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Drone Hobbyists Find Flaws In 'Close Call' Reports
An anonymous reader writes: The people and agencies pushing for strict drone regulation have no trouble coming up with a list of dangerous drone-related incidents. This includes not only the recent drone crashes that have been picked up by the media, but also reports of "close calls," where drones have allegedly approached full-size aircraft. But a new study by drone hobbyists finds that most of these "close calls" were anything but. Of 764 such incidents reported to the FAA, only 27 were actually described as "near misses" by the pilots involved. None of the incidents involved mid-air collisions, and some have involved military drones rather than hobbyist ones. The people who did the study suggest that we should find a better way of classifying these drone-related situations so legislators have accurate information from which to design regulations.
A operator running a drone that can hover near motionless may not consider things a 'near miss'. On the other hand, an airline pilot flying a jumbo jet that can not be maneuvered travelling at several hundred miles an hour is something completely different. At the speeds Jumbo jets travel, by the time they see something as small as a drone it's already passed by them. That's a near miss. They saw it. There's no time for them to avoid an object like that. So while the drone operators are bitching that - hey I was near a half mile or a mile away. Or even two miles away. The airline pilots are saying - get the hell out of my way. I can't turn and by the time I see your little hobby I'm either running it over or passed it putting my entire crew and my passengers at risk. It's not even an argument.
Just as soon as the average bird is made of hard plastic, metal, and possibly flammable/explosive lithium ion batteries, your comparison will be reasonable and accurate.
Yes, bird strikes happen. They can be quite dangerous - the widely reported-on landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 (the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson") was caused by a couple bird strikes that caused the engine to fail. They're very risky for pilots and passengers, and they DO make airliners plunge from the sky. We can't "regulate" bird strikes out of existence unless we want to engage in wholesale slaughter of every species of bird in existence. We CAN, however, regulate drones, and thus vastly reduce the possibility of a drone strike taking down a plane.
Now, why don't you explain to us why a drone strike is magically NOT a risk to commercial aircraft, just because you think you have some sort of inalienable right to fly your little quad copter anywhere your heart desires?