Drone Diverts Firefighting Planes, Incurring $10,000 Cost

An anonymous reader writes: Fire is raging through thousands of acres of forest in California. A few days ago we discussed how a man's personal drone was shooed away from a fire site. Now, the drone situation has gotten worse. The U.S. Forest Service is helping to fight the fire by sending planes full of fire retardant to drop on the surrounding area. Unfortunately, one of the missions had to be diverted because a private drone had encroached upon the planes's airspace. The mission involved three planes, all loaded with retardant. One was large enough to find another target on which to drop its payload, but the other two simply had to jettison and return to base. Officials say the failed mission wasted at least $10,000. They're now having to spend extra time keeping an eye out for these drones and trying to educate operators on the temporary restrictions in place around forest fires.

Comments

Can we go back to R/C Planes?

[Overzeetop]

Can we stop calling them drones. They're remote controlled (hobby) airplanes. Drones makes it sound like it's a weaponized, autonomous craft weighing hundreds of pounds.

Re:Can we go back to R/C Planes?

[dissy]

Can we stop calling them drones. They're remote controlled (hobby) airplanes. Drones makes it sound like it's a weaponized, autonomous craft weighing hundreds of pounds.

The only problem with that request is that today a percentage of hobbyist drones ARE autonomous craft in the 100+ pound class.

Limiting our discussion to one subset of aircraft (the small RC planes) would not allow for fully addressing the actual problem at hand, in that any/all unauthorized aircraft should NOT be in no-fly zones, and most certainly should not be in obviously dangerous areas such as over a forest fire where there is no justification or excuse for not assuming it would be a no-fly zone at that point in time.

And while no they are not specifically weaponized, in the sense of adding specific payloads to drop.
But similar to controlling a 2000+ pound car in and of itself can be used as a weapon, so too can the medium to heavier drones.
The point being that even non-weaponized doesn't necessarily mean the device can't still be used in a dangerous manor.

What we need is disclosure

[russotto]

How much is Diane Feinstein's office paying Slashdot to publish stories like this? I fly R/C helicopters and I sure as fuck don't want them banned or restricted to the point where they have to be equipped with the sort of expensive equipment it would take for them to respect NOTAMs.

Not to mention that it won't work. There's already open-source versions of the control systems. What component are you going to restrict?

Re: This problem needs a technical solution

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

Well, they diverted the plane, so presumably there was /some/ reason to do that.

Irrational fear?

Police-style self-righteous indignation and privilege?

Re:This problem needs a technical solution

[Richard_at_work]

If you know anything about jet engines, then you would know that a simple set of ear protection earmuffs can kill a multi million dollar engine if ingested.

Re:Thank you Mr. Heston

[drinkypoo]

But the problem is not how it is controlled, RF or GPS..but rather who is controlling it. Fix the moron, rather than intercept his RC toy.

You cannot make anything idiot-proof because nature will always build a better idiot. Slashdot moderation proves this. Also, it's non-trivial to even find the moron. Drones will fly waypoints and shoot photos and video independently. They can be miles away, and don't even need to be transmitting. Even cheap off-the-shelf drones will do this, let alone well thought-out hobbyist drones. Now, go forth and find the operator in the chaos surrounding a forest fire!

Re:Luckily no one died

[ScentCone]

Drone owners are idiots.

Really? There are literally millions of them. Are all of them idiots? People driving cars have a wildly worse track record when it comes to deaths. For that matter, licensed media helicopter pilots have caused more deaths. and there are merely thousands of them, not millions. What's your point?

Dump the retardant on the drone.

[borgheron]

Why not dump the retardant on top of the damned drone instead of diverting. Idiotic paranoia about drones is rather dumb. Either that or just hit it.