts to block government use of drones are probably doomed to failure, since the FAA has already been directed by the 112th Congress to integrate drones into the national airspace via HR 658 (relevant section here,) and police departments across the nation are buying them in droves, despite what happened in Seattle. The DHS's "loan a drone" program, coupled with DHS's $4M grant program to local law authorities to acquire drones, would strongly suggest that government use of drones is here to stay.
Given the push/pull legislative wars being driven by the privacy vs. public safety debate, I doubt that banning RC aircraft is a viable legislative option. What is (probably) going to happen with RC aircraft is what has already happened with other "hobbies" that are deemed to be a threat to public safety (think: greenhouses that could be used for growing pot, legal chemicals that could be used to manufacture illegal drugs, model rockets that could be weaponized.) Purchases of RC aircraft and related equipment will be tracked at the point of sale and those records will be forwarded to the feds, where the purchasers will end up on an FBI watch list, just like the purchasers of the above-mentioned items.
Can you explain how ingestion of an R/C aircraft can cause the failure of two engines
It's worth noting here that geese, like most birds, have rather delicate bones. An R/C aircraft might have steel and other really hard materials that could do more damage. That drops the number of engines to one. If the remaining one fails due to the addition stress placed on it, then you have two engine failures as desired.
An uncorrelated, stress-induced failure of the remaining engine seems pretty unlikely — quoting Wikipedia:
"When flying far from diversionary airports, (so called ETOPS/LROPS flights), the aircraft must be able to reach an alternate on the remaining engine within a specified time in case of one engine failure. Power is not an issue. One of the engines is more than powerful enough to keep the aircraft aloft. Mostly, it is about maintenance and design requirements ensuring that a failure of one engine cannot make the other one fail, also. The engines and related systems need to be independent and (in essence) independently maintained. ETOPS/LROPS is often incorrectly thought to apply only to long overwater flights. In fact it applies to any flight more than specified distances from an available diversion airport. Overwater flights near diversion airports need not be ETOPS/LROPS compliant."
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Retired engine mech here.
Jet engines are tested with birds, but that doesn't mean birds can't damage them. It means they should be able to digest that standard weight of poultry and not fail. Maintenance would inspect (visual and fiber-optic borescope) them on return for maintenance.
Birds aren't metal. An engine sucking in an aircraft forms binder (for example) can sustain considerable damage just from the metal spine.
It's a crapshoot what sending hard parts down an intake will do. Just one bolt could, if it got to the compressor section, take an engine out. It rarely does.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There's no legal power/ frequency bands that RC hobbyists can use to view cameras and steer that far away. There are plenty of items you CAN use, but not without modification. As soon as you boost the power on a 2.4ghz antenna you are outside FCC specs... Which means its automatically outside FAA specs using "illegal" controls.
The other direction is that somebody who DOES have licensed FCC equipment to send audio/video at that distance (like a TV station) cannot mount that equipment in a non-licensed (toy) aircraft because its commercially licensed by the FCC.
THAT is what makes it a Drone in the FAA/FCC rules. Somebody has modified equipment to break at least one set of rules just to put the craft in that spot.
The quadcopter did not come within 200ft of the plane. The plane came within 200ft of the quadcopter. Quadcopters can't go near fast enough to intentionally get in the path of a plane going hundreds of miles per hour. The quadcopter operator was likely FPV flying (with a live camera that generally looks at the ground) and wandered near or into a flight corridor without knowing it. 1750 ft is too high for reliable from-the-ground visual flight for a quadcopter. Flight corridors aren't usually "narrow". Even within a flight corridor, the plane *could* be anywhere across a big area of sky. Hence this was far more likely to simply be accidental.
It's more akin to a stupid Cessna pilot accidentally wandering across commercial flight corridors without knowing it. It happens a couple of times a year, and isn't quite as newsworthy though it's far more dangerous due to the vastly greater size and speed of the Cessna (though a Cessna still could never intentionally get itself in front of an airliner with any reliability at that height and speed). The error here is that the quad operator was flying that high in a flight corridor (RC planes fly *under* flight corridors all the time). RC planes are generally supposed to fly under 500 ft. It is also a practical limit just due to the visibility from the ground. Hence the likelihood the Quad was FPVing.
Absolutely wrong, mabhatter.
All you need is a technician's class amateur radio license to transmit video remotely from a model aircraft back to you. There is plenty of hardware made specifically to do just that as well - without modification.