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FAA Report Says Near Collisions With Drones On the Rise
The Washington Post reports that Pilots around the United States have reported a surge in near-collisions and other dangerous encounters with small drones in the past six months at a time when the Federal Aviation Administration is gradually opening the nation’s skies to remotely controlled aircraft, according to FAA records. ... Many of the previously unreported incident reports — released Wednesday by the FAA in response to long-standing public-records requests from The Washington Post and other news organizations — occurred near New York and Washington. The FAA data indicates that drones are posing a much greater hazard to air traffic than previously recognized. Until Wednesday, the FAA had publicly disclosed only one other near-collision between a drone and a passenger aircraft: a March 22 incident involving a US Airways regional airliner near Tallahassee, Fla.
n/t
The skies are open, they are owned by nobody. This is more about technology leapfrogging regulators. Slow government agencies with no incentive to move fast. Why not start with licenses first? You need them to drive a car. You need them to fly a plane. These are effectively controlled missiles, but once control is lost they have no backup.
Funny how this revelation comes out just before they are about to release their regulations for "drones".
Because every asshole out there with a DJI Phantom couldn't figure out flying around airports (or over 400 feet) was a bad idea.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Do the pilots fully comprehend the fact that even though there's nobody inside the thing that it's still being controlled. Couldn't this be more about human psychology than actual danger?
If someone is deathly afraid of pit bulls and a totally tame one gets loose and tries to play with them, wouldn't they later talk about how they feared for their life from this beast, even though they were never in danger?
The only thing of interest how the FAA is spinning this and how much they are going to try and regulate.
You wanna fly your drone with no IFF, no communication and anywhere you want? Oh, because America and Freedom and stuff. Okay, good luck with that.
That's a recipe for collisions. Now, I realize you got your SHINY NEW THING delivered from Amazon and want to use it any way you want but there's this thing we have called public safety. Grow up the lot of you.
.....the number of drone incidents would have been zero.
Conversely, they can also be utilized to anonymously spy on people in ways that have never before been available to the average person/extremist types. Since they can also deliver explosive devices, they can be a very dangerous tool. It's easy to understand why governments are very wary of drones proliferating, since they are relatively cheap to produce. Law enforcemnt will want to be able to know who exactly sent which drone to wherever, and who sent it.
Today tech is advancing at such a rapid rate. We as a people can eventually adapt to whatever is coming. The question seems to be, can the powers that be adapt to the new freedoms drone tech will be bringing us.
Do you really believe Collisions With Drones On the Rise or is it more likely a Fast and Furious (astroturf) operation that is designed to gin up support for Government Action? Like how they might also be demonizing laser pointers . . .
Is this really a problem or just a ruse to have more regulation?
Consider that most 'drones' are very tiny light weight items more akin to a good old fashion toy R/C model airplane than what people think of as 'DRONES' as in war planes. When a real drone gets hit by a full size airplane, such as the 767 mentioned in the article, the real drone is destroyed and the 767 will not even notice the gnat with the possible exception being if a big drone went through the engine which would possibly cause damage but be unlikely to disable the large aircraft.
Birds, the organic things that flap their wings, are a far greater hazard to aircraft.
This leads to the conclusion that this report is more about justifying more restrictions on 'drones' than anything else. This is more about fees and control by government agencies than about safety.
so dangerous, and yet no accidents. Sounds like a PR campaign before another FAA power grab.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
We are past the point where the avionics that planes have is small enough to be integrated into any drone capable of flying over a hundred feet up. I know it would add cost but as someone else said why doesn't the FAA require a license and transponders on drones so that everyone knows what's in the air and who owns it?
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
No one here seems to want to acknowledge that you will not be able to have nice things because there are people NOT reading this site who are buying these and doing stupid things with them. Fix the problem, people!
Are you retarded? Bird strikes are a real problem (remember Chesley Sullenberger landing that plane on the Hudson river?). Once you consider general aviation aircraft (which outnumber "full size airplanes") it becomes much more serious.
Protip: if you're flying a drone/rc aircraft/whatever near a fucking class B airport you're violating several existing regulations, which is to say it has been a restricted activity for decades.
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Anyone here can tell us the technical specifications for drones available to customers. I don't mean specifialized commercial drones, I mean mass market drones.
I am asking because the article reports altitudes as high as 4 000 feet. As far as I know, DIJ and Parrot drones have a battery autonomy of about 15 minutes and I wonder if they can actually reach 4 000 feet altitude and land within 15 minutes. What about the radio communication module, can it still control the drone at such an altitude? Because I believe if the drone is out of reach by the remote controller, it initiates a return flight until it is again within the radio communication perimeter.
Probably a custom made drone could reach 4 000 feet and be still remote controlled, I have doubts about the customer grade ones.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Our skies are riddled with commercial airliners, and a few private planes, owned by people who could afford them. Perhaps quads are the next thing in personal aviation and perhaps also the FAA should give recognize this and give people some airspace, too.
I live in Silicon Valley, where you can hear airliners every few minutes, and police helicopters every weekend, So what really is the difference?
I also fear that the FAA is going to tighten private use, just so they can auction off the airspace rights to companies like Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I see FUD... Sigh....
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
I know people probably wont like to think about this.
Assume a terrorist faction, using a drone or several drones to deliver guns onto airport property. It seems like it would be pretty hard for them to be seen at night. You could fly it to an area where someone had access while entering a flight. It seems to be a very insecure attack vector. I wonder if they monitor the entire radio spectrum around airports to look for things like control signals and video feeds. hell, if you controlled it via a cellular connection they would probably never know. and another thought would be to just put a damn bomb on the thing. Have it land on and attach to an international flight and blow the damn thing during takeoff.
This is damn scary. I hope i don't end up on some kind of no fly list. Actually I am posting this an anonymous to help try to keep that from being a fact.
Planes hit birds all the time. Have we been smart enough to pass a bunch of laws to keep the birds from flying around planes? But in all seriousness--planes strike birds all the time and rarely encounter any issues. Of course there the was the Landing on the Hudson, but that was a flock of geese. Geese tend to be much larger and heavier than any hobby type drone.
,maybe we can come up with a reason to ban drones that saves the children....
But hey, before folks have a chance to think logically, might as well pump out the FUD to get these toys out of the hands of potential terrorists--or
I can cover that. Ban drones because predator use them to tract kids and see when they are alone. Anyways it is a legit concern. Wait till you are on a flight that is downed due to a hobby drone
At least 5 airliners in the next decade will be brought down 'accidentally' by cop drones aka drunk fucking assholes fucking around with their buddies.
It is amazing the number of respondents to this who didn't read what he wrote about birds, engines and such. Typical /. heads who just want to see their names up in the bright lights. Reading comprehension appears to be on the wane, even by /. standards.
As I said in a previous article on the same subject, just hire Bubba and his friends to take target practice on any drone anywhere near an airport.
Problem solved.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Just as government and big business wave about claims of piracy and kiddie porn in order to get the public to let them have more control (while the public never notices that the proposed regulations will not actually hinder pirates or kidde abusers), this too is a scam. People in government and big business want to scare soccer moms into supporting the expansion of government rules and regs into more of our lives. After all, it gets harder and harder for big business to justify charging governments billions of dollars for drones as the tachnology becomes ubiquitous and even a couple college kids ans a couple thousand bucks can build an impressive one.
Remember: The FAA will not certify an airliner to operate in US airspace unless it has passed the birdstrike tests - the stuctures, the windscreens, the engines, etc MUST be able to withstand strikes of (if I recall properly) an 8-pound bird. My memory could certainly be off a bit on this but I seem to recall at least some testing done with 12 pound birds. In the case of engines, frozen birds are fired into the engines (and ice, as post-Columbia NASA people will attest) is like a brick at high speeds. I doubt many of the drones the public is supposed to get spooked about are 8 pounders. All these recent drone vs airliner stories feel a bit too much like they are orchestrated to fit an agenda (and I work in the aerospace biz and do not even own any foil hats). There's SOME reason so many different diverse outlets are pushing this stuff.
That the FAA is made up of pilots is why they should NOT be making policy calls. Flying is scary, exhilarating, complex... Nobody learns to fly because they're just looking for any ol' job. Its an emotionally charged activity and people pursue it because they're the sort who's motivated by those sorts of emotions.
So when one of these people is asked about dangers, they aren't going to look at statistics, or make a single calculation. They're going to answer off the top of their head that "there is a non-zero chance." And its technically true - probability does get arbitrarily close to zero without ever getting there. But they're still wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
When you think about something scary, and you're later asked about the probability of that thing occurring, you will always always always overestimate the likelihood. That is how brains work. You can't get around it. Pilots think about scary airborne accidents more often than most people, and so they will defend the FAA to the death. They don't actually KNOW that they're only doing so to justify their emotional knee-jerk reaction, but they are. These are super intelligent and competent people. Piloting is HARD. They're smart and have spent their lives making solid rational educated decisions. So imagine how embarrassed they would be to admit that they never actually looked at how difficult it is for two things to collide in a three dimensional environment. They won't do that. The more rational and intelligent argument they hear against this nonsense, the harder they'll stick to their fear-guns.
P.S. The FAA is lieing. There have never been any near-collisions. Drumming up a fear response is just standard policy. All agencies do it. Don't think that because humans have a hard time lieing to one another in person that a large group of humans will also have a hard time lieing to other large groups. It doesn't work that way. The American government in particular lies as a matter of course, about nearly everything. I'm not being paranoid or anything - all the people who make up the system really do mean well. We just have to acknowledge the nature of large organizations with no accountability, diffusion of responsibility, and strong motivation to cover-one's-ass.
P.S.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/119/
That shows mathematically how difficult it is to hit something LARGER than your projectile, when you're actually aiming to do so.
Actually, there are far fewer pilots in the FAA than there are lawyers. The last time there were more pilots than lawyers in the FAA was back in the early 70's. Yes, the bureaucrat issuing paperwork to the pilot is extremely unlikely to have ever been more than a passenger in an airplane.
Traditional powers always want to hold the turf. The FAA wants to keep its authority. But this will distill into a solution that the FAA may not like. Drones are proving to be very useful and are rapidly becomming more and more useful. If the skies can not tolerate both drones and traditional aircraft it may well be time to ground planes almost completely as drones have more to offer most people. Keep in mind that passenger carrying drones can easily exist. The Air Force is more than slightly aware that human pilots are not ideal in fighter type air craft. Even the notion of a human controller in a remore location is not such a great idea as autonomous drones are rapidly becomming more and more capable and less likely to err than human controllers. In some ways weapons of war with very high tech designs begin to resemble ancient ideas of war machines. For example artillary barges which either had no ability to guide themselves or very small propellers and engines to be able to do a bit of manuvering can be seen in modern designs. A large vessel tows an unmanned barge that sits so low to the water that water sloshes on its deck. The sides are V shaped to ward off strikes by guns or torpedoes. The barge is able to go the last two or three hundred miles under its own engine. It is a highly armed device with missile ports and other high tech weapons that pop up and can rain hell on a region. It is all weapon and all armour. No sailors are at risk at all. When the barge depletes its weapons it can return to the mother ship or pull into the mouth of a harbor and scuttle itself thuse sealing off the harbor.