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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.
The skies are open, they are owned by nobody.
The Air Commerce Act of 1926 takes issue.
Yes, the FAA is going to use this to drum up business. Never let a crisis go to waste. But it's still a problem. And the likelihood of a Phantom sized drone actually crashing a commercial jet is low, but nothing on the order of non zero. Airports spend millions of dollars a year on bird mitigation despite the fact that most strikes are just fatal to the bird.
Some strikes hit the engines which, at the very least, cause the plane to be pulled from service and inspected. Sometimes they wipe out both engines. Oops. A bigger concern for me, as someone who spends a lot of time in little planes, is said Phantom womping into the leading edge of a Cessna or Beaver - planes that aren't constructed a whole lot heavier than the drone. That could ruin your day.
So yes, it's being hyped but the underlying problem is real. It would, however, be nice if the FAA actually did something about it. However, the FAA is a government entity for whom speed is an unknown quality. They probably think they're going balls-to-the-wall here and both interns working on the problem haven't been able to go to lunch for weeks.
(An as aside, a pilot friend of mine thinks the answer to this issue is to arm the planes. A small gatling type gun with say, hard plastic bullets would take down any drone in existence. Think of the fun! You could hook them to an airliner's video feed and charge passengers to look out and possibly shoot drones and birds and UFOs. Better than an in flight magazine any day.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Define a few feet please.
The FAA has this definition which seems especially relevant in this discussion.
And do pilots also report to the FAA everytime they pass "within a few feet" of a bird?
It's quite common for pilots to radio their controller when they encounter a hazard. That's how your pilot knows to turn on the "fasten seatbelt" light when you're approaching turbulence; the same goes for flocks of birds or unidentified aircraft. Even so, it's not really fair to compare birds drones, for the same reason that deer don't get jaywalking tickets.
I can say through personal experience that just seeing other aircraft / birds takes a huge amount of my attention, even when the other gliders have 15-18 meter wingspans. Drones are much smaller than manned aircraft and they tend to move very slowly, making them even harder to see. The problem of seeing other gliders is a big enough issue where someone developed a technology called FLARM to reduce the number of collisions by notifying pilots of other gliders within ~4km; it has already saved many lives despite being only 10 years old.
So when I'm flying, I spend a large amount of my time looking for other aircraft. My eyes have much better resolution and FoV than a drone's camera, and I can swing my head around to look from side to side, and up & down - this gives me a better capability to look for hazards. Birds also tend to have good eyes & ears. There is a very good incentive for us to be vigilant: our lives are at stake.
On the other hand, drone pilots only have a camera, hooked up to a low-resolution video screen, which they would need to aim all around in order to scan for other aircraft. The problem is magnified by the fact that have a poor incentive to look for collision hazards: they have a few hundred dollars at stake, and they're probably already using the same camera to look at something on the ground.
The FAA has been hell bent on gaining government control over drones and they will make up any excuse they can, the scarier the better.
Sorry, I just don't buy the regulatory overreach argument in this case. My life could be put in jeopardy by someone playing with their new toy while I'm already flying low and slow on final approach; the last thing I need is another distraction when I'll be touching down (one way or another) within 15 seconds.
I would wager that most of the people writing the regulations are pilots of some capacity, and those who aren't certainly have ready access to many extremely experienced pilots; these people are just trying to protect the lives of millions of airline passengers, flight crew, and pilots.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"