Slashdot Mirror
Footage Reveals Drone Aircraft Nearly Downed Passenger Plane in 2004
Newly released footage, writes reader Wowsers, shows that in 2004 "A German drone aircraft was within meters of bringing down a passenger aircraft with 100 people on board. The link shows stills from onboard the drone. The incident had been hushed up for nine years, and is creating waves in Germany now the footage has been leaked out."
No it's not a Photoshop. The drone is not equiped with an automatic preventation system against collisions. The accident nearly happened in Afghanistan. The whole discussion came up by the mistakes which were made and the money which was spend on the Eurohawk project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk)
As best I can tell, the footage is from the forward-facing camera, whose view is slightly obscured by the nose-antenna-harpoon-thing(technical term) visible on the front of the drone in this shot.
That would presumably also be present in competent fake footage; but it is consistent with the line of sight that you'd infer from the drone's layout, and from the shots on the manufacturer's puff page.
The video on YouTube is dated Dec 2006...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NOar22TX2k
The video exists on YouTube since December 2006
For fuck's sake, the SUBJECT BOX is for a SUBJECT, not the start of your god damned sentence.
If you're flying ANYTHING in a manner where a millisecond response time matters, you're flying wrong. If you're flying CLOSE ENOUGH to things that a millisecond error in your response is critical, you're flying too close or completely off the flight plan.
This is why we don't take chances with air-traffic-control. It's not unusual for planes to be MILES away from each other and still be called a "near miss". At the sorts of speeds you're talking about, you cover WAY TOO MUCH space too quickly to be able to "get out of the way" - you should just not be within miles of each other.
As such, even UAV's are subject to the same kinds of safety distances. This one obviously a) wasn't on a flightplan, b) was straying off its flightplan or c) was misdirected by (or ignorant of) the local equivalent of air-traffic-control.
One day a drone will hit a passenger-carrying aircraft. One day a passenger jet will take off with both engines hatches undone, causing an engine failure and potential fire in both engines when it snaps off and damages the engine (London Heathrow, last week). One day someone will get on a plane and bomb it (not 9/11 - think Lockerbie back in the 1980's!). These things will all happen. The way we reduce casualties is NOT to ban planes (although, obviously, that works perfectly!!), but to apply controls. In this case, the controls already exist and are in place. If people didn't follow them? Take away their UAV pilot's licence.
It was "leaked" to youtube in 2006 and now has been viewed 217,648 times. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NOar22TX2k The Daily Wail makes its money from people that don't have anything significant to worry about in their lives - The Wail gives them something to worry about. A standard modus operandi is to find something that is dangerous in excess, write a scare story, and completely ignore that it was made illegal several years previously.
Footage Reveals Drone Aircraft Neatly Avoids Passenger Plane in 2004, Testament To Drone Technology.
Fixed.
From TFA:
The 88lb German 'Luna' drone was caught in air turbulence created by the Ariana passenger plane, before losing control and crash landing near the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Uh, yea, not really "neatly avoid[ing]" when the damn thing crashes as a result.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You do realize that the frontal area of an airplane consists largely of the cockpit and engines, right? And that many areas of the plane's wing and body are slightly thicker than a soda can? Those "NO STEP" warnings are there for a reason. Have you seen what a single goose, about 6-7lb, can do to a passenger airliner? This thing weighs more than ten times that, and is substantially larger. If you think 88lb of hard material traveling at several hundred miles per hour won't cause serious-to-catastrophic damage to a passenger airliner, you're an idiot.
Please help metamoderate.